Mommie Dearest

In Mommie Dearest, Joan Crawford (played by Faye Dunaway) exemplifies incredible personality disorders. The movie itself is about this woman who adopts two children while living her life as a movie star. Throughout the movie, she shows serious signs of narcissism and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She struggles to balance her career and children, and she tends to make the wrong choices. These show through her multiple disorders.
The first of these disorders is narcissism, and Crawford had plenty of it. Narcissism is someone believing they need excessive admiration (Rathus, 2010). The movie shows this in her right from the opening scene. When she walks into her bathroom, you can see towels with “Joan” written on them. Then a very planned morning routine is
OCD is obsession with orderliness, perfection, and control (Rathus, 2010). Crawford shows many actions that seem to be obsessive. A normal obsession of people with this disorder is time. During Christina’s fifth birthday party, Joan kept insisting that it was time to open presents against the photographers wishes. She becomes openly upset when her schedule isn’t kept. Another common obsession is cleanliness. Joan’s incident with this occurs at Christina’s birthday party also. When they finally get to presents, Christina discovers a grass stain on her dress. When she tells her mom, Joan immediately wants to go into the house and fix it before pictures. When the photographers keep telling her that it’s fine, she lets it go but not without a dirty glance. These two instances show obsessive-compulsive disorder because it displays her need to keep things orderly. She wanted to keep to a specific schedule and not change it, and she also wants to make sure things are kept to the way she likes it, like the cleanliness of her daughter’s clothing. Joan proves that she has OCD because her persistence of keeping things the way she likes