Demi Moore as Hester Prynne arrives on the shores of Puritan New England with lace embellishments on her outfit and crazy notions of acquiring her own home to live in solo, while her husband is otherwise occupied with parking the schooner or testing the patience of the neighbouring Algonquin population. She says and she does with open-hearted personal authority and does not wait for permission to go about her business. Naturally, the colonists hate her.  In The Scarlet Letter—richly transcending the source novel—‘A’ is for authority, agency and authenticity.

Gary Oldman, as Rev Arthur Dimmesdale, has a face only a sexually pent-up pilgrim would want to sit on. They meet when Dimmesdale helps her out after her carriage blows a tire. He seems not perturbed that she is alone and eager to make her acquaintance. What follows is a series of meet cutes as the two develop an attraction to each other. Eventually, Hester receives word (via Dimmesdale, the sly fox) that her husband has perished (no body though!) and, after deciding that the seven years of grief dictated by puritan law is arbitrary and stupid, they go to the barn for some privacy and have sex on a pile of grain.

If someone put the above on a t-shirt, I’d wear it!

Hester’s sweet, Instagram-ready decor scheme and scandalising fashion choices are rivalled (in a friendly way) by the bold accessorising and whimsical yard design of a farm for rebel ladies run by Harriet Hibbons (Joan Plowright.) “When first we came,” she reminisces, “there was dancing around the maypole. […] Now a whipping post stands where the maypole used to be.” The fashion and decor practiced by Hester, Harriet, and others is an expression of the freedom the puritan culture hasn’t wrung out of them. And this tight grip of control is only getting worse at the time of Hester’s arrival. 

“You don’t put her in prison. You put the prison in her,” advises Meredith Stonehall (Dana Ivey), the wife of a Puritan dingdong overseeing Hester’s fate after she falls pregnant with Dimmesdale’s child. This is a chilling piece of fashion policing theory. Hester’s style—loose and lacy—has rankled from her arrival, and the scarlet ‘A’ for adulteress she is forced to wear is a perverse adornment for a woman who would otherwise only wear a colourful accessory when feeling agency to do so.

In The Addams Family, Dana Ivey’s character rejects the thieving, duplicitous, cis-supremest scheming of Dan Hedaya for Cousin It. Her character’s intellectual backflips for repressive Puritanism here are a knife to the heart.

After the birth of Pearl—Hester and Dimmesdale’s daughter—we discover that Hester’s husband, Roger (Robert Duvall), has been alive all along, living in captivity with a tribe of Indigenous people.We are shown quickly why Hester mourned so little for Roger after his ‘death’ when he aggressively forces a wash cloth into her face and flips a bowl of water at her upon his arrival in her home. He then ensconces himself with the colony’s head gargoyles (concealing the fact that he is Hester’s husband), facilitates the gang assault of Hester’s female slave (to coerce her into spying for him—he later murders her), declares Pearl to be “the Devil’s own child!” (he would know), and murders a man leaving Hester’s home thinking he is Dimmesdale. (Nope! This man dropped in with the sole intent to rape Hester.) The murder is done in a way that implicates the Indigenous peoples, starting a war. This fuckin’ guy.

The film seemed like an opportunity to collectively express frustrations with Demi Moore’s naked ambitions for herself. A February 1994 news article from Entertainment Weekly opens with “Demi Moore as a Puritan? Stop that snickering. The actress who twice took it all off for the cover of Vanity Fair is about to sign on to play the role of Hester Prynne…” You know what? Hester requires grit, determination, confidence in speaking one’s mind, and the sexiness that emerges when an individual possesses those qualities. A 1995 Rolling Stone Q&A includes the following quote from Michael Douglas, the holy ghost of the divine trinity of erotic thrillers, Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction and Disclosure: “Demi gets more done in a day than most guys do in a week. She’s really running on all cylinders.” Hester is more Demi than not.

The most important fashion catwalk is the perp walk. – John Waters                                        (See also: Lori Loughlin; Leona Helmsley)

A viral tweet from @LLW90210 in 2018 punctuated a simmering discussion online about men and their terrible living quarters:

“every straight girl on this site has an apartment filled with stunning art, plants and vintage furniture but is in love with a man who sleeps on a bare mattress next to his PS4”

Both vox.com and vice.com published reporting in late 2018/early 2019 on the internet perception of men eschewing bed frames (Vice) or forgoing decor, save for, yes, a video game console and an easy chair, altogether (Vox). Both pieces take pains to acknowledge that lousy apartments, lack of interest in decor, and a general tolerance for disgusting housekeeping practices are not gendered male exclusively, nor are decor, style and tidying exclusively female interests. However, the internet’s teasing was getting at something that felt true, even if not verified by social scientists nor biologists. “Look, I don’t have the demography,” one man who is without a bed frame is quoted in the Vice piece, “But I think that society encourages women to take care of themselves in a way it doesn’t really for men.”  

This meme gets at a very real anxiety. If an old pizza slice in the bathroom, disused gym shorts as pillow cases, and a variety of handguns lying about the living room floor (all examples from the Vox piece) are acceptable, where does that leave art, greenery and vintage furniture, let alone the person who chose them with care?  Hester made the most of the home she chose (yeah, she was hoping the husband would never show up), but, just like her fashion, found that it still meant nothing when it came to asserting her autonomy where the colonists were concerned.

Hester has a slave, Mbtuba (played by Lisa Andoh), but the film does not develop the inherent conflict in Hester demonstrating personal agency while denying another woman hers. As mentioned previously, Mbtuba pays with her life for Hester’s crimes, absorbing the colonists’ worst impulses for punishment and debasement. If Hester is assigned the scarlet ‘A’ to wear as a walking prison, Mbtuba has worn her prison for far longer as an enslaved black woman, compounded by Hester being her mistress. We are all implicated in her imprisonment. 

The Scarlet Letter was directed by Roland Jofeé and released in 1995.

WORKS CITED

Brennan, Judy and Cagle, Jess. “Casting ‘The Scarlet Letter.'” EW.com. February 4, 1994. https://ew.com/article/1994/02/04/casting-scarlet-letter/

Jennings, Rebecca. “Why the internet loves dunking on guys’ terrible apartments.” Vox.com. December 19, 2018. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/19/18141261/apartments-bad-male-minimalism-twitter-meme

@LLW90210 (Lauren). “every straight girl on this site has an apartment filled with stunning art, plants and vintage furniture but is in love with a man who sleeps on a bare mattress next to his PS4” twitter.com. August 5, 2018. Account suspended. (Accessed via Jennings, Rebecca. “Why the internet loves…” on June 5, 2019.)

Udovitch, Mim. “Q&A: Demi Moore.” February 9, 1995. rollingstone.com. https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/qa-demi-moore-202654/

Yagoda, Maria. “Why Do So Many Adult Men Keep Their Mattresses On The Floor.” vice.com. February 5, 2019. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbwvqx/why-do-men-keep-their-mattresses-on-the-floor