A Great Big Girl Like Me: The Films of Marie Dressler

4. Min and Bill and Tugboat Annie: The Mythic Body

4 Min and Bill and Tugboat Annie The Mythic Body Her face is like a god’s come back to life— A face that shows the pain of mortal man; And happiness that centuries have known— A god who speaks as only idols can. Perhaps she learned the truth when Time was young, And comes again with Heaven-songs of mirth; And leaves her god and goddesses alone, To live with us a little while on earth. —poem by Joel Keith When a fan clipped the above verse from a newspaper and mailed it to Marie Dressler, claiming it “exactly expresses how I feel about you,” the star was so touched by the tribute that she had the poem engraved on a small metal plate and carried it around in her handbag. When she died, the poem was read aloud at her funeral, and the engraving was placed in the casket with her body.1 It is likely that most stars of the 1920s and 1930s were compared in the press, explicitly or implicitly, to gods or supernatural beings.2 Dressler ’s own studio, MGM, promised the public “more stars than there are in heaven,” intentionally conflating the movie screen, the night sky, and the eternal resting place of the virtuous. But as Marie Dressler transformed herself from a slightly tawdry slapstick comic to the nation’s adored surrogate mother and Oscar-winning thespian, these heavenly tributes began to accrue to her public image with unusual force.This chapter will investigate the mythic Dressler, drawing from the folkloric figures of the trickster and the frontier hero to analyze her two films with Wallace Beery, Min and Bill and Tugboat Annie. The two films that were the subject of the previous chapter have a rather literal, often simplistic relationship to the sociopolitical world of the early 1930s: Politics is about an election, and Prosperity is about a bank failure.The Beery films are not the stories of community leaders doing great deeds.They are the stories of little people, social outsiders who stand up and make heroic sacrifices for the good of their children, at great cost to themselves. Rather than prescribing specific social solutions to the widespread suffering of the Depression, these films speak in the language of allegory or parable. The plots are circular, dealing with the cycles of nature and the continuation of families. As Joanna Rapf has argued, they are “about how to endure.”3 And by privileging the personal over the social, these films show a different attention to scale than the Moran series.When the world around her shrinks, Marie Dressler grows. The public Dressler may be a leader, but the private Dressler is a hero.These films frame Dressler’s body differently, letting the wind blow through her hair, letting her dwarf the characters and landscapes she inhabits. They mythologize the heroine by framing her against the sea, or by placing her in her rocking chair with a shawl over her shoulder, an unmistakable maternal archetype. The crisis of the Great Depression inspired a search for heroism and the nobility of daily life in America.WPA murals remain in post offices and other public buildings all over the country depicting heroic, larger-than-life farmers, steel workers, carpenters, pioneers, and other emblems of America’s grassroots strength.Writing about the creators of these figures, Erika Doss argues,“In both their private paintings and their public commissions, these modern artists generally depictedAmerican wage laborers as figures of action and autonomy, and thus as exemplars of the work ethic.”4 Many of these images fetishized the strong male body, the Herculean man whose work is a testament to his nearly superhuman might. “Ironically, when social and industrial progress seemed inert,” Doss says, “many American artists chose to depict sturdy, strong, muscular, and dynamic laborers, as if these painted and sculpted symbols of manly might and movement might actually propel America out of its economic slump.”5 The creation of a dynamic male hero was a direct response to the sense of helplessness gripping the country.The visual arts depicted the working man as a hero, precisely because a crisis of 94 • a great big girl like me unemployment had undermined the cultural normalcy of masculine work. A WPA poster from the 1930s conveys one such image, a burly blacksmith standing over his anvil, his right hand over his head, clutching a hammer poised to...