Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 72

68 Popular Culture Review of race. To avoid such artificially contrived treatments of race, according to Ginger Clark, Philip Dunne (screenwriter) along with Darryl Zanuck, consulted with mem bers of the African American community to eliminate scenes that would offend black spectators. Their efforts, although perhaps commendable, were not expan sive enough to eliminate racial typing. Nonetheless, however superficially these films may have treated the issue of race, they remain important for examining cinematic constructions of race and for documenting Hollywood’s racial stance. Additionally, they reflect America’s social cultural history. A Literal View In the film Pink\\ a mulatto woman, similarly named Pinky, returns to the South to be reunited with her black grandmother. Dicey. The grandmother, a black washerwoman, and Miss Em—her white employer—have developed a lifelong friendship to which Pinky is introduced. At the grandmother’s request. Pinky, draw ing on the training she received in the North, provides nursing care for Miss Em in a story that thus far is believable. An Alternative Reading A complicating factor that is disingenuous about the film, is that the mulatto character is played by a white actress who assumes the mulatto role. The mulatto woman’s experience (being that she is the descendant of a black and white parent) is reconstructed and usurped by a white actress, conceivably displacing the black woman in her own story. This displacement affirms one of the ways by which race was superficially treated on screen in the 1940s. The mulatto character is centered in this dramatization, which, by cinematic constructions, idealizes and fabricates the experience of those of mixed ancestry. An alternative reading of this film proposed by this essay explores not the mulatto character who passes as white, but the elderly white woman who conceiv ably is desirous of blackness. The essay that follows then examines the elderly white Miss Em ‘s voyeuristic gaze of Pinky, hinting at her transformation into Pinky and reflecting her secret desire for blackness. The story, as seen in this ex amination, lies with the elderly Miss Em, who is desirous of blackness and who vicariously experiences blackness through the mulatto character, as they are mir ror images of each other. Pinky, A Neither/Nor The film. Pinky^ curiously explores the construction of its black Other through a mediated construction, a mulatto figure who, according to Hortense Spillers, was “created to provide a middle ground of latitude between ‘black’ and ‘white' [with