I know I keep denying you guys the Friday action, but I am at the home of my friend Ayla, and I do not want to clutter her bookmarks with my absurd number of music blogs. I will mention, however, that the new Pains of Being Pure at Heart album (first Pains of Being Pure at Heart album?) is rad as fuck. Ignore the messy faux-controversy; influences are influences, good music is good music, and bottomline, the album's worth the money and time.
Editorial
As promised, it's time for my Imitation of Life editorial. If you had told me, as I walked out of the mandatory class screening, that I would be thinking for more than ten minutes about the film, I would have responded in utter disbelief. When the credits rolled, I felt robbed. I had heard 'masterpiece,' 'subversive,' and 'brilliant' thrown around, but I had just watched - to the best of my knowledge - a sordid, drawn-out soap opera.
Then I read the assigned essays. Read about Sirk's opinions, read about the context, read about all the little details I'd missed, or rather, not enough to notice. Suddenly, I was seeing a wholly different picture. Structurally, this flick was friggin' impenetrable. Sure, for a good long while, it's just the hackneyed narrative of a woman sacrificing it all to make it big in show business, etc. etc., the standard genre fantasy through which millions could vicariously live. But that which, at the time, felt an awkward diversion (the Sarah Jane subplot) is actually a brilliant narrative-collapsing stab at the genre in which he was working.
If that sounds kind of complicated, it is. Let me sum up the film for you thus: Lora, young white single mother, wants to be an actress. Annie, a black woman, moves in with Lora to become a nanny for Lora's daughter, Suzie. Annie brings along her daughter, Sarah Jane, who is strikingly light-skinned and wishes she was white. For a good long while, the movie follows Lora's predictable trajectory: she falls in love, sacrifices that love and her family for her career, and then, once at the top, realizes she misses what she's left behind. Like I said, hackneyed.
Meanwhile, though, Sarah Jane grows into a teenaged rebel, despising her mother, hiding her black heritage, fleeing from city to city and working seedy showgirl jobs. Only at her mother's death does she return home, weeping and repenting for her lies.
The subversion, then, lies in the peculiar mirror image the movie forms, a mirror with which Sirk freely plays. Both Lora and Sarah Jane perform the titular imitation, but while Lora's career is one of classy success, Sarah Jane is relegated to the slums, performing in night clubs, forced by ethnicity into seclusion. Ultimately, though, Sarah Jane's real performance - her role as a white woman - is a great success: when she runs to her mother's casket, nobody believes Sarah Jane. Nobody believes she's black.
So yeah, structurally, impenetrable. It's a genius sort of back-and-forth. But it's easy - painfully, painfully easy - to miss. The dialogue is wretched. It's the sort of dialogue that comes off as wooden by design. And the pacing, well, we won't get into that. At the time, perhaps these were just forgiveable tropes, but in 2009, they make the movie almost impossible to appreciate.
So how do we react to this movie? Simply relenting with our "respect" seems insufficient for a movie this devilishly subversive, but time has not been kind here, and without the proper context, its subtleties are lost entirely.
I guess, then, a lament is proper. To the film scholars, and to aspiring filmmakers, it will live on as an inspirational achievement, but to those who lack the time to spend appreciating such buried treasures, it's lost entirely. And that's something truly worth being upset about.
PERSONAL:
I am a super busy hero.
2009 FILMS SEEN: 1.5
2009 SONGS ON MY ITUNES: ???
Current Computer Situation: Ayla's PC.
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I beg to differ - somewhat. I saw the film years ago as an afternoon movie - something that was shown on local tv stations as a kind of syndicated programming - and even with commercials it was stunning. Perhaps having first seen it close to the conclusion of the initial push of the civil rights movement it was pertinent and therefore moving. For me the subplot was the movie, and even felt that way upon my initial viewing, not as some kind of special insight I was having. It was all about the strength and stability of the maid character, and her love for her daughter, and the sacrifices she made. The truly heartbreaking moment is when the mother goes to her daughter's school and is denied by her daughter. Yet, it is also so understandable to know the daughter's pain and struggle. Growing up with the white mother and daughter who are not particularly special, yet have all this success premised primarily on their race. At least when compared to the path the maid's daughter finds herself on - she has none of the opportunities afforded either the white mother or her daughter. Painful to watch the power of racism. The way it can become a reason to hate oneself, deny oneself, even to the point of being ashamed of a mother who was the epitome of kindness, strength and love. It was a movie that had a huge impact on me - and I am no filmmaker.
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