Ivana Miloš, In the Flower Basket (2022), monotype on paper, 33 x 24 cm
THE SEX OF ROSES
Flower boy T, n*gga that's me Rooted from the bottom, bloomed into a tree Took a little while, n*gga making leaves Keep 'em in the branches so my family can eat
—"Where This Flower Blooms," Tyler, the Creator
A long time ago somebody messed with people’s minds and put into their heads the idea that women, and especially female sexual organs, look like flowers. Botanists, anatomists, and pornographers stand no chance against decades of the birds and the bees and all the metaphorical, flowery language that conceals bodily realities to the point of alienation where the flower really somehow looks like a vulva to those that have either never really looked at a flower (which flower anyway?) nor at a female body. Probably neither. But then, are we not all blind?
This is not Charlie Chaplin’s fault, of course. He shot two of the most famous (and best) scenes featuring flowers and a (blind!) woman in the history of cinema. The title of the film is City Lights and it features a so-called flower girl played by Virginia Cherrill. The first sequence in which Chaplin’s Tramp meets the flower girl (who is a flower seller) begins with a close-up on a bouquet of flowers fading into a close-up of the face of the woman. The transition between the flowers and the blind woman appears as natural as in a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. She is sitting at a street corner in front of a fence with a basket to sell flowers from. Absent-mindedly, she is playing with two flowers she is holding in her hand while waiting for customers. Chaplin shot 451 takes of this first encounter between the smitten Tramp and the helpless flower seller. I am not sure how often the flowers had to be replaced in-between takes. Likely nobody cared except for the prop masters and their headaches. Later, in the eminent and unsurpassed final shot of the film, it’s the Tramp himself holding a flower close to his face as if to hide behind its beauty.
Beauty, that’s the cue. It’s said to be in the eye of the beholder but somehow this is not true for our cultural understanding of flowers. They are more or less a symbol for beauty, peace, love, and kindness. Relating a character to flowers—even if there have been some notable, pretty badass exceptions in film history—Chaplin immediately communicates something about love and tenderness. In most of the shots in which the flower girl appears we can also see flowers. She carries them in her basket, or cares for them in the flower shop, or waters them in her window. In (silent) films, shared visual reference points are of great importance as they provide the groundwork for speaking without words. Here we are in the field of film semiotics. “The universe of action depicted by the cinema is already a universe of signs,” wrote Umberto Eco. The flower is a code, it’s sold for its symbolic value. Just ask politicians who pose with flowers and children. Just ask those that draw and press flowers on every object to gain profit. Just ask Instagram.
In some sense, selling flowers is a paradox. It’s making business with something that opposes the world of business. Chaplin—who understood everything about the necessity for humanizing business—almost manages to have the leaves of the flowers appear like dollar bills. In a later scene, the Tramp, pretending to be a rich man, is buying all the contents of the flower basket and the blind woman is holding the banknote as close to her heart as she earlier held the flowers.
The blind flower seller in City Lights is not the only blind flower seller we know. In Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii there is the young slave Nydia. She sells garlands of flowers to earn some money for her owners. Like in City Lights, the image of flowers is related to poverty and femininity. She is described as “a young female, still half a child in years... dressed simply in a white tunic... ; her features were more formed than exactly became her years, yet they were soft and feminine in their outline, and without being beautiful in themselves, they were almost made so by their beauty of expression…” It doesn’t end as well for Nydia as for the blind girl in City Lights. She falls for the Roman nobleman Glaucus and though she saves him and his wife Ione after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, she drowns herself in the sea rather than endure the pains of the continuous love triangle. There must be a graveyard somewhere with all these women in literature and cinema drowning themselves in oceans for men that never knew; men that still liked the scent and look of flowers and sent them to their women until the point of suffocation, to borrow a perfectly legitimate idea from Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating, in which a character is afraid of not being able to breathe in the presence of flowers.
In his famous depiction of Nydia, sculptor Randolph Rogers faced a similar problem as Chaplin. How to show blindness? In the scene in which the blind woman takes him for a rich gentleman cruising off with a car, Chaplin prefers to pan between the car and her reaction instead of using any motor sounds as an effect like he does in other audible occasions throughout the film. Rogers has Nydia hold her hand behind her ear to signal how she depends on her hearing.
It doesn’t really matter that both of these depictions of blindness have very little to do with actual experiences of blind people. After all, blindness serves as another code relating characters to vulnerability. Chaplin had such a huge understanding of cinema that he turned that around at the end of the film. It’s not being blind that makes us vulnerable, it’s being seen. When the blind flower seller is not blind anymore and recognizes the ragged Tramp as what he is instead of a millionaire she believed him to be, he is suddenly the vulnerable one. He is the one being exposed to the camera, to her and to our emotions. He is the one holding a flower.
It’s a rose, to be exact. When the Tramp first buys flowers from the blind woman he doesn’t take the rose she is offering to him but insists on a carnation. As carnations follow their own symbolism relating to revolutions and socialism, this is an interesting side note. Carnations are more modest than roses. So, there is a dramaturgy of flowers in City Lights. Like many flowers, roses combine female and male reproductive parts; they are monoecious. The male reproductive component is the stamen, made up of the filament and the anther. The female reproductive components are called carpels and we can find them in the middle of the flower. So says science but, as we know, science does not stop people from thinking what they want to think. To be fair, it would also be strange to look at the rose in front of Chaplin’s face when his and our eyes are full of tears.
Thus flower sellers are still, with very, very few exceptions, presented as female. Ornamental qualities of life are still connected to feminine attributes; the flower boys are still outsiders; the female flower sellers still offer their bouquets because they care (not because they want to earn money; how unworldly are you to expect anything else of a woman?); the flowers are still supposed to wither as soon as love ceases to exist; husbands still forget to water the flowers; and, in cinema, women are still framed by flowers (flowers on their dresses, flowers in their hair).As we feel the vertigo of all these flowers, colorful and thick, we see it clear as day: flowers look like women, they look like vulvas, oh how beautiful! Let’s make a metaphor and forget all the inequality buried underneath it.
Whoever is looked upon is vulnerable. Metaphors etymologically have to do with the transference of ownership. Creating a metaphor is still a form of owning. Please don’t forget that you can’t own a flower. In the end, it’s Chaplin again who told us what to make of this. In his Limelight he declares: “The meaning of anything is merely other words for the same thing. After all, a rose is a rose is a rose. That's not bad. It should be quoted.”
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.