In this article, I examine how the spectacle of aging film stars replicates and dictates the cultural attitudes that make risking the scandal of anachronism “necessary and inevitable as a sign of life,” as Mary Russo puts it, even when age does not literally signify death (in other words, even when the actresses are only middle-aged) (21). With close attention to Hollywood films Sunset Boulevard and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? I argue that the conflation of disability with gender and aging in the character of Blanche Hudson encapsulates the impossible standards imposed on all non-normative bodies (that is, all bodies) by Hollywood cinema. While aging bodies are not necessarily disabled, older people frequently face being treated as though they were physically less capable than they once were. The assumption that disability is automatic in later life has negative impacts both on those older people who do not experience significant physical impairment and on those older people who have lived with physical impairments since long before they were labelled old. In Baby Jane, the collision of Blanche Hudson’s physical disability with Jane Hudson’s psychiatric illness relies upon an understanding of their obsolescence as performers; their failed physicality mirrors their stalled career paths. However, as I will argue, the double-edged performances offered by Joan Crawford and Bette Davis undermine that obsolescence.

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