On the power,
limitations, and possibilities of performance.
To follow up the
start of yesterday’s post, another argument for re-releasing Disney’s Song of the South (1946) would be that
it features one of the final
film performances of Hattie McDaniel, the multi-talented singer and actress
who performed in more than 90 films (!) between 1932 and 1949 and who became in
1940 the first African
American to win an Academy Award (for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind [1939]). In many ways, McDaniel, whose parents were
former slaves and whose father fought with the US Colored Troops during the
Civil War, embodies the most inspiring kind of American life; and her Oscar
victory, like her legendary and hugely successful film career, reflects just
how culturally and socially influential that life was. You can’t tell the story
of the
rise of Hollywood in the 1930s without a chapter on Hattie McDaniel.
But does it
matter to that story that so many of McDaniel’s most famous characters, from
Mammy in Gone and Aunt Tempy in Song to the nostalgic post-Civil War
mammy figure in Shirley Temple’s The Little Colonel
(1935), embodied stereotypical, even mythic, visions of African American
identity, figures for whom slavery seemed to be the pleasant idyll of plantation tradition
legend and in whose life the highest duty seemed to be caring for
young white children? The preponderence of such roles is, to my mind, a
reflection of McDaniel’s era and culture far more than of any choices or
emphases of hers; but nonetheless, it does seem impossible to tell
McDaniel’s individual story without recognizing the ways in which it too
often dovetailed with a broader, longstanding, and still in that period dominant
narrative of African American identity and community. Which is to say, an
Academy Award-winning performance as a mammy is still a performance as a mammy—and
one hardly (if at all) distinguishable from century-old images of that stock
type.
Yet if the type
had not changed much, the performers certainly had. The Mammy role in D.W.
Griffith’s The
Birth of a Nation (1915), for example, was played by a white actress, Jennie Lee,
in blackface; a quarter of a century McDaniel would win her Oscar. Change
and progress aren’t always pretty, and they’re hardly ever ideal; but the shift
from Lee to McDaniel—like McDaniel’s busy and successful two decades of work
more generally—represents change and progress to be sure. Indeed, it’s fair to
ask whether the far more complex female slave characters and performances I’ll
analyze later in this series—Django
Unchained’s Broomhilda
(Kerry Washington) and 12 Years a
Slave’s Patsey (Lupita
Nyong’o)—would have been possible without Hattie McDaniel and her mammies.
I don’t know that they would have—and I certainly know that McDaniel comprised
a vital, and far too easily dismissed, step along the way.
Next
representations tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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