Abstract
As well as books, we welcome reviews of films, blogs, and most forms of digital media.
I felt like I had to give these women a voice. (Sophia Coppola to The Film People on her motivation behind remaking The Beguiled)
The impetus behind Sofia Coppola’s much lauded 2017 remake of Don Siegel’s 1971 civil war film represents an important, but necessarily suspect ambition in feminist filmmaking: that of ‘giving voice’. While the project of giving voice often offers itself as a noble and worthwhile exercise in empowerment, it is inevitably tied up with questions of power, privilege, location and authority: which subjects are granted voices, by whom, when, where and at what cost? Coppola’s claims of recovering female voice through The Beguiled, when faced with these concerns, reveals pretensions to a singular, uncomplicated, and inevitably white feminism, valorized at the explicit cost of black female representation and voice.
Coppola’s film, like the 1971 film by Siegel starring Clint Eastwood, is based on a 1966 novel by Thomas P Cullinan, which tells the story of an injured Union soldier taken in by the residents of a Confederate Southern school for girls. Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) runs the Farnsworth seminary, aided by teacher Edwina Marrow (Kirsten Dunst). Amy, a 12-year-old student at the school, chances upon the injured Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell) in the woods. Miss Farnsworth decides, on Amy’s pleading, to allow McBurney’s wounded leg to heal before he is handed over to Confederate troops, and locks him in the music room downstairs. The film then follows the female residents’ individual fascinations for and encounters with the corporal, their various claims for his affection, and his understated, but by no means innocent efforts to charm them in turn. One night, McBurney indicates that he will come to Miss Morrow in her room, but instead, is discovered by an anguished Morrow sharing the bed of Alicia, a student. In an impassioned confrontation, Miss Morrow pushes McBurney, resulting in his falling down a flight of stairs, losing consciousness, and breaking his injured leg irreparably. Miss Farnsworth decides the only way to save him is to amputate his leg. McBurney then awakes in an inconsolable rage, convinced that his leg was amputated in jealous retribution for his having chosen Alicia’s bed over the others’. McBurney breaks out of his captivity in the music room with Alicia’s aid, steals a gun and returns to threaten the residents for what they did to him. While Miss Morrow follows him to his room, where they make love, Miss Farnsworth and the girls decide to poison McBurney at that evening’s meal. The film closes with the women dragging his body to the road, leaving him to be found by passing Confederate soldiers.
While it is easy to see the appeal of such a female-centric story to Coppola’s project, her insistence on ‘giving voice’ becomes less compelling, if not altogether redundant, given that the original 1961 novel, A Painted Devil, is narrated chapter by chapter from the perspective of each female character. Coppola’s effort then cannot be celebrated as an original centring or recovery of female voice per se. Instead, various black feminist commentators (Atad and Winter, 2017; Kareem, 2017; Sensei, 2017, inter alia) have exposed it as a thinly veiled glorification of a particular, white, puritanical and privileged female voice, through the explicit erasure of black reality, at a deeply racialized historical moment.
Coppola’s decision to omit the black female slave Hallie (from the 1971 movie) or Mattie (from the 1966 book), as well as to portray Miss Marrow, written as a biracial character, as white serve, as the cynosure for accusations of whitewashing. Coppola defended this choice on the basis that she ‘didn’t want to make a movie about racial politics in the Civil War. So I decided just to focus on the women’ (Ebiri, 2017). That the category of ‘women’ that Coppola is so very invested in somehow does not extend to a black Hallie or a biracial Marrow betrays a systemic refusal within much of Coppola’s work to recognize femininities other than white, or grant meaningful subjecthood to characters from minoritized ethnic groups (Sensei, 2017). Further, Coppola’s attempt to address this omission within the film’s narrative is even more troubling: the absence of slaves in the Southern mansion is explained through the dismissive line ‘all the slaves have left’: an egregious misrepresentation of history, trivializing the often fatal struggle for emancipation faced by enslaved peoples. Hallie’s character, as portrayed in the 1971 film, presents the most vociferous resistance to McBurney’s charms, and the most explicit assertions of political agency. Meeting McBurney’s claims of a united cause in the war against slavery with derision, Hallie boldly exposes McBurney for the mercenary he is. In the final section of the film, when McBurney threatens to rape her, Hallie declares ‘You better like it with a dead black woman, because that’s the only way you’ll get it from this one’, marking the only declaration of categorical rejection to McBurney’s overtures in either Siegel or Coppola’s films.
Thus, not only is Coppola’s Beguiled a dangerously distorted historical account of the Civil War, but it does a grave disservice to the cause of privileging marginal subjects, denying a role to a black actor and withholding an important opportunity for radical black female representation or voice. In an effort to account for these controversial choices, Coppola submitted that she ‘didn’t want to brush over such an important topic in a light way’, and felt unable to do justice to the subject of race given her focus on ‘universal themes, about desire and male and female power dynamics that could relate to all women’ (Coppola, 2017). But it is precisely this assumption about universality, and more specifically the universal nature of white experience that leads Coppola erroneously to believe that omitting blackness somehow allows her to sidestep race: as if whiteness is not racial, as if the choice to exclusively depict whiteness is not racial, as if the context of the Civil War is not always already racial.
Coppola, however, rightly pointed to the ‘many examples of how slaves have been appropriated and “given voice” by white artists’, stressing that ‘rather than an act of denial, my decision … comes from respect’ (Coppola, 2017). Does this, then, leave non-black artists in the quandary Gene Seymour (Rickey, 2017) gracelessly articulated as ‘The way I figure, if there had been a slave girl, somebody somewhere would have made something of that’? Must filmmakers and other artists then stick to their ‘lanes’ of gender, race, religion, caste, etc? Or will they forever be damned for exclusion when they do not tell the stories of gendered, racial others, and condemned for appropriation when they do?
The answer must lie somewhere between a Coppola-esque repudiation or denial of race, and uncritical and often commercially exploitative appropriations of marginal realities. Feminist art, much like theory, must remain vigilant to the intersecting axes of power and privilege, and located historical moments, within which it unfolds. It must appreciate the many varied and often conflicting realities of those it claims to speak for, and renounce disingenuous claims of universality. And finally, it must always recognize, declare and account for the location it speaks from, and the field of power it speaks within and to. What does all this mean for Coppola’s ‘feminist retelling’ of The Beguiled? It means that, at best, what she achieved was giving voice to a particularly privileged and exploitative class of white women, elevating their struggles, glorifying their existences, and imbuing their world with sentiment and nostalgia at the immediate and explicit cost of black representation. Through her erasure of the brutality of Hallie/Mattie’s existence, and her naïve defence of wanting to ‘do something gentle and pretty’, Coppola’s exaltation of antebellum Southern belles takes on a particularly chilling tone in the racial context of its release: Trump’s America where peaceful protests against the continued use of Confederate symbolism are met with state-endorsed vitriol and violence.
Finally, issues of erasure persist even if we are to appraise Coppola’s work within the narrow frame she so carefully circumscribes for herself: the struggles of isolated white upper class women in the repressed context of a seminary. Coppola’s version omits entirely a central theme of incest, presented vividly in the 1971 film, and cleanses the relationship between 12-year-old Amy and McBurney of its sexual content. Coppola’s decision to exorcize all elements of non-normative desire constitutes yet another assault on representation and diversity, and serves to buttress puritanical sexual morality and oppressive sexual normativity.
Thus, as Coppola’s problematic portrayal dispiritingly demonstrates, the project of ‘giving voice’ only re-inscribes hierarchies of power and privilege, and reinforces dangerous normativities, unless it is willing to invest seriously in intersectional investigations of feminist authorship and authority, standpoint and location, and epistemic and other privilege.