No More Wire Hangers, Ever

I dimly recall hearing “No more wire hangers, ever!" before seeing Mommie Dearest, a film I'm not ashamed I have seen probably four or five times and think is legtimately good, not just entertainingly terrible. 

As with most bad movie catch-phrases, its meaning is inextricably linked to the context in which it's uttered. That’s true of both the film and the individual scene where the immortal words are uttered. 

In Mommie Dearest, Joan Crawford is a child of brokenness and despair. Her ferocious will and ruthless ambition catapulted her to the top of the A-list, but there was a lot she could not control. 

For someone with a raging, if undiagnosed case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, that lack of control was maddening. 

What Crawford could control was her palatial estate. Crawford was rich enough to hire a phalanx of maids so that she never had to use a broom ever again if she did not want to. 

Crawford didn’t just want to clean; she needed to clean. It wasn’t an urge or an instinct: it was an obsession. Cleaning figures prominently in Mommie Dearest because it was a huge component of her private life and the traumatic upbringing of her daughter, Christine, whose tell-all memoir inspired the film. 

The Academy Award-winning actress ruled her home with an iron fist. Everything had to be done her way, and Crawford did not want wire hangers in her house, ever. 

“No more wire hangers ever!” became one of the most famous lines in the history of film because of the incongruous intensity and urgency that Faye Dunaway brings to them. 

This is no mere request: it is, instead, an angry command delivered with animal desperation in a fit of rage by a maternal monster whose anger-choked face is smeared with make-up. 

For most of my life, “No more wire hangers ever!” was merely a legendary movie line. Then I became a house husband who works at home and whose life revolves around looking after my children, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and putting away clothes. 

I am what is known as a domestic goddess, although that phrase has been tainted by Roseanne’s tragic descent into QAnon-fueled Donald Trump super-fandom. 

Within this context, I have developed very strong opinions on some issues. Specifically, I have come to hate wire hangers with the same ferocity that I despise American cheese and iceberg lettuce. 

Wire hangers are the fucking worst. They’re aesthetically displeasing. They’re weak. They clash with other, less terrible hangers. 

At the risk of riveting of y’all with an inside glimpse at my very glamorous existence, about a year ago, I made a decision. I was removing wire hangers from my life. From here on out, it would be sturdy white plastic hangers only. 

This was not a temporary decision. On the contrary, I had decided that my home and my closets would have no more wire hangers ever. 

I threw out all of the wire hangers in my house and replaced them with white plastic hangers. My neurodivergent brain appreciated the uniformity of having one kind of hanger in my closets instead of a motley array of different types. 

As you can imagine, my wardrobe consists of two pairs of shorts, a pair of jeans, and ten pop culture-themed T-shirts from Fright-Rags. However, my wife, who doesn't wear the same outfit every day like a cartoon or comic strip character, has a lot of clothes, so we have a lot of hangers. 

I’m not someone who generally cares about anything involving clothes, but I REALLY care about wire hangers. I hate them in the same way I hate Donald Trump and his administration. Unlike Trump, I have the power to banish wire hangers from my life and my frazzled brain. 

My mother-in-law does not share my hatred of wire hangers, though I have told her that, for the sake of my fragile mental health, I cannot have wire hangers in my home or my closets. 

So when she brings wire hangers over, I throw them away and replace them with plastic hangers. 

Joan Crawford and I have more in common than traumatic childhoods and fierce battles with mental illness. We also hate wire hangers, though I like to think that I express my disdain in a more reasonable and less operatic way.