Douglas Sirk | Imitation of Life / 1959

imitations of art

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eleanor Griffin and Allan Scott (screenplay, based on a novel by Fannie Hurst), Douglas Sirk (director) Imitation of Life / 1959

                                                                                                

On August 21 of this year, 2009, I attended the 50th anniversary showing of Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life. At the Samuel Goldwyn Theater of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, the audience was also treated to a special interview of the remaining living major cast members, Juanita Moore (who plays Annie Johnson) and Susan Kohner (who played Annie's daughter, Sarah Jane) by Susan Kohner's son Paul Weitz and film critic Stephen Farber.*

     Although I had previously seen the film several times on television, I'd never before seen it on a large screen, which is truly necessary for this highly color-saturated and artificed film.

    Behind my interest in seeing this movie were several pieces written in 2008 and 2009 by then-sixteen-year-old Felix Bernstein on various aspects of artifice in film and theater and, in particular, a brief discussion of the camp elements in Sirk's works. Just a few weeks earlier, I had also caught a television showing of the 2002 film, Far from Heaven, a film (on which I write in these volumes) that is an homage to many of Sirk's films and cinematography. In the end, I realized that all of these coincidences had led up a to necessity to write on this movie and its effects.

     Certainly, as many have, one could begin by describing Sirk's Imitation of Life as a soap-opera, or—with another kind of backhand dismissal of the work—as a "woman's picture." In introducing the film to the audience of 1000 viewers, Farber himself, while clearly an admirer of the film, admitted to some terribly clichéd moments of the work, particularly in Sirk's montage of the passing years of Lora Meredith's (Lana Turner) career.

     To my way of thinking, however, to use these adjectives is to miss the point. For the film is not simply a tearjerker or even a slightly over-the-top portrait of a woman determined to have a career, but is an intentional—if artful—presentation of the American dream as kitsch.

     I have never been able to comprehend the great attraction of so many directors to the vague acting skills of Lana Turner, but Sirk knows a woman determined to be a star when he sees her, and uses Turner's exaggerated posturings to their best effect. In the interview after this film's showing, Juanita Moore revealed that Lana spent much of every morning with her discussing the events of Turner's 14-year-old daughter's murder of Johnny Stompanato, Turner's lover, the actress often breaking down in tears. It is clear that Sirk could not have found a more vulnerable and over-wrought figure for his purposes.   

      Lora Meredith is a woman with a young daughter, surviving on the pittance she makes from labeling envelopes, who by accident meets Annie Jackson (a woman Moore herself described as little more than a Black mammy) with Jackson's daughter in tow at Coney Island. Even worse off than Meredith and her daughter, Jackson and Sarah Jane have come to the end their resources, without even a place to sleep. Jackson craftily negotiates a bed in the Meredith flat in return for all the services of a maid, and, in the process, quickly insinuates herself and daughter into their household.

     Meanwhile, would-be photographer Steve Archer (John Gavin), who Meredith also met at Coney Island, has fallen in love with the Turner character: "My camera could easily have a love affair with you." Archer is even willing to go to work at an advertising company to support Meredith. But she, we quickly discover, is utterly determined to become an actress, despite the fact she is no ingénue. At the very moment that Archer attempts to propose, Meredith receives a telephone call, promising her a career. In response to his demands that she return to reality, Meredith summarizes her position and the film's often absurd dialogue: "Well, I'm going up and up and up—and nobody's going to pull me down!" In short, as Fanny Brice might express it, “Don’t rain on my parade.”

     Indeed, like some rising balloon, Meredith quickly floats away from her moorings, and, as any reader of popular fiction might predict, ultimately loses touch with her daughter Susie (Sandra Dee) and her servant-confidant-friend Jackson. Time and again Archer is sent away—indeed the platinum-haired Meredith appears to have become a celibate devoted only to stage and film—and Susie is given "things" instead of love.

     If the movie stopped here we might easily describe it simply as a soap-opera. But although Sirk pretends to center the work on the achievements of his star and on the success of those for whom the American dream might be possible, his camera and the script focus instead on the "back" story of the black mother and daughter living in her house. Although Annie Jackson has long acclimated herself to a menial and forbearing life, her light-skinned daughter is as determined as Meredith to achieve the American dream, even if it means giving up her own identity and becoming white. While the white figures in the film seem almost oblivious to problems faced by Jackson and Sarah Jane, Annie herself knows them all too well. In response to Meredith's dismissal of Sarah Jane's attitude, Annie replies: Miss Lora, you don't know what it means to be...different..." At another point she summarizes: "How do you tell a child that she was born to be hurt?" That "hurt" is witnessed time and time again in this film, as Sarah Jane is beaten by her racist boyfriend (played by Troy Donahue) and turned away from all her jobs the moment she is discovered to have black blood.

     While Meredith accumulates, Annie, it is apparent, becomes more and more giving until she has little left to give except her own life. In those humane actions she becomes the only real figure in the film. The title may have you believe that the characters are "imitating life," but their true actions are even more perverted, as one by one they attempt to imitate "art." Just as the film intentionally pushes the limits of its own credibility, so do they seek out worlds that cannot and do not exist. Lora may have become a "star," but we recognize, precisely in Sirk's montage of stage titles that her string of hits has all the craft of the mediocre plays of Margo's in All About Eve or of Auntie Mame's Midsummer Madness. Archer seeks to become a great photographer, but ends up as an advertising executive. Sarah Jane finds a career as a cheap singer and dancer in dives and supper clubs. Susie imagines herself having a relationship with a man twice her age (Archer). Through his use of popular clichés Sirk reveals that the dreams of this all-white world are also outrageously kitsch. When art becomes a kind of commodity, a symbol of a desirable something missing in life, there is little chance of normality.

      The movie ends with another vision of art, with Jackson's theatrical funeral, attended by the numerous friends and admirers who Meredith could not even imagine existed. Decked out with a great singer (Mahalia Jackson), a band, and a hearse pulled by four white horses, Annie's funeral—an event created by Annie herself—is a fuller artistic realization than any of the performances or activities of the other characters. And that creation points not to art, but to another kind of eternal life.   

 

*Moore died at the age of 99 in 2014. Already when I saw here in 2009, her memory of perhaps her knowledge of the director and his milieu was slipping a bit, as she described the German-born Sirk as a Southern gentleman, who, she claimed, had no little recognition about the racist content of his film.  

    

Los Angeles, August 22, 2009

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2009).