Imitation of Life

Whereas a chamber ensemble was previously enough for Sirk, he brought a full symphony orchestra into his last American film. Imitation of Life is to classic melodrama roughly what The Searchers is to classic westerns. Crisis follows crisis, men dictate the roles women are supposed to play (sometimes literally), mothers suffer, daughters hate them, and bedposts are by far the most well-worn objects in bedrooms. If the film contains even more emblems of the genre, watching it becomes a health hazard. It is primarily a colourful textbook on how to use Hollywood style to deliver subversive messages (which resonate much longer than the explicit messages of thesis-based “films about problems”). Sirk supplemented the traditional dyad of class and gender incompatibility with the theme of racial differences. Whereas, thanks to career advancement, a white mother can give her daughter everything except maternal love, we can see in the relationship between a black mother and her daughter that the greatest maternal love is not enough in a socially unequal society. The first woman loses her daughter’s favour due to her own self-realisation; the extreme selflessness of the other woman, whose skin colour prevents her from achieving self-realisation, causes her daughter – who denies her own racial origin – to turn away from her. Both paths – career-focused and family-focused – are dead ends. Each storyline sceptically complements the other wherever a sign of hope appears. The result is a maximally disillusioning picture of a society that survives thanks only to a misguided perception of its own strength and invincibility. At the time, radical social changes, for which Imitation of Life could easily serve as a modest model in an alternate universe, were only a few years away. 90% (29/11/2012)