However, this blog post is not simply about racism. Well, it is and it isn't. It is most directly a response to a movie I watched over the holiday weekend, "Julie and Julia." More to the point, I am writing about elements of white supremacy in the film. Now, there's a term that has gone out of use. It is much more caustic I think than the term racism, and both for that reason and because it points to some thinking and to some acts that have not disappeared from American culture it is appropriate that someone begin applying it to otherwise seemingly innocent thoughts and practices.
"Julie and Julia" was on its surface a darling of a film, and I have to admit that that was what first interested me in viewing it. I tried to get my daughter to see it with me, a nice mother-daughter outing I thought, and she agreed until we got to the cinema. There, she begged off and deserted me for "Zombieland." After my viewing of "Julie and Julia," I have to say that my daughter made the safer bet.
There are in this movie about a young woman (a southern girl if I'm not mistaken) who moves within one year from self-loathing to fame two underlying and interrelated themes--conflated time and recovery of the "lady persona." The first is necessary in order to complete the project of the second. To be clear, I am suggesting that with this film the idea of the white "lady"--a social, racial, and economic construct--is recovered. Before I go on to illustrate my point let me say a word about why such recovery is important at this time. We are living in an era when girls have "gone wild." (About an hour before going to see "Julie and Julia" I watched on a blog some video clips that are clear examples of video porn. And although all of the women in those clips were African American, romp shaking of the sort that we see as of late is not limited to this group. Needless to say, the phenomenon of the video vixen provided just the right contrast to the virtuousness of Julie Powell and Julia Child, a contrast that presented in bold relief a message concerning white womanhood.)
What is conflated time, and how does this movie utilize this tool for the project of recovery? Well, as one reviewer put it, the movie weaves the life of Julia into that of Julie (or vice versa). That is to say that the movie closes the gap between the 1940s and the new millennium. How so? First, Childs is not foreign to Julie (although I suspect she would be unfamiliar to most millennials), and since Childs is not alien to Julie but rather a subject of admiration, Childs can in this story serve as a prototype of virtuous white womanhood, or, better put, of the white "lady." Clearly, Childs is not meant as mere inspiration, however. No, Julie must become a simulation of Childs, which is to say that she must become a postmodern version of the earlier figure. Let's just say, Julie has a good start at this task at hand, since she in fact has an actual mother, a physically absent yet never spiritually absent force who responds to her daughter's every professional and personal decision. Like a good Southern matriarch, she intends to keep her protege on the right path, one that will keep the family name high.
There are in this film many other infusions both of the lady figure and of "the Southern," which not surprisingly work hand in hand. Some reviewers (a definite minority) were sickened by the syrupy sweetness of this movie, by a perfection and confection created by the loving husbands of both Childs and Julie. Both men were saints, the exact honorific description that Julie expressed at her husband's overall support of her work and the same idea expressed by Childs as she gleamed within the aura of her husband's near angelic devotion and pure love. This was no story of a single mom, fighting sexism and discrimination to beat the odds on a tough road to success. No. This film is a postmodern glance to "better" times. There is lots of sex in this movie, but it is clean, wholesome intimacy, the kind that takes place between legitimate partners, i.e., between wives and husbands. Again, both Julie and Childs have perfect marriages. (The problem the film invents between Julie and her husband, a spat that results in his leaving her for a day and a night, is totally unbelievable given how there for her he is the rest of the time. The problem of Julie's ambition is then simply an unsuccessful plot device.) As for Childs, her problem is more real. She has everything a woman could ask for but fertility, yet her life is nevertheless full. A spoiled Southern Belle, one might argue, she has the luxury of indulging at least a couple of whims before her husband pays for her to attend the famous Cordon Bleu. One could easily reason that Julie is Childs' spiritual daughter or granddaughter, and, if one were to look seriously at both women as figures or representatives of white women's virtue and its recovery, one could make a case that the white mother figure yearns to have her wayward daughter return home, to her rightful place and station. (A prodigal daughter, Julie has sinned against her forebears by both marrying below her station and moving off to the God forsaken North.) In making such a case, one might begin with Julie's unhappiness at the beginning of the movie, a existential angst if not depression caused by living in the unfamiliar and unglamorous Queens, New York and by confusion concerning her life's purpose. Would that we could all have such great problems. These false issues take viewers back to the days when ladies would tire and faint so easily.
Now, my reading of this film most would agree is perfectly rational. Just one thing: the movie is based on two "real" lives. Ironic. Art imitating life; life imitating art. It is incredibly hard to know these days where reality ends and fantasy begins, and "Julie and Julia" demonstrates in so many ways this postmodern problem, beginning even with its title and the fact that a real person actually came up with the idea to marry herself to this lady of the past whose name so closely resembles her own. The critical question for those viewers willing to be critical of an otherwise adorable movie is whether the social construct of the lady has any real relevance in real life? In asking this question I will probably be accused of taking art too seriously, advice which I have gotten used to and which I recognize for what it is--censorship of mind and spirit. And, I suppose I can also be accused of conflating time myself, for truly I am not that removed from a culture in which the white "lady" construct served some definite purposes, set against and of course above the Mammy construct, the servant black woman. If I am correct that Julie is a postmodern lady, then we might expect to see a Mammy figure somewhere in the movie. She exists in a largely muzzled black coworker, Julie's neighbor in cubicle-land. With barely three full lines, one wonders why this somewhat naturalistic character is in the film. Is it because the real life Julie had such an acquaintance? Reading things the way I do, the black coworker is there only to support Julie's dream; we hear few words from the quiet one, just a quick offering of a gesture of approval and support and, later, a statement of loyalty when Julie gets in trouble (fake trouble) at work for taking a day off to cook and to blog. Though there is in this movie a smart reference to "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" the answer to that obviously still discomforting question is I'm afraid another white couple and, if things go as planned, some other white women intrigued by Julie's project. Who's not coming to dinner? The black coworker.
If the white "lady" construct served in the past to keep black and other women of color subservient and invisible, why would the result of its recovery serve different purposes today? Short answer: it doesn't. White supremacy always serves the same purposes: to hold up images of white beauty, grace, and virtue, characteristics that anything but innocently justify social inequity. But how does this insidious feature of American society play itself out? Julie Powell writes about her otherwise uninspired life, gets an article in the New York Times, which immediately catapults her to fame. Why? Why? Why? And how? Was it because her writing was just that good? Better than that of countless other bloggers, who write on much more serious topics and who will never have a road to publication so nicely paved? Was it because she struck a chord with an audience tantalized by the commingling of white female purity with delicious food? Early in Julie's project, her friends convince her to ask her audience for money. "They like you," they assured her; "they will fund your work." And indeed, they and we did.
Finally, I am reminded of one of my own spiritual giants, Sojourner Truth, who it is said took her blouse off before a crowd of onlookers who had doubted her womanhood. She is now famous for having had the nerve not only to do such an unladylike act but to ask, "Ain't I a Woman?" After all of this time, women of color, faced with the ever-present ideal of the white lady, held up in such high esteem, must still take their clothes off, both to be recognized as women, and to be (de)valued. This is the cost of white supremacy, and it continues unabated.
