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