In the frantic opening scene of “Dolores Claiborne” — released 30 years ago — a violent scuffle unfolds just offscreen at the top of a staircase, before an elderly woman topples backward from a wheelchair and careens down a flight of stairs, where she lands with an audible crunch of balusters and bones. Moments later, a frantic housekeeper rifles through the kitchen drawers, then returns to raise a heavy marble rolling pin over the disheveled and bloodied figure, who is by all appearances pleading for her life.
This was not merely a murderous rampage. It was the spectacle of the lethally unhinged b***h—and it was exactly what audiences were primed to expect. A slew of thrillers in the early 1990s—”Basic Instinct,” “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” “Final Analysis,” “Single White Female,” “Disclosure,” among others—all centered on the conceit of the libidinous, deranged b***h who spirals into homicidal mayhem. This was a decade, after all, when unruly women both onscreen and in the public eye were routinely relegated to the malign category of the “b***h,” where their downfall and humiliation could be gleefully savored.
At its outset, “Dolores Claiborne” seemed poised to double down on this formula by doling out red-meat b***hery from Kathy Bates, until an unsettling possibility creeps over the story: what if being a b***h isn’t actually a crime?
“I did not murder that b***h”
The plot picks up after the tempest of the first scene with Dolores implausibly insisting on her innocence: “I did not murder that b***h any more than I’m wearing a diamond tiara.” Even Dolores’ long-estranged daughter, Selena (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a spitfire journalist from New York, can’t quite swallow these denials because—here the noose tightens—she’s apparently done it before. Years ago, Selena’s father, a Scotch-swilling deadbeat named Joe St. George (David Strathairn), tumbled down a well to his death during a solar eclipse. The investigator, Detective Mackey (Christopher Plummer), was convinced Dolores pulled off a pre-meditated homicide, but he couldn’t nail the case shut, and it’s eaten at him for 20 years. Now, Dolores has apparently slain her invalidic employer, Vera Donovan (Judy Parfitt), so Mackey is on the hunt again for his white whale.
The film project got rolling when screenwriter Tony Gilroy picked up Stephen King’s bestselling novel of 1992—and came away dismayed. He tells Salon, “It had some really fascinating angles, but the whole narrative was one long slog of a monologue from Dolores, which made it feel one dimensional, and to be honest, raw and unrevised.” Worse, he was stopped cold by some of King’s more stomach-turning flourishes—in the novel, Vera flings and smears her own excrement around the bedroom to torment Dolores—but when novelist and family friend William Goldman suggested he should be the one to draft the screenplay, Gilroy pressed past his misgivings.
The breakthrough for the screen adaptation came to Gilroy on the plane to Castle Rock for the pitch meeting: They could bring Selena into adulthood, but tormented and spiraling through substance addictions, meaning her mother’s harrowing sacrifices never truly ferried her to safety. Castle Rock bought the project on the spot. Gilroy set to work meticulously highlighting the Maine-area colloquialisms and metaphors and building out Detective Mackey as a Javert-type villain, echoing the relentless inspector in Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.”
A slew of thrillers in the early 1990s all centered on the conceit of the libidinous, deranged b***h who spirals into homicidal mayhem.
Development and production were rife with mishaps. Hackford came on board as director and was far into pre-production only to be told that no one had secured King’s sign-off on a radically revised script, the one that brought Selena into adulthood. Hackford recalls feeling the sword of Damocles hanging over his head when he phoned King, who replied, “I wish I’d thought of that.” Weeks later, a bemused Hackford called King again to confess they’d been unable to locate Little Tall Island, notwithstanding the hand-drawn map in the book’s front matter. King broke the news: “I made it up.”
Plummer’s physique presented its own problem. Hackford instructed the costume designer to outfit him in the disheveled clothes of a provincial cop, but every time Plummer emerged, “He looked like he’d just stepped out of the pages of GQ Magazine.” When Hackford finally raged that his instructions weren’t being followed, Plummer told him, “It’s simply impossible to make me look bad in clothes, but wait a moment—I’ll break my nose.” Plummer retreated to the makeup trailer and drew an ugly scar across his nose with an eyebrow pencil. The effect, Hackford says, was transformative: “Suddenly, he was the dour, dogged, disheveled curmudgeon I’d envisioned.”
Jennifer Jason Leigh and Christopher Plummer in a scene from the film “Dolores Claiborne,” 1995. (Castle Rock/Getty Images)Hackford scouted a location in Nova Scotia called Blue Rocks on a desolate tract of coastline that was experiencing its coldest temperatures in a century. “Even patches of seawater along the shoreline froze,” Hackford recalls, “and it fit Dolores perfectly: a woman totally isolated at the end of the earth, savagely weathered and tough as nails.”
To achieve the special effects of the solar eclipse, the house was reassembled on the largest blue screen sound stage in the world, constructed ad hoc at a hockey arena in Nova Scotia. The neophyte effects company bungled the pricing from the storyboards, however, not understanding they had to cut back several times to the same shots, sending the sequence 500% over budget. “I was livid,” Hackford recalls.
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Other special effects came off brilliantly. Flashbacks were shot with Fuji film stock, which produced bright, vivid pastels, and the present was captured with cold, blue Kodak film, made grimmer by desaturating the codec. In another subtle effect, Hackford incorporated images taken from paintings by Belgian artist René Magritte, so that when Dolores shatters her window with an ax and when Selena stands before the mirror on the ferryboat, uncanny surrealist imagery signals the eruption of repressed memories. These effects gave tonal clues that Selena was struggling with mind-warping accretions of buried trauma.
Bates would ultimately garner unstinting praise for her performance as the prickly, foul-mouthed housekeeper—a role, in fact, she would retrospectively call her favorite of her career, in part because director Taylor Hackford set aside time for meticulous preparations: a dialect coach to master Maine’s soft “r” and elongated vowels, a movement expert to stiffen her deportment for the later time frame, and top-of-the-line wig and makeup artists brought in from Italy. But it was also a performance haunted by a past success.
“Sometimes being a b***h is the only thing a woman has to hold on to”
Five years before the release of “Dolores Claiborne,” Castle Rock Entertainment, co-founded by Rob Reiner in 1987 after helming “Stand By Me” to great acclaim, struck gold with its 1990 adaptation of “Misery.” The film earned more than $61 million at the box office and catapulted Bates to an Oscar win. Bates delivered a virtuosic performance as Annie Wilkes, a sweet-as-pie ex-nurse who rescues her favorite novelist, Paul Sheldon (James Caan), from a car crash in the mountains, only to torture and mutilate him in retaliation for killing off the heroine of his pulp romance series. The “hobbling” scene—she uses a sledgehammer to break Paul’s ankles—elevated her to canonical b***h status: a cunning, brutal and mercurial harridan who hides her malice behind a folksy façade. In his review, Roger Ebert marveled at Bates’ talent for oscillating from “sweet solicitude to savage scorn.”
“Dolores Claiborne” would up the ante by unleashing a firehose of b***hery. The novel’s 65 uses of “b***h” in all its variations got paired down to about a dozen for the film, but each utterance hit with blunt force. Hooligans spray paint “B***H” across the door to Dolores’ house. Vera herself revels in rumors of her b***hery, telling a rejected housemaid: “At least you can tell you husband what a b***h Vera Dona is,” only for Dolores’ voiceover to confirm that she endured “three square meals of b***hery all summer long.” When Dolores finally learns Vera has bequeathed her the entire estate, instead of expressing wistful gratitude, she breaks into a rage: “B***h! That malicious, high-flown, harping b***h.” Selena’s b***hery, meanwhile, has a wrathful sexual edge, as when she fires back at her magazine editor who is withholding an assignment: “So not only are you not f**king me, you’re f**king me.”
The seeds of all this b***hery are traceable to a singular piece of advice that becomes the core refrain (repeated word-for-word by Dolores and Selena) about why some women behave the way they do: “Sometimes you have to be a high-flying b***h to survive. Sometimes, being a b***h is the only thing a woman has to hold on to.”
To welcome the appellation of “b***h” is confounding on the face of it, since it was by and large recognized as a profane term of abuse. In her 2018 book “’90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality,” Allison Yarrow traces how the term “b***h” was weaponized in the ’90s as a rhetorical scythe to cut down ambitious women. Trailblazers like Hillary Clinton, Anita Hill and Marcia Clark were relentlessly framed as power-hungry b***hes. Of course, this gendered insult was nothing new—the ancient Greeks regularly insulted women as dogs in heat—but the 1990s brought what Yarrow calls an unprecedented epidemic of b***hification. Controversial newsmakers—Monica Lewinsky, Tonya Harding, Lorena Bobbitt among them—had the term pinioned to them like a scarlet letter, stripping away their accomplishments and leaving only scorned husks of their real selves.
“Dolores Claiborne” hit like a battering ram into a cultural space that offered only two conceptions of b***hery—vile monster and bad** renegade—both of which grossly failed to represent real women living hardscrabble lives.
With women underrepresented in front of and behind the camera, male storytellers often shaped ’90s narratives about women in insidious ways. The TV show “Friends” relentlessly mocked Monica Geller’s past as a fat woman. On “90210” and “Melrose Place,” women were reduced to sexy vamps whose ambitions never extended beyond wreaking havoc or exacting revenge. Murphy Brown was the redoubtable b***h boss who tyrannized over her assistants. Roseanne was the crude, loudmouth b***h who belted the National Anthem like an “obnoxious pig.” In “Mrs. Doubtfire,” Sally Field played a humorless executive and absentee mom who failed to monitor her children. From myriad vectors, media outlets put women in their place for being uppity, incompetent, or vulgar.
Dinged by this hailstorm of misogyny, some women fought back by brashly claiming the mantle of the b***h. Naomi Campbell became the self-anointed “b***h” of the fashion industry, and Madonna claimed the same crown in pop music, even as Meredith Brooks’ anthem “B***h” soared to number two on the Billboard charts in 1997. At a grassroots level, inspired by the reclamation of queer by the gay rights movement, B***h Magazine launched in 1996 in Portland, Oregon, as a feminist riposte to demeaning stereotypes. Meanwhile, in Britain, the Sunday Times elbowed into these debates with Camille Paglia’s saucy 1992 piece, “Kind of a B***h: Why I like Hillary Clinton,” and Julie Burchill’s cheeky 1995 article, “I’m a b***h and I’m proud.”
Still, as Yarrow points out, many of these efforts were caught in a feedback loop of consumerism that involved being tarted up in a bad-girl aesthetic to sell merchandise or goose sales. Or worse, they dabbled in a spectacle of degradation—raunch culture epitomized by “Girls Gone Wild”—that was bizarrely packaged as liberation.
Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kathy Bates in a scene from the film “Dolores Claiborne,” 1995. (Castle Rock/Getty Images)What this means is that “Dolores Claiborne” hit like a battering ram into a cultural space that offered only two conceptions of b***hery—vile monster and bad** renegade—both of which grossly failed to represent real women living hardscrabble lives. The twist of the film is, after all, wrenching. Dolores really did murder her husband, but only after discovering an unbearably horrific crime: he was subjecting Selena to incest—a trauma Selena had psychologically buried by adulthood. In Dolores’ moment of abject paralysis, it was Vera who had the spine to tell Dolores to kill her husband—the same Vera, it turns out, who, ailing and miserable, was pleading with Dolores in the opening scene to end her monotonous agony, as a tragic act of mercy. On the frigid coast of Maine, hard-bitten b***hes turn out to be the battered survivors in a brutal world of tradeoffs.
For his part, Hackford describes the thematic arc of the film as, “exploding the whole notion of a so-called ‘b***h’, because you come to understand that those bristling, icy exteriors are their defense mechanisms for surviving and coping with abuse until finally, the social performance of b***hery becomes their whole persona. But there’s so much pain and humanity flowing beneath those exteriors.”
Embracing b***hery, for both Vera and Dolores, is also a way to repudiate the immense social pressure to be amiable and compliant. Colleen Dolan, an education expert with expertise in Stephen King film adaptations, tells Salon, “B***hery gets them out of the straightjacket of respectability, what Betty Friedan had called the ‘feminine mystique.’ Remember, Dolores, by law, can’t even open her own bank account. The law is outrageous, but to even express outrage is to make yourself a b***h in the eyes of society. So they choose b***hery, freeing themselves to become avenging angels against those who’ve wronged them, and, frankly, avatars for the militant rage of second-wave feminism.”
The origins of Dolores herself may explain why b***hery is so intensely valorized by the narrative. The central character was conjured out of a deeply personal source—namely, the travails of Stephen King’s mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. Nellie’s husband abandoned the family when Stephen was a child, leaving her to bring up him and his brothers on paltry wages from menial jobs. For nine years, she rarely saw her children. When King has Dolores murder her deadbeat husband, you don’t have to squint to see some measure of authorial wish-fulfillment.
In an uncanny mirroring, Hackford tells Salon his own parents divorced when he was nine months old, and his mother had to keep the family afloat as a waitress: “She struggled to put food on the table, and then she got cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy. She survived, but she couldn’t lift trays after that. It was hard, and it hardened her in a sense.”
Hackford dedicated the film to his mother as a deeply personal homage: “I knew what it meant to have a long-suffering mother who frankly looked to others like a cold, hard b***h. So, when Selena has the agonized revelation that her mom is the hero, my god, that’s the payoff of the whole film.”
“It sold out, every last seat”
“Dolores Claiborne” earned just over $46 million on a $13 million budget, and reviews, while generally positive, featured various barbs about its strengths being balanced against, as one review put it, “a whopping list of shortcomings.” Notwithstanding praise for Bates’ “powerhouse of a performance,” the film seemed on a glide path to obscurity.
But as Judy Parfitt tells Salon, “Years after I’d made the film, I was at a department store in New York, minding my own business, when from behind me I heard a man snarl, ‘Sometimes being a b***h is the only thing a woman has to hold on to.’ I was taken aback, naturally, but when I had my wits about me again, I thought, oh wow, this film has some traction, some real staying power.”
Parfitt’s own memories of the film are attached to a highly recognizable memento. In the scene where the elderly, dementia-stricken Vera venomously demands of Dolores: “I want my china pig!” Dolores fetches the trinket, bringing Vera to slow sobs of grief. Parfitt suspected the scene would become iconic, and asked if she could keep the prop. “And they sniffed, ‘No, you can’t have it.’ Well, that night, I heard a knock at my door, and there was Kathy Bates’ niece, delivering the gift of the china pig. I still have it, of course.”
Like the women it portrays, the film’s fervent admirers have often gone overlooked. Gilroy recalls being invited to the Austin Screenwriters Festival in 2018, where he suggested they screen “Dolores Claiborne.” “The organizers balked. They said no one would come. We screened it anyway, and, lo and behold, it sold out, every last seat, and I kept hearing scraps of dialogue being bandied about from all over the auditorium—they’d all seen it multiple times before.”
Gilroy says he was reminded of parallels with a precursor film, “Mildred Pierce,” which features Joan Crawford as a scrappy, working-class mother whose sacrifices go unappreciated. “And I realized then that, like ‘Mildred Pierce,’ this film had attracted an ardent following, mostly women and a lot of gay men, people who felt maligned and marginalized and whose struggles get overlooked. Watching the intensity of the reaction, I remember thinking, damn, we really created something important here.”
For her part, Colleen Dolan says the legacy of “Dolores Claiborne” is one of defiance: “For once, a movie tried to kill off the myth of the psychopathic b***h instead of the b***h herself. That was a true stroke of genius.”
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