Little Women, Lightness, and the White Fantasy of the Period Piece ⎮ Blue Soup Film
Awards season has bored me into a deep sleep— one on the edge of calm but falling backwards towards anxious. As the nominations are announced and golden trophies given out, I find myself thinking again and again, who cares. I am sure 1917 and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood are good, maybe even exceptional, films. But, be honest with me, is there anything in these movies that truly excites you? Anything that makes you look forward to the future of movies and inspired to watch and create? Your answer may be yes and, if so, I am intensely curious to what excites you in these movies because for me it is a short and crystal clear no. For me, the reason for my boredom comes easily— I am desperate for new stories. And with over 100 years of films in our pocket and most of them coming from the perspective of straight white men, we all know a great place to start. The issue with the Golden Globes and the Oscars (and basically every other awards show that we angrily read the results of on our phone then forget about three minutes later) is not that there is a lack of women or people of color or queer people or international people in film. Everyone is making films. The problem I see arises from a sense of acknowledgement. Acknowledgement can often seem like a shallow anxiety. Who cares if a group of old white men watched your movie? Most of us don’t. But I think acknowledgement— especially for a perceived authority on the topic— gets at something much deeper than a search for approval (besides the obvious money factor that comes with the support of those straight white men). Acknowledgement can change the structure of how we approach telling stories.
Though awards season has sparked my thoughts on acknowledgement, I want to talk about it within the context of something completely different— period pieces. A few weeks ago I got to see Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation of Little Women. I had high expectations going into this movie— but also a steady stream of apprehension. The film ended up fulfilling both sides of my anticipation. You see, I really liked this film. I thought the filming was beautiful, the structure was interesting and well put together, most of the performances were wonderful, and the ending felt satisfying. However, despite the undeniable pleasure in watching the film, I left the theater asking myself, “did we really need this movie?” I know think pieces about little women are a dime a dozen and that this is not a new conversation. To be honest, I am already forgetting about this film. But the thing is, I really wanted to love Little Women. Period pieces fill a very specific craving for the fantasy that only slightly grumpy people in large dresses and cravats can relieve. Literary adaptations are even more alluring in that they not only reference a fantasy of the past, but also a quality of storytelling that only comes with decades (if not centuries) of working and reworking. As an English major who wrote her thesis on adaptation— I can hardly resist. However, there is a fortified barrier of entry in these stories that goes past simply not seeing a black face on a screen. Basically, this is a personal vendetta that I decided to express through excessive, essayistic language.
Saoirse Ronan as Jo March in Little Women (2019)
I saw a tweet the other day that quoted Angela Davis saying, “I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy.” There has been enough conversations about inclusion that slapping a couple of black faces on a film written, directed, shot, and even PA’d by only white people is solving no kind of problem and is a ploy to gain money fueled recognition. However, in the context of period pieces, inclusion becomes a bit more complicated— not from whether we should tell black stories and include black people in non-black stories but rather how to go about doing that work. Some people on the internet called for a black interpretation of Little Women in response to Gerwig’s adaptation, but why tell that story again when you could tell a story adapted from a black work? Well, here’s a list of film adaptations based on black literary classics made in the last century:
Roots (1977)
The Color Purple (1982)
Beloved (1998)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005)
12 Years a Slave (2013)
These are all masterful books and important adaptations; however, each and every one of these films’ main focus is slavery, abuse, or general suffering. Of course, films like Little Women and other popular period pieces include stories of hardship and suffering; however, that suffering never really interrupts the fantasy. No one watches 12 Years a Slave or The Color Purple and thinks “man, I was born in the wrong decade.” In fact, though these films are technically all period films, I wouldn’t categorize them into my personal perception of “the period piece.” By cultural connotations alone, I would characterize these films within historical fiction— an equally important but quite different genre in my subjective definitions of genre. Even though films like Pride and Prejudice and Little Women are technically historical, what we’re really looking for when we watch them is a romance. Not necessarily one of interpersonal love, but one of exorbitant wealth that affords large estates and huge beautiful dresses. A wealth which our main heroines may not posses but are always within arms distance (usually through the aforementioned interpersonal romance). The main conundrum of representation in period films comes from the conflict between reality and the fantasy. Yes, there is an expectation of historical accuracy or, at least the visage of historical accuracy in period pieces. However, when people say, “well this is a period piece, there were only straight white people in that place at that time so it’s just being historically accurate” they don’t actually care about the historical accuracy. They are not pouring over archives and censuses counting every black or queer person and calculating the probability that they could/would be present in the time and place of the film. They are actually concerned about disrupting their perception of the period fantasy. The fear is not historical or academic, but lies in a fear of having to change views held since primary school. What was the point of kindergarten if all the information was prejudiced. Let me have my moment of whiteness!!! Can’t we escape you people???
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kelsey Scott, Quvenzhané Wallis, and Cameron Zeigler in 12 Years a Slave (2013)
Another difference between the white fantasy period pieces and black period films lies in the period piece’s general sense of lightness. White period pieces are allowed to be light and bright while black history always has a lingering shadow of horror and injustice (Amma Asante’s Belle comes close to this lightness but only through the inclusion of white characters and narratives). Little Women exemplifies this capacity for lightness because it manages to contain lightness and focus on family within the context of one of (if not THE) most brutal and important wars in US history. Yes, the Marsh family faces hardships during the war, but the importance and specificity of this particular war (and how their white family fits within the history of this country as built by black and white congruously) doesn’t seem to matter. What does this story mean to the one black woman with lines in the film. The war is not a familial hardship for her but a complete shift in how she moves within her own country, surrounded by people who claim it is not hers. She is not part of the March family’s story and I’m not saying she should have had a lead role in the film, but there has to be some indication of the wider context of the film in order to create convincing environment— and that simply cannot be done without the inclusion of black people. Though I’m sure the Marsh family’s distance from blackness and its place in the Civil War is accurate to the time, that does not excuse the film’s ignorance to its own setting. The film must show at least a sliver of the outside (meaning black) perspective in order to illuminate the central characters’ shared outlook. And, again, in order to achieve a conscientious and truly realistic story, the film must acknowledge black people, black experiences, or black existence (and that does not mean simply including someone with black skin as this film does).
The missing pieces of Little Women make the film come across as less of an update and more of an outdated attempt at modernization. This film, in its exploration of feminism and womanhood, would have been a revelation in the 90s. However, though the film uses modern techniques and incorporates modern sensibilities, it doesn’t engage the current standards of intersectional feminism. I want to make clear that I didn’t expect this film to race bend in any way. What I do expect is for the film to consider its character’s intersections and how those intersections fit within their historical context. This brings me back to my original point about the power of true acknowledgement. The film’s attempt to acknowledge blackness primarily fails in that it makes no effort in understanding what exactly it was meant to acknowledge. It took the route of diversity (barely) instead of inclusion and prioritized lightness over authenticity.
Had Little Women tried to understand the complexities of how blackness fits into this story, would it be able to maintain the same sense of lightness? Or does the acknowledgement of blackness bring with it that cloud of suffering and atrocity? I think no; however, based on black historical film’s track record— I understand the mistake.
Anya Taylor-Joy in Emma
Trula Hoosier, Barbarao, and Alva Rogers in Daughters of the Dust (1991)
Next month, a new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma will be released by Focus Features. As with Little Women, I expect I will like this film. But shadowing over any kind of excitement for this film lies the same question I had walking out of Little Women, “why exactly did they make this?” While I will admit that Emma is a particularly interesting text to adapt today, (the novel itself is a great example of creating characters astoundingly unaware of their privilege), a perfect modern adaptation of this film already exists in Amy Heckerling’s 1995 film Clueless (THIS IS A FACT). It was even written and directed by a woman so there’s your diversity quota. We can move on now. When I think of the ideal black period pieces of our future, I think of something similar to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. Though this film does not explore the same environments of wealth as Emma or Little Women, I feel the fantasy in a way I never have with black period pieces. Of course, Julie Dash wrote an original screenplay for Daughters of the Dust so the story does not come from any literary traditions— but something about the way the film comes through the screen makes it feels like it’s a story that has been told forever. And even though that film was made thirty years ago and not much has progressed since then, Daughters of the Dust gives me hope. Hope that black stories can be told with all their complexities and all their suffering— without having to center around the suffering. With the lightness of white dresses on black skin and the sounds of family intermingling with the waves on a beach that feels like home.
See you soon,
Sofia
