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Blood and Sympathy: Race and the Films of Mary Pickford
- The University Press of Kentucky
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BLOOD AND SYMPATHY 187 Pickford as the tragic Cho-Cho San in Madame Butterfly (1915). The actress played numerous nonwhite characters during her early film career. BLOOD AND SYMPATHY Race and the Films of Mary Pickford Elizabeth Binggeli I I n the opening of the 1927 Douglas Fairbanks film The Gaucho, audiences are given a treat: a brief, unbilled appearance by Mary Pickford as the Virgin Mary, a miraculous vision in two-strip Technicolor. She materializes magically from a rock wall, a blond, rosy-cheeked shock of color in an otherwise black-and-white world; her large eyes brim with compassion for the Argentine shepherd girl who has fallen from a cli∑ and whose broken body lies motionless next to a spring. A single loving glance from the Madonna heals the rapturous girl and dazzles a gathering throng of pampas folk. The Gaucho’s TechnicolorVirgin is neatly emblematic of the star persona Pickford had honed over many years: her radiant sympathy for the su∑ering seems to transcend the mortal realm. The casting of his wife as feminine purity incarnate was a cheeky move for Fairbanks, who was widely rumored to be having an a∑air with his Gaucho costar, the “Mexican Spitfire” Lupe Vélez. Early in her career, Pickford might have played the fieryVélez role or, indeed, the native shepherdess role. Although best remembered today for her fair skin and brilliantly back-lit halo of golden curls, the actress portrayed many characters of non-European descent, including Native Americans, Mexicans, Filipinos, Japanese, and a Native Alaskan. Unlike many actors (including rival actress Marguerite Clark), Pickford never appeared in blackface makeup, but she did play these roles in a kind of “brownface” by darkening her hair and complexion.⁄ Curiously , these nonwhite characters abruptly disappeared from her repertoire after 1916. Pickford is often described as an “everywoman” with “universal” appeal, but only seven years into her twenty-four-year film career, her “universality” became unambiguously white.¤ Why? It would be easy enough to argue that as her star ascended, audiences wanted Pickford to look like Pickford. But this answer only begs the question: whatever her natural skin tone, why did “looking like Pickford,” after 1916, mean looking indisputably white? Other actresses at the height of their popularity, including Norma Talmadge and Colleen Moore, were allowed considerably more leeway in their racial appearance onscreen; they were “exoticized” with dark makeup, and Frame enlargement from a Technicolor test of Pickford dressed as theVirgin Mary for The Gaucho (1927). Elizabeth Binggeli 188 [44.222.233.8] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:03 GMT) their star personae were not threatened. And if familiarity were the sole issue, why did so many of Pickford’s own roles glory in her ability to metamorphose, sometimes unrecognizably, into little girls (The Poor Little Rich Girl [1917], A Little Princess [1917]), little boys (Little Lord Fauntleroy [1921]), or homely women (Stella Maris [1918], Suds [1920]). With these roles, the actress could display her virtuosity by casting aside her maturity, her femininity, or her charisma. But after 1916, Pickford did not cast aside her whiteness. To portray a white character is not a choice to play racially “blank” or neutral. Regardless of an actor’s motives, playing white involves investing that skin tone with the attributes the culture designates as “white.” Whiteness in Western culture, critic Richard Dyer argues, “reproduces itself regardless of intention, power di∑erences and goodwill , and overwhelmingly because it is not seen as whiteness, but as normal.”‹ To the extent that white people are portrayed as unraced, or as grounded in a “spirit” that is more essential than the body encasing that spirit, nonwhite people are conversely portrayed as encumbered and indelibly defined by their bodies. Dyer contends that “what makes whites di∑erent, and at times uneasily locatable in terms of race, is . . . their spirit of mastery over their and other bodies, in short their potential to transcend their raced bodies.”› Idealized white masculinity is often expressed in terms of noble mastery over base bodily desires, including lust, greed, and violence. The idealized white woman, in contrast, is patterned after theVirgin Mary herself; she is a pure “vessel for the spirit,” wholly without bodily desire.fi This is not to say that all white characters are virtuous and pure, but rather that their virtue or corruption is measured by the degree to which they conform to the cultural expectations of whiteness implied by their skin color. But there is a...