In her book on the reception history of Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood films, Barbara Klinger explores the disjunction between the way Sirk’s films were derided by critics upon their first release, only subsequently to be rescued by academic-orientated film scholars during the late 1960s and beyond. The split between the two positions is clear: contemporary critics found the films soppy and sentimental, artificial and melodramatic. Above all, the films relied on manipulating audience emotions, encouraging viewers to escape into false nether-worlds that were completely severed from the concerns of the real world. Later film critics and scholars, on the other hand, have been almost unrestrained in their praise for Sirk’s films. Their approval directly counteracts the dismissals of the earlier critics. From this perspective, Sirk’s films are still considered artificial and melodramatic, but it is precisely because of this that they are seen to run counter to notions of manipulating audience emotions and escaping into false worlds. On the contrary, Sirk’s films have the ability to bring audiences face-to-face with false worlds, such that audiences can reflexively and intelligently judge those false worlds for what they are. In this light, Sirk’s films present the exact opposite of manipulating audience emotions and instead offer clear-sighted and clear-thinking critiques of American middle-class dreamworlds (Klinger, pp. 69-96).
My contention in this essay is that each of these positions is partially correct: Sirk’s Hollywood films are certainly ones in which audience emotions are manipulated, but this manipulation is achieved against the backdrop of a critique of false worlds. Audiences can adopt a stance of ironic distanciation only if, at one and the same time, they are emotionally manipulated. If contemporary critics dismissed the films as ones that were, to paraphrase one writer, comprised of ‘synthetic emotional onslaught’, [1] then the latter-day critics can only, it seems to me, accept the films on the basis that some aspects of the films’ emotional onslaughts are genuine. The task for the spectator is to distinguish genuine emotions from fake ones, and to separate real feelings from ones that are acted or ‘put on’. This, at least, is what I shall argue is at stake in Sirk’s most accomplished melodrama, Imitation of Life (1959).
Sirk’s melodramas are built on the play of dialectic, counterpoint and antithesis; the role of one character is always refracted by that of another. Bob Merrick’s (Rock Hudson) restlessness in Magnificent Obsession (1954) is refracted both by Helen Philips (Jane Wyman) and Edward Randolph (Otto Kruger); Kyle and Marylee Hadley (Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone) in Written on the Wind (1956) are contrasted with Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson) and Lucy Hadley (Lauren Bacall); the division in All that Heaven Allows (1955) is more directly drawn between the romantic couple of Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) and Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson) (J. Halliday, pp. 112-113). In Imitation of Life the antitheses occur between characters whose actions can be considered genuine, who are ‘true to themselves’, in contrast with those characters who ‘put on an act’ and who thus deceive themselves. The one character who remains true to herself throughout the film is Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), the black maid. She claims at one point: ‘It’s a sin to be ashamed of what you are. And it’s even worse’, she continues, ‘to pretend, to lie’. These are key words, and variations on them occur throughout the film. They are key because they are central to the theme not only of this film, but of Sirk’s other melodramas:pretending is the main attribute of American middle-class life that Sirk sets out to criticize. In Imitation of Life, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), the successful, glamorous actress, and Annie’s daughter, Sara Jane (Susan Kohner), devote their lives to pretending and it is their actions – their acting – that Sirk is holding up for criticism.
Of course, the dichotomies I have begun to list soon break down: for all her efforts of remaining ‘true to herself’ Annie nevertheless loses the love of her daughter and is constrained to a life of servitude as a member of the economic underclass that fosters Lora’s success. Steve Archer (John Gavin) might be held up as one character who remains ‘true to himself’ to the extent that he never pretends or deceives himself, but he does abandon his ambition to be a photographer and settles for an unfulfilling life in an office job. Similarly, Lora’s career as an actress is not one that is delivered up solely to pretence and self-delusion, for she realizes half-way through the film that ‘something is missing’: even though she has become a successful actress, she has not found happiness or fulfilment. Ultimately, it is Sarah Jane who is caught in the most difficult situation: she desperately wants to find happiness and remain true to herself, but does not quite know how such a state of affairs can be achieved.
These entanglements are given added weight by Sirk’s canny decision to make the character of Lora an actress – in John Stahl’s 1934 film the equivalent character had been a businesswoman. This decision gives added weight to the argument that Imitation of Life is a film about ‘acting’, and about distinguishing true acts from ones that merely ‘put on an act’. Lora, as an actress, and a good one (as she claims at one point), is something of an expert at ‘putting on an act’. Her ability in this regard is aptly demonstrated early in the film when she convinces a potential agent, Allen Loomis (Robert Alda), that she is already an accomplished and experienced Hollywood actress when in fact she is no such thing. Loomis is impressed enough to admit to her: ‘All actresses lie, I know that, but I believed you’. ‘It was a good acting job’, he concludes and eventually becomes her agent. It is through him, as a consequence of her ‘putting on an act’, that she finds theatrical success.
It is certainly possible to argue that in Imitation of Life Sirk is setting up theatres of one form or another as the ultimate form of deception: when one learns to act too well – and thus to lie or pretend – then that is when one reaches the apogee of self-destruction and self-delusion. The theatre is established as a social form in which the pitfalls of pretending are writ large. Sirk’s earlier film with a theatrical sub-plot, All I Desire (1953), also supports this argument. In that film, Naomi Murdoch (Barbara Stanwyck), having left her marriage and family some years earlier to pursue a career in the theatre, returns home in order to see her daughter, Lily (Lori Nelson), perform the lead role in her school play. Upon returning home Naomi ‘plays the role’ of an accomplished actress and convinces her family that she is a great success. All the while, of course, she knows, every bit as much as the spectators of the film know, that her career has been far from successful. At the end of the film she confesses: ‘The theatre’s a tough jungle’. She’s been left with no glory or glamour, merely ‘bruises on my illusions’, as she puts it. Again, the associations pertaining to theatre are fraudulent and deceptive.[2]
As is well known, Sirk worked as a successful theatre director in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. He acknowledges, however, that he did make a decisive break with the theatre when he began to understand and explore the possibilities of cinematic language. By the time he came to direct Schlussakkord/Final Accord in 1936, he claims that making films was not merely a matter of transferring theatre to cinema, but rather required qualities that contrasted markedly with those of the theatre. ‘I realized I had to make a complete break with my theatrical past’, he admitted. ‘I had realized that the cinema and the theatre were two completely different media’. The distinction between the two forms became crucial for him: ‘I began to understand that the camera is the main thing here, because there is emotion in the motion pictures. Motion is emotion, in a way it can never be in the theatre’ (Halliday, pp. 43-44). Once again, Sirk seems to be emphasizing that with cinema he was in some way turning his back on the theatre, the key distinction being that cinema could present emotion in ways that it could not in the theatre.
An important contrast, from this perspective, can be made with some of the films directed by Elia Kazan. Kazan, like Sirk, worked as a theatre director before moving into film, for many years doing both. Kazan was also active in Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s, during roughly the same period in which Sirk was making films there (though by the mid-1950s Kazan had moved his operations to New York). But perhaps most significant are Kazan’s origins in the Actor’s Studio and his embrace of Method acting. The Method is a way of extracting genuine sentiments and emotions from actors to the point where they ‘become’ the role. As such, the Method can be seen as an equivalent of discovering one’s ‘true self’, of no longer pretending to be someone, but on the contrary, becoming someone as oneself. The successful protagonists of Kazan’s dramas typically uncover their own ‘method’; during the course of the film they discover their own genuine sentiments and emotions. By contrast, the unsuccessful characters in those films fail to attain this achievement, they fail to acknowledge their true selves and are defeated or shattered in one way or another. Near the end of On the Waterfront (1954), for example, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) realizes that, as he says, ‘I was rattin’ on myself for all them years’, and he stands as the clearest example of a character in Kazan’s films who stops pretending, who stops lying to himself and ‘becomes somebody’. His brother, Charley (Rod Steiger), on the other hand, had constructed a career out betraying himself to the mob and thus ends up defeated, disillusioned, and ultimately killed. There are plenty of other similar examples from Kazan’s films: Blanche Dubois (Vivien Leigh) in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) continually denies acknowledging her ‘true’ self in favour of ongoing attempts to win the approval of others; Emiliano Zapata (Marlon Brando) in Viva Zapata!(1952) is the true paragon of the revolution in contrast to the cronies who merely bask in the corruptions of power (Zapata is killed, of course, at the end of the film but that merely emphasizes the authenticity of his actions); Cal Trask (James Dean) in East of Eden (1955) exposes the secrets and insecurities surrounding his family history – he confronts the truth where others had sought only imitations and deceptions; while Chuck (Montgomery Clift) and Carol (Lee Remick) in Wild River (1960) arrive at self-knowledge in the face of a small town’s outmoded prejudices and beliefs. Kazan’s films are driven by a determination to separate those who are ‘true to themselves’ from those who pretend to be something other than themselves. For Kazan, the legacy of the theatre and its Method is the promise of discovering ways of being genuine and ‘true to oneself’.
Thus, the opposition between the genuine and the fraudulent in Kazan’s films is usually quite clear: those who bow to social pressures and outmoded traditions end up deceiving themselves and thus become embittered, unhappy, or die, while those who go beyond the horizon of social sentiments and arrive at genuine self-insight are rewarded with, if nothing else, the knowledge that they have acted correctly and been ‘true to themselves’. I use the example of Kazan to point out his faith in the theatre – in the ‘truth’ of the Method – a faith that underpins the kinds of themes that recur regularly in his films: that of acting correctly, genuinely, and of avoiding self-deception or pretence.
The contrast between the genuine and the fraudulent in Sirk’s films is much more difficult to discern. Countless film scholars have noted Sirk’s privileging of the inauthentic and the artificial. One writer has recently asserted that, in Imitation of Life: ‘From the costume jewelry of the opening credits to its garish colors and emotional pretenses, this film wears its inauthenticity on its sleeve’. This same writer continues by claiming: ‘One would miss the point if one concluded that the imitations or simulacra that fascinated Sirk caused him to represent his characters as secondhand or sorry versions of something more true’ (J. Copjec, p. 117). The implication of this position is that Sirk does not produce an opposition between authenticity and inauthenticity, but instead produces a vision of the world in which pretty much everything is inauthentic.
I do not think, however, that this can possibly be the case. For Imitation of Life, what is inauthentic can only be understood against that which is authentic.
I have argued so far that the emphasis on inauthenticity in Imitation of Life is allied with an underlying theme of the pretensions and inauthenticity of the theatre. Nowhere is this made clearer than in Sarah Jane’s continued attempts to escape into a life that is allied with the theatre; indeed, when commenting on the film, Sirk refers to Sarah Jane’s escapes as ones that aim for ‘the escape world of vaudeville’ (Halliday, p. 152). Sirk’s own reflections on this aspect of the plot are in fact straightforward. He draws a clear dichotomy between ‘real life’ and the ‘imitation of life’ to which Sarah Jane is attracted. He puts it in the following terms: ‘the Negro girl [is] trying to escape her condition … and rather trying to vanish into the imitation world of vaudeville. The imitation of life is not the real life’, he continues, and he concludes that the difficulty of Sarah Jane’s position is that she ‘is choosing the imitation of life’ instead of the ‘real’ one (Halliday, p. 148). Sirk is thus adamant that Imitation of Life does not merely give us a vision of the world that is all imitation and inauthenticity but rather that it posits a clear distinction between modes of existence that are real and authentic, and those that are inauthentic imitations. I think the film, for the most part, bears out Sirk’s claims.
In the remainder of this essay I want to work through the opposition between the authentic and the inauthentic in Imitation of Life, especially as it is crystallized in the character of Sarah Jane. This further allows a distinction to be made between an authentic life on the one hand and the imitation of life that is associated thematically with the theatre on the other. It also allows some comments to be made on the cinema’s capacity to demonstrate genuine emotion insofar as, for Sirk, this is a specific achievement of the cinema that separates it from the theatre. Finally, the slippage and instability of the supposed opposition between ‘emotional manipulation’ and ‘ironic distanciation’ can be clarified.
My analysis concentrates on three sequences from Imitation of Life; in each, Sarah Jane declares her love for her mother. The scenes are important because they are the only ones in which Sarah Jane exhibits emotions that can be considered genuine or authentic. In short, these are just about the only moments in which she refrains from ‘putting on an act’. These are the only moments of the film when she breaks through the barrier of pretence and lying. Here, she experiences something that approaches ‘real life’ rather than its imitation.
First of all, in what is probably the film’s most famous sequence: Annie’s funeral. Sarah Jane is awash with tears as she falls upon her mother’s coffin. For her whole life she had rejected and tried to escape from her mother whereas now it is as if she has come to realization of the deep and genuine love she truly had for her. She breaks down and weeps in a display of authentic emotion and genuine affection. This is a moment in the film when the spectator is urged to consider that Sarah Jane’s words – ‘Mama, I did love you’ – are an expression of her true feelings. By uttering these words and acknowledging her love for her mother Sarah Jane is effectively renouncing all of the attempts she has made to escape from her. With this admission of her love she is thus rejecting all that had been a part of her ‘imitation of life’: her attempts to ‘pass’ as white, her attempts to discover independence in theatrical vaudeville shows.
One writer, writing in the 1980s, argues that this scene is ‘poignant’, ‘almost unbearably moving’ and that it has a definitive result: ‘The spectator is in tears’ (Neale, p. 19). The spectator, I would argue, can only be moved to tears here if they recognize the authentic nature of Sarah Jane’s emotional display. By crying at this moment the spectator is acknowledging the authenticity of Sarah Jane’s statement of love, and by considering this an authentic gesture the spectator is thereby also recognizing the inauthenticity of Sarah Jane’s attempts to escape into the false world of the vaudeville theatre. Such is the Sirkian system: the inauthentic is held up against the authentic.
There are two other occasions during the film when Sarah Jane declares her love for her mother. The first of these occurs immediately following one of the film’s most provocative incidents. While hosting a small dinner party Lora asks Sarah Jane to help serve some food to the guests. Sarah Jane is contemptuously insulted by the request and proceeds to serve the food in a mock imitation of a southern black servant. Once again, then, Sarah Jane gives herself over to an imitation of life, although this time she is duplicating ‘blackness’ instead of trying to ‘pass’ for white.
She immediately realizes the insensitivity of her actions (though Lora fails to recognize the insensitivity of her own request). A puzzled expression crosses Sarah Jane’s face, a furrowing of the brow which suggests a call to conscience: when all is said and done, she realizes Lora did not deserve to be treated in such a way, that her ‘imitation’ of blackness was a cruel projection of her own insecurities. She turns to her mother and apologizes for her actions. ‘I love you’, she says, as she hugs her mother gently. Once again, the distinction between genuine actions and ‘putting on an act’ is made clear.
Finally, in one of the film’s most moving sequences, Sarah Jane again confesses her love for her mother. After once more escaping from her clutches, Sarah Jane’s mother nevertheless tracks her down declaring that this is last time she will do so. Sarah Jane is irate and asks Annie to leave. She even requests that if they should ever happen to see each other again that they refrain from acknowledging one another. Annie declares that she understands and even sympathizes with Sarah Jane’s wishes; she now just wants to say goodbye and hold her ‘baby’ in her arms one last time. They do hug, and the hug breaks through Sarah Jane’s façade. Her face assumes the same furrowed expression that had previously denoted a call to conscience. ‘I love you, Mama’, she tearfully admits. Again, the genuine emotion expressed by these words exposes the fraudulence of the actions that had preceded them and the pretension of Sarah Jane’s escape into the vaudeville world of imitation. In Sirk’s world, the division between the authentic and the inauthentic is crystal clear.
These three scenes thus demonstrate the way that Imitation of Life is based upon the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity. Perhaps it could be argued that Sarah Jane reaches a realization similar to that of Terry in On the Waterfront: at the end of the film she finally comes to understand that all her attempts to escape into the world of the theatre and its imitations of life have resulted in little but unhappiness and despair (or even death itself: ‘I killed my mother’, she sobs at the funeral procession).
Imitation of Life presents a clear division between the authenticities of ‘real life’ in opposition to the inauthentic modes of life’s imitations. At the same time, however, and in a way that is contrary to the kinds of lessons one acquires from Kazan’s films, understanding and recognizing the split between the authentic and the inauthentic in Sirk does not lead to resolution. Sarah Jane’s realization that she loved her mother after all does not then mean that she, or the viewers of the film, are left with a happy ending. Her acknowledgment can only exacerbate her despair. Resolution in Sirk’s cinema cannot occur solely on the basis of a character’s discovery of how to be ‘true to oneself’. Rather, any way out of the delusions of inauthenticity can only be possible if one is both true to oneself and true to others at the same time as others also develop a capacity to be true to themselves. Sarah Jane’s self-knowledge is of little use if that means her only option is to accept her black heritage and thus to look forward to a future in which she is cruelly exploited as a member of a second-class race (the horrific consequences of black exclusion and denunciation remains one of the film’s strongest points). And nor is her action of embracing Lora at the end of the film and becoming part of her family again, as the film’s ending suggests, any kind of resolution if Lora continues to deceive herself and be deluded by her own theatrical aspirations. The lack of resolution in Imitation of Life is therefore a product of the inauthenticity of the social, of the inability for the protagonists to mutually recognize or acknowledge one another.
For Sirk, the inauthentic is aligned with the theatre, while for Kazan the theatre gives rise to authenticity. For Kazan, faith in the theatre and its Method provide the bedrock from which authentic actions can be judged. For Sirk, on the other hand, the theatre provides only possibilities for self-delusion, inauthenticity and escape. The search for authenticity – and the possibility of turning one’s back on the theatre – becomes a difficult if not impossible task in Sirk’s films.
It can be argued, however, that the display of genuine emotion is a distinctive quality of the cinema, at least from Sirk’s perspective. The distinctiveness of Sarah Jane’s ‘call to conscience’ in the scenes I have described, make for exceptional filmic moments. Perhaps this achievement is nothing less and nothing more than the camera’s ability to get close to its subjects in ways that are unavailable to the theatre. By way of the camera, audiences can see a character’s tears, their minor gesticulations, their sorrow and joy.
But even if the cinema has the ability to exhibit close moments of genuine emotion – of authenticity – then even this is no guarantee of resolution or reconciliation: Sirk is certainly not proposing any kind of triumph of cinema over theatre. In Imitation of Life Lora does indeed make a move from theatre into film acting, but if the world of the theatre is deemed inauthentic then her entry into the world of film offers no instantaneous authenticity. Even at the end of the film, when Annie is on her deathbed, Lora’s startled cry reeks of inauthenticity (Sirk considers this one of the high ironic points of the film) (Halliday, p. 153). Lora’s inability to distinguish real life from its imitations continues unabated.
Ultimately, however, to understand what Imitation of Life is trying to do audiences have to trust in its distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, between its evocations of real life and its manifestations of life’s imitations. The evocations of real life rely on emotional manipulation – the emotion of motion pictures. It is only by way of these moments of intense emotional involvement that the moments of authenticity in the film can be distinguished from those of pretence. And it is the moments of pretence, of escaping into falsifying theatres of one form or another, that Sirk is holding up for criticism. Finally, that is what is produced by Sirkian ‘ironic distanciation’: an acknowledgment of the inauthentic imitation of life.
Works Cited
J. Copjec, ‘The Invention of Crying and the Antitheatrics of the Act’, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, MIT Press: Cambridge, 2002.
B. Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk, Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995.
J. Halliday, Sirk on Sirk: Conversations with Jon Halliday, Faber and Faber: London, 1997.
S. Neale, ‘Melodrama and Tears’, Screen, vol. 27, no. 6, 1986.
Endnotes
[1]
‘Imitation of Life’, Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1959, p. 55, quoted in Klinger, op. cit, p. 78.
[2] Such a position might be contrasted with the place of theatre in the films of Jean Renoir. The theatre in Renoir’s films is a place of experimentation and self-discovery, a place where one can try out roles in order to see whether they ‘fit’, and ultimately, by passing through the theatre one gains self-knowledge and self-awareness. This theme is certainly implicit in The Rules of the Game (1939) and is explicit in The Golden Coach(1953), made in the same year as All I Desire. Renoir’s position, in this way, might be seen as something of an opposite to Sirk’s.
Created on: Tuesday, 19 June 2007