A (mush)room of one’s own: feminism, posthumanism and race in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled

Abstract

The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola, USA, 2017) is one of several recent films to feature mushrooms as a prominent plot device. In this essay, I argue that the use of mushrooms here allows cinema to engage with issues surrounding the Anthropocene, or the period in which capitalist man has shaped the world more than the world has shaped capitalist man. I shall in particular propose that the association between women and fungi suggests that the Anthropocene entails an anthropocentric and patriarchal worldview. That is, The Beguiled suggests that the Anthropocene is defined specifically by capitalist man – whose world must now be replaced by one that might be deemed feminist and posthuman, not least because of how the women at the film’s all-girls’ private school work with mushrooms to bring down the central male figure, Civil War soldier Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell). However, The Beguiled also posits the limits of such a feminist and posthuman world both through its Civil War setting and through its status as an adaptation-cum-remake of Don Siegel’s 1971 film of the same name. For, by omitting from her film the central character of Hallie, who is played in Siegel’s “original” by Mae Mercer, and which character is in Thomas P. Cullinan’s source novel known as Mattie, Coppola conscientiously raises the issue of race – precisely by rendering it invisible/absent. This omission is not necessarily racist in intent, however, for in her elliptical style and in her use of the Madewood Plantation House as a location, Coppola subtly suggests that cinema itself is a force for the white Anthropocene, and that blackness, like a mushroom and like woman, will emerge as its post-cinematic replacement.