The Past Jars the Present as Hollywood Meets Wellesley
Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College
[This article appeared on the op-ed page of the October 9, 2002 edition
of The Boston Globe]
When Wellesley College agreed to welcome Revolution Studios to film
scenes in a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts and other luminaries,
we knew we were in for a week of disruptions. We knew, too, that many
members of our campus community would find it intriguing and fun to
observe closely how a movie is made, and that some would relish the
opportunity to participate as extras and technical assistants. We knew
that others would be critical of the decision to invite Hollywood to
Wellesley, and that the filming would spark a clash of values within
our community of vocal, independent thinkers. What we didn't know was
how much we would learn --- not only about the making of movies, but
also about the making of our multicultural learning community over the
past 50 years.
The film, "Mona Lisa Smile," is a work of fiction, written by Lawrence
Konner and Mark Rosenthal and set at Wellesley in 1953-54. The writers
neither requested nor required permission to use our name for their
creative work. But when the production company asked to film parts of
the movie on our campus, the alternative was to let them find another
college and call it Wellesley in the film. Since the beauty of our campus
is legendary, the answer seemed obvious.
And the script for this historical drama seemed interesting and well
researched, chronicling the experience of a young art historian from
UCLA (Julia Roberts' role), who secures a coveted teaching post at Wellesley.
The relationships she develops, with students and faculty colleagues,
reveal many of the strains on women's roles in the Fifties that gave
rise to the feminist revolution in the decades that followed. These
are familiar themes to us and worth exploring: how far women have come
toward full equality in the past five decades, and yet how some of the
struggles of that era never really end.
The gender issues were central to the script and altogether explicit,
but the racial issues were there only by omission. This is because the
most dramatic change at Wellesley College over the past quarter century
is how extraordinarily diverse we have become. While Wellesley has graduated
women of color for more than a century, our faculty and students today
represent a nearly complete cross-section of the nation as well as 66
other countries. Now fewer than half our students come from the white
upper-class strata of society depicted in the film. Our diversity today
is not only a rich resource for learning - creating a range of opinion,
experience, and perspective that constantly challenges all our assumptions
-- it is also fundamental to our institutional identity, purpose, and
pride.
Seeing ourselves reflected in a mirror half a century old was jarring,
despite our conscious efforts not to replicate destructive patterns
of the past. When the studio issued a call for extras and production
assistants, we anticipated that the imperative of historical accuracy
would bias their selection away from students of color for on-camera
roles. We asked the studio to open the off-camera opportunities to students
who would not have an equal opportunity to play extras in the film,
which they did. Our students were philosophical and gracious about the
historical constraints on the casting decisions.
But as the week wore on, all of us became increasingly discomforted
by the painful reality that members of our community were being excluded
on the basis of skin color from participating in a re-enactment of our
past. Students bore eloquent witness to their emotional shock at experiencing
a form of racial discrimination that for their grandmothers and even
their mothers had been commonplace. They raised important questions
about the potential impact of the film on the image the college would
project into the future. And they organized discussions of the many
questions unearthed in our brief encounter with Hollywood's spin on
historical events that it chooses to depict.
Those discussions will continue. But for now, what is most clear is
that the disorienting experience of being abruptly transported back
50 years in time, paradoxically, underscored both the progress our society
has made in erasing some of the corrosive consequences of unconscious
white privilege and the depth of the racial wounds we continue to carry.
Honest explorations of the past will always have to confront both realities,
as our students are now doing with great courage, sensitivity and sophistication.
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Diana Chapman Walsh, Ph.D. is the twelfth president of Wellesley College.
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