Mame has the depth of a teaspoon, and it is in shallowness that her greatness lies. Auntie Mame has one of the most essential and insane sets of any film this side of The Ladies’ Man, and it’s because of Mame that it is in constant flux. She is authentically fascinated with something new every few months, the walls and doors and art change to match that fascination, and then the fascination disappears like what’s on top of a sinkhole. Mame’s short-term obsessions are deeply felt, and most importantly, they are her own. She doesn’t develop them because someone else tells her it’s fashionable to go whole hog on Chinese decor. Her fancy told her so.

Her fancy points, if a little belatedly, toward the nephew who has been orphaned and thus winds up with her. Patrick grows up to be the kind of bland heterosexual drip who didn’t get beat up enough at prep school, and this disappointment is deeply felt not just by Mame but by all of us moviegoers with a personality. (He manages to snap out of this Main Street/Wall Street foolishness by the end of the picture, but it’s clear that the damage has been done to him by the boys’ school and by university. There is tolerance in him, but he could no sooner grip his Auntie Mame’s life with both hands as he could grip a pan out of a hot oven.) As a boy, though, Patrick needs something to fill the void. He needed it before his father died, too, as his father was not present in his life in any real way. Mame fills that void in two ways. First, she, and her life, and her penchants, and her apartment are a lot. Second, while she may have forgotten that she was supposed to bring the boy into her life on such-and-such a day, she makes up for it quickly. While every other adult in Patrick’s life has viewed him as something which might cramp his style, Mame, who is most visible in the whims that characterize her style, simply enfolds him.

From that day forward, Patrick is part of Mame’s style. In that initial meeting, where she is hobnobbing up a storm and as distracted as a puppy in a field of butterflies and tennis balls, it seems like Patrick might be a prop just as much as her ornate decorations on her door. It turns out the opposite is true, and thus the key to Mame is unlocked. The individual expressions of her passion are fleeting. The passions themselves are not. To be shallow is not to be vapid. Perhaps a normal person is a teaspoon of honey, or grape Kool-Aid, or boiled potatoes. Mame Dennis is a teaspoon of cinnamon, ghost pepper, durian. The pale men who bounce up against her, a group which includes the grown Patrick, cannot stand such individual flavors, cannot cope with the bouquets and textures. If the world recoils against Mame, then it does so out of fear of an authentic flavor.