Response to Sadhana Week 8
Dear Sadhana,
I am fascinated by your idea of the fiction of the work on passing building on the "fiction" (as you point out not a fiction, but an exposure of the fundamental truth of the illusory nature of race itself) of the passing person telling the story of being "a different race," building on the fiction of race itself. I want to apply this idea to the film Pinky. The other, almost surreal, layer in that film is that the actress playing the passing character is white. Thus the audience is asked to add another layer to the layers of fictions that you have already pointed out are already operating in any work about passing. The audience is asked to participate in the 1) the fiction of the work 2) the "fiction" of the story Pinky tells about her race 3) the fact that that "fiction"--the story she is telling--is actually in this case "true" given that the actress playing her is white 4) the fiction of race (which to the 1950s audience would not have been a fiction, but an immutable fact). But what better way to expose the fiction of race than by casting a white actress to play the black woman passing. Of course, the casting of a white women (and a classically 50s-beautiful-Hollywood-starlet-looking white woman at that) was intended as a conservative move. And in one sense it is. White audiences were spared the sight of a black women and white man "actually" kissing. They also were allowed to feel secure in the final frames of the movie in the notion that it was (really) a white woman who had won justice for herself and was now benevolently, but firmly ordering black women to and for in her house. But there are moments of the film that, through the clumsiness of casting an obviously white woman in the lead rule, unintentionally play as the ultimately transgressive contemporary art piece about the absurd, horrifically farcical, illusion of whiteness in America.
All the best,
Patrick
I am fascinated by your idea of the fiction of the work on passing building on the "fiction" (as you point out not a fiction, but an exposure of the fundamental truth of the illusory nature of race itself) of the passing person telling the story of being "a different race," building on the fiction of race itself. I want to apply this idea to the film Pinky. The other, almost surreal, layer in that film is that the actress playing the passing character is white. Thus the audience is asked to add another layer to the layers of fictions that you have already pointed out are already operating in any work about passing. The audience is asked to participate in the 1) the fiction of the work 2) the "fiction" of the story Pinky tells about her race 3) the fact that that "fiction"--the story she is telling--is actually in this case "true" given that the actress playing her is white 4) the fiction of race (which to the 1950s audience would not have been a fiction, but an immutable fact). But what better way to expose the fiction of race than by casting a white actress to play the black woman passing. Of course, the casting of a white women (and a classically 50s-beautiful-Hollywood-starlet-looking white woman at that) was intended as a conservative move. And in one sense it is. White audiences were spared the sight of a black women and white man "actually" kissing. They also were allowed to feel secure in the final frames of the movie in the notion that it was (really) a white woman who had won justice for herself and was now benevolently, but firmly ordering black women to and for in her house. But there are moments of the film that, through the clumsiness of casting an obviously white woman in the lead rule, unintentionally play as the ultimately transgressive contemporary art piece about the absurd, horrifically farcical, illusion of whiteness in America.
All the best,
Patrick
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