The Gypsy-Rose Blanchard cinematic universe

Please take caution watching Run (2020) if you are sensitive to infant loss or NICU trauma. All my NICU trauma is subconscious, so I have decided that I can make as many dark jokes as I want. Please also take caution watching Run (2020) or any of the media mentioned here if you have experienced parental abuse. Please also take caution watching Run (2020) if you typically prefer to watch movies that are good.

In 2016, journalist Michelle Dean broke the story of Gypsy-Rose Blanchard in a longform Buzzfeed article. The story spread like wildfire through quote-tweets the way certain kinds of articles and essays did then, even before the height of pop culture’s true crime obsession. This story is insane, people would say. It’s got everything. The plot is impossible to forget: A teenage girl murders her abusive mother after years of being held captive in a falsified state of chronic illness, living as a victim of her mother’s mental illness called Munchausen by proxy. 

The story’s stranger-than-fiction quality quickly led to it being adapted into an HBO documentary, Mommy Dead and Dearest (2017), then a Hulu drama series, The Act (2019), which Dean co-wrote. In particular, abled audiences found the concept of Munchausen by proxy so sickeningly intriguing that similar storylines were added to fictional media, such as a character in Ryan Murphy’s satirical Netflix show The Politician (2019), a Lifetime drama film Love You to Death (2019), (I hadn't heard of this one until writing this piece and I will not be subjecting myself to it as it looks even worse than the others), several young adult fiction novels, and finally, straying the most from Gypsy-Rose's story, a feature-length thriller called Run (2020). All of this gained public attention again when the real Gypsy-Rose Blanchard was released from prison on December 28th, 2023.

I would like to propose that abled audiences have been so drawn to the Munchausen by proxy trope that there is now a sort of Gypsy-Rose Blanchard cinematic universe.

I just want to know what exactly makes the Munchausen by proxy narrative, a story of severe abuse, so compelling to abled audiences. I think I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it because I similarly don't understand the interest in true crime. In this instance, is it the teetering balance between the lie (intense, suffocating, overprotective love) and the reality (severe, even fatal abuse)? Do they get a thrill out of watching systems fail people over and over? 

It’s apparent that these stories are made for abled audiences because if you know anything at all about the concept of ambulatory wheelchair users, some of The Act’s "big reveal" scenes, like Gypsy-Rose (Joey King) standing out of her chair at night and freely walking around the house, become mundane and bizarre. Additionally, disabled audiences know that the systems will fail her because we don't expect them to work in the first place. The shock value is taken away and we are left with just the abuse narrative.

The big reveal in the last act of Run – played out in a montage where this movie's daughter character, Chloe (Kiera Allen), finds a box conveniently stuffed with material evidence of every crime her mother has ever committed – is that the actual daughter died at two hours old and Chloe is someone else’s kid that the mother stole from the hospital nursery, then made sick to keep her captive. 

I don’t know what compelled this duo of screenwriters to write this particular story, but one of them likes to brag on Reddit that it “sparked a bidding war.” The image of Hollywood executives going feral over a script with a storyline that’s been done several times in the past few years is perplexing to me as someone who knows next to nothing about the industry. But okay!

The opening shot of the movie is a typical “bunch of surgeons in an OR” scene, except that when the camera pans over the circle of doctors, you see that the patient they’re working on is a premature infant. The mother (Sarah Paulson) is wheeled in to see her infant, who – if I can be pedantic about this for a second – has a shocking lack of tubes and equipment for a baby in such a dire situation as she’s supposed to be in. But medical TV is notoriously inaccurate, and this is a Hulu movie. Whatever. Paulson, in a state of shock and grief, asks, “Is she going to be okay?” 

The screen goes black and, one by one, dictionary definitions of medical conditions fade in, a technique that would possibly be effective in another film but feels like shock value in this one. Everyone expects a healthy child, but here, the diagnoses just keep hittin’. Sure, it easily establishes Chloe as medically complex, but it also quite literally defines her by her disabilities before the title card of the movie even appears.

The title card, by the way, is formed by the definition of “paralysis” fading away simply to reveal the word “run.”

If I remember correctly, Chloe’s first real introduction is made while the electric stair lift in her home is whirring and bringing Chloe in her wheelchair down the stairs. By presenting a teenager using a piece of equipment usually associated with older folks (the stair lift) in an awkward, uncut continuous shot, the presumably abled target audience is immediately made to feel uncomfortable with Chloe’s disability. 

Kiera Allen’s acting shines through, however poorly this character was written or presented. Chloe is played as a teenager fighting for independence against the abuse she doesn’t yet realize she’s receiving – she’s a smart Woman In Stem™ !, sautering mysterious wires at her desk, applying to college. She has personality thanks to Allen’s acting. 

What has the media trope of Munchausen by proxy done to abled people’s understanding of disability? It has made some of them believe that all ambulatory wheelchair users are “faking their disability” because they can stand up and walk. It has caused accusations of abuse against people who are being failed not by their parents, but by the medical system (such as in the Netflix documentary Taking Care of Maya, where the false accusations of abuse lead to several tragedies.) While Run is the only film in the Munchausen by proxy trope to feature an actress who is actually a wheelchair user, that is perhaps its only redeeming quality.

Run’s ending is particularly bizarre, making a weak attempt at a revenge plot as Chloe walks with a cane (Look! She’s a Good Disabled who overcame her disability and got out of that wheelchair!) to visit her incarcerated mother, smuggling in the same pills her mother used to paralyze her, and says “Open wide, Mom” right before the credits roll. While Run is not a film directly about Gypsy-Rose Blanchard, it is clearly inspired by her story and has had the same effect on abled audiences. No matter how well Kiera Allen may have played the role, the movie is simply not for disabled people. Run doesn’t know who its audience is, outside of chronically online girls excited that they get to see Sarah Paulson play an unhinged maternal figure. Mother is mothering!

I end my review of Run with this: please cast Kiera Allen in better movies. She is reportedly co-writing and starring in a Disney movie called Grace, which is being produced by Rollettes founder Chelsie Hill. That sounds fantastic and I hope it gets made! But I need Kiera Allen in more!! Mooore!

Back to Gypsy-Rose:

Leading up to Blanchard’s freedom, a new, bizarre effect of the Munchausen by proxy trope emerged. Through all of this publicity, both explicitly about Blanchard or simply inspired by her, Gypsy-Rose Blanchard, or the idea of her, fell into the clutches of internet stan culture. After it was announced that Blanchard would be granted an early release and leave prison on December 28th, Blanchard’s fame landed in a strange intersection of the problematic true crime fandom and Gen Z meme culture. In the same way Zoomers celebrate Mariah Carey “defrosting” for Christmastime, Blanchard’s release from prison was immediately memed and stan-ified. 

Perplexingly, some of the chronically online Zoomers started crossing their fingers that Blanchard would be interviewed on Trisha Paytas’ podcast. Paytas, never one to miss a chance to be in the online spotlight for all the wrong reasons, immediately tweeted an invitation to Blanchard to appear on her show. 

There are, of course, people who were level-headed enough to beg the weird internet posters to treat Blanchard like a normal human being. But that ship may have sailed as soon as the first fictional adaptation of her story was released.  

It’s unclear whether the Zoomers making a spectacle of Blanchard’s freedom are familiar with Blanchard’s actual story or have just absorbed it through the sieve of internet memes. The memes frequently freeze her in time using a particular photo; she’s wearing a poofy princess costume dress, a tiara, huge Coke-bottle-lens glasses, and a toothy grin. The picture shows her as a teenager in what was probably the height of her abuse. They seem to know that she was a Munchausen by proxy survivor and that she “killed her mom.” These two ideas alone almost conjure the image of her committing bloody murder in the princess costume. (In reality, it was Blanchard’s boyfriend who actually committed the murder; he is carrying out a life sentence.)

Blanchard now owns her narrative. I haven’t touched most of the internet discourse about her after she was released from prison, I haven’t watched her Lifetime show The Prison Confessions of Gypsy-Rose Blanchard or read any part of her recently-released memoir. I think the fictionalized versions of the Gypsy-Rose Blanchard cinematic universe is where the connection to disability culture ends. Gypsy’s own real adult life and identity is now up to her to define. 

Blanchard has emerged from incarceration into a society that has either picked apart her life story until there was nothing left or exalted her as some kind of post-ironic female rage girlboss. On top of the multitudes of trauma she endured in her childhood, inflicted both by her mom and by every part of the system that failed her, she now has to navigate the trauma of being a public figure, purposefully or not. It’s unclear what this wave of true-crime-inspired, Munchausen-by-proxy-themed films and TV shows ever intended to achieve besides creating shock value for abled audiences. This trope has only made the life Blanchard has ahead of her even more difficult.