Posts filed under 'Week 8 - Morrison'
Who doesn’t love going to the movies? One of the most moving scenes in The Bluest Eye is Pauline at the movies. Pauline Breedlove is sitting in her last refuge, the movie theater, with her hair all done up nicely and her nice clothes on, slipping from her heterotopia space into a purely Utopian space, when her tooth falls out. It crushes her and, as she says, she settles down to the business of being ugly. In terms of character development and motivation, I believe that this is one of the most defining scenes. In the last paragraph of his essay, Foucault writes that the “that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea..” (27) he continues on that these spaces are essential to human development. Pauline’s space is destroyed, and her dreams do dry up.
In her post, Jessica mentioned that she didn’t “buy [Foucault]’s discussion of cemeteries and their changing roles”, and while I sort of see where she’s coming from, one thing about this discussion that really intrigued me was its relation to the last few pages of The Bluest Eye and Pauline and Pecola’s move to the outskirts of town. Perhaps it’s simply narrowing his discussion to cemeteries that’s a problem. Foucault’s idea that death, diseases (and, in the case of Pecole, an unmentionable sin) must be moved away from the main living space to a heterotopia space lest it infect the entire town, resonates. He writes, “The dead, it is supposed, bring illness to the living, and it is the presence and proximity of the dead right beside the houses, next to the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is this proximity that propagates death itself (25).”
Pecole and Pauline are shunned by their communities through no fault of their own, but they are contaminated none the less and must be pushed out. Maybe not in a physical sense, but in a very emotional sense, they’re dead to the community. I don’t see any textual evidence that suggests that they were forced to move away, but it seems that Pauline might have done so willingly, to keep her heterotopic mirror spaces clean.
To continue this idea of Pauline’s space, I want to comment on Courtney’s post. Courtney wrote that “Pauline Breedlove, more than anyone, defines herself by space.” While I think that’s true, I think it’s more that Pauline allows spaces to define her. She’s unable to stay in that Utopian space of the movie theater and so sets about creating her own space, to compensate. Courtney goes to on to say that it’s Pauline’s work at the white household that gives her “a purpose and a drive” but I don’t really agree with that point. I feel that Pauline isn’t so much taking refuge in the work itself, but she is actively assembling a heterotopia of compensation (Foucault 27) in the other house. Pecola and Claudia’s arrival at her work is a clear sign that they are invading the space she so clearly makes for herself. She doesn’t even let Pecoal in the kitchen, but makes her wait outside. It isn’t that she doesn’t want Pecola messing up her employers house, she doesn’t want anyone invading her space/ Her own house offers her no refuge and so she sets about using the space that she has access to, to create a better world for herself.
October 18th, 2006
Fanon highlights the connections between the black identity politics and the body. He opens “The Fact of Blackness” by privileging sight in the relations of black identity politics; “look, a Negro” (109). In Fanon’s description of his encounter with the little boy his black skin creates a spectacle and he becomes a spectacle by extension because he is defined and identified by his skin. He points out that because the white black relations are based on sight, it’s the black skin that stands between the two racial groups; specifically, he says, “I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the idea that others have of me but of my own appearance” (116). He argues that his “recognition” (115) as a black man is determined by the outward manifestations of his blackness. Similarly, Simone deBeauvoir argues in The Second Sex that although the body is “the instrument of our grasp upon the world” (32) this is an insufficient explanation for why woman is the ‘Other’ (33). Like De Beauvoir, Fannon too shows the lack of reason in being judged by his external bodily appearance. Furthermore, he suggests that prejudice itself is a larger problem because the Jew, though visibly the same as white non-Jews, is still discriminated against. Beyond this, Fanon argues that it is not only black skin in and of itself that makes a black man black, but also he is black in his relations with and in relation to white society (110).
For Fanon race relations exist within a larger issue of rationality of assigning meaning, recognition, and status to the black population. He notes that although the black man is defined by his body, “he encounters difficulty in the development of his bodily schema…the body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty” (110-111). Fanon’s statement echoes DuBois’s double-consciousness. DuBois defines double-consciousness as “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (4). DuBois argues that because of double-consciousness, the African American struggles to “merge his double self into a better and truer self” (5). This struggle plays itself out in many of Morrison’s characters and in Imitation of Life with Peola’s insistence that she won’t be black. The disembodied ways in which all the texts represent the black body is also a reminder of double-consciousness. Disembodied identity and double-consciousness seem to come together in the object position black people hold. White society disembodies the black body, and as a result, the black body turns upon itself and engages in self-disembodiment and objectification. Fanon frequently mentions the object position he is fixed in. He makes a connection between white eyes, him being seen and being fixed. He says, “white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away slices of my reality” (116). Fanon’s words present a rationale for the black desire for blue eyes; blue eyes have power, subjectivity and authority to define, objectify and fix others. Fulfilling black desire for recognition in this way however does not erode the underlying inequality and prejudice, but rather takes place in what DeBeauvoir calls bad faith. Recognition is this way may actually perpetuate the underlying prejudice.
What does Fanon mean by making himself known (115)? How does he propose to do this? Is regression (123) his method and does this regression relate to violence that Fanon advocates in some of his other texts?
October 18th, 2006
I feel a little scattered with all I want to say this morning. Everyone’s done such a wonderful job of dissecting “Imitation of Life” so I won’t delve too deeply into it, although I agree with everyone else’s general reaction of “Ohhhh, I don’t like this.” I especially hated watching a black woman actively, happily participating in and reinforcing the discriminating stereotypes of African Americans. Really, I know it’s harsh, but Delilah infuriated me. I couldn’t stand that she wasn’t stronger, that she wouldn’t go out on her own when the business was booming, that she let her brat of a daughter disrespect and humiliate her, that she worked just as hard day in and day out as Bea but didn’t think she herself was worthy of a foot rub. I hate that she didn’t fight back against the suppressive ideology of larger society, the ideology that she can’t pinpoint and understand who’s at fault for when talking to Peola about being black. Debord says how “once ideology…finds itself legitimated in modern society universal abstraction and by the effective dictatorship of illusion, then it is no longer the voluntaristic struggle of the fragmentary, but rather its triumph” (213). Maybe what I hate most is that Delilah seems to allow this triumph without batting an eye.
Meanwhile, Du Bois writes about black men’s struggle to find an ideology of their own within the larger ideology of white society. (Or, at least, that’s how I interpreted it.) He writes how, “…this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,–has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation…”. This plays off of Althusser’s idea of how ideologies are essentially imaginary anyway. But, I wonder about this idea of “two unreconciled ideals.” I think Du Bois wants the two to reconcile, in whatever way possible. But, it also seems as though Du Bois is, on one hand, berating white society, calling the “American world” a “world which yields him [the black man] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (all sorts of Lacanian ideas of the mirror image here), while at the same time wanting the black man to be a part of this very world. Is this good, bad?
Or, perhaps more importantly, is it possible? Du Bois writes, “Work, culture, liberty,–all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race…in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic.” I don’t know what to do with this. On one hand, obviously, I think it’s a great, optimistic idea and would create a great little utopia, to use some Foucault terminology, in which we could all live happily ever after. However, if the black man “conforms” to the “ideals of the American Republic,” then hasn’t he let that ideology “triumph?” Is he giving in? Is he comprimising himself for social peace/harmony? At what point is conformity okay? Is it ever okay, and to what extent? Oh, so many questions!
On a broader scale, Du Bois’ piece and “Imitation of Life” left me humbled and saddened, kind of the way I feel any time I watch or read anything having to do with the Holocaust. I always experience these suffocating and frustating feelings of anger at the injustice of discrimination, the hatred and horror of mankind, and the reality that these extremes exist in the world and will continue to for, probably, the rest of my life. And then I’m left wondering, what role, if any, do I play, have I played, will I play in changing it all?
October 18th, 2006
I very much enjoyed Foucault’s theories on public versus private space. There is a certain mystique which surrounds his work in literary classes and, having never read him before, I was expecting getting through it to be like pulling teeth. I was surprised to see that his contentions were very interesting even if his phrasing was a bit muddled. He asserts “We do not live in a homogenous and empty space, but on the contrary, a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps fantasmatic as well” (Foucault, 23) I like Foucault’s reasoning that humanity orders and categorizes space to make sense of his world but I think he ignores one necessary (albeit negative) component to the allocation of space which is relevant to what we’re studying-Historically, part of the purpose of special allocation was to keep out people one believed to be unworthy, unintelligent or in other ways inferior. This brings to mind Frantz Fanon’s essay “The Fact of Blackness.”
Fanon states “In America, Negroes are segregated, in South America, Negroes are whipped in the streets, and Negro strikers are cut down by machine guns, in West Africa, the Negro is an animal. Where am I to be classified? Or, if you prefer, tucked away?” (Fanon, 115) This relegation to the margins that has been forced on black people by white society results in highly developed racial pigmentocracy among African Americans,(As with the case of Maureen Peal, the lighter one is, the better off they are.) it also causes problems with the development of the negro “body schema” or self image.
This idea of organizing space with the purpose of exclusion got me thinking about the characters in The Bluest Eye and how they respond to the environments in which they find themselves. What does the space in which they live and work mean to Morrison’s characters? Claudia and Frieda MacTeer have parents that love and care for them. The MacTeer’s are strict, but they provide structure and limits for their girls to grow to their potential. In contrast, home for Pecola Breedlove is an exercise in submission. There is no happiness in the walls of that tiny, freezing, house for Pecola. She endures the fighting of her parents and the perpetual absence of her brother without a word, consoling herself within the space of her dreams. She fixates on blue eyes because once she has them, she thinks that she’ll finally be beautiful and able to relate to the people in her life.
Pauline Breedlove though, more than anyone, defines herself by space. She feels no happiness in her own little house. The role of mother, for Pauline, is a cross to bear, rather than something to define herself by. The only spaces of contentment in Pauline’s life, as in front of a movie screen, or in the home of her white employer. Here, Pauline is affectionate, responsible and respected. Work gives her a purpose and a drive that she doesn’t feel at home because it defines her as a woman. Separate from the encumbrance of her alcoholic husband, her emotionally wounded daughter and her perpetually absent son. Work is the only arena of her life where she feels she has control.
Ok, enough for now, I look forward to discussing the role of space more in class.
Courtney Riley
October 18th, 2006
I enjoyed Foucault’s article, thought I think his introduction of the “complete” hierarchy of the Middle Ages was a bit too absolute (and this reflects other points of “absoluteness” that I felt should be taken with a grain of salt, though perhaps I’m just jealous of his authoritative voice). However, he does set up well for the point that Galileo begins to break down the medieval structure of “space.” The discussion of the problems of “storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements” made me think of the issues surrounding what has been called the “age of criticism,” our modern age. This applies especially to questions of the literary canon, which have always had to have been dealt with, but which have been more agonized over in the 20th Century, especially as concerns what the “American” canon (or any literary canon) should be. The formal and informal problems that face the structuring of the canon (what there will be “space” for) could even tie in to the idea that we have not, according to Foucault, entirely desanctified space, depending on what you consider the sanctifying factors to be. I would certainly consider the aspects that characterize different functions and meanings and “origins” in literary works to act, on whole, as part of a very heterogeneous space (for fun, wikipedia defines heterogeneous as a compound with many different parts that are “not easily separated, though they are clearly distinct”—perhaps this is what leads to frustration). This also parallels his discussion of museums and libraries as places of accumulation rather than of choice, though again, I think this breakdown of antiquity versus modern times could be interrogated.
I’m not sure I entirely buy his discussion of cemeteries and their changing roles. I mean, I agree that cemeteries are places that have changed in function as heterotopias as history has “unfolded;” I am just again unsure of his delineations of modern and “non-modern” modes, though his statements concerning Victorian thought are certainly correct. Maybe his argument is just too rushed for me. However, there are other moments that I am sure Foucault is speaking with an appropriate consciousness of the irony of his own “absolute” statements—as when he speaks (it seems to me) tongue in cheek when talking about the “perfection” of colonialization—for his purposes, it is enough that the ideologies of these projects were really only attempts at and failures at a kind of perfection, riddled with holes and probed in its own time and ours. Overall, I thought this article was rather ingenious in its main points, and I appreciated, even enjoyed the theoretical concepts of space that Foucault outlines. I just think, or am unsure what to think, about the issues I mentioned above—am I missing the tone of his voice, or do his discussions seem a little too pat in places where they should be more ambiguous, or at least more thoroughly complex? I’m really reaching with this post, but I think his article could bear some more discussion, especially if we want to apply it to some of the other readings (“flatly” or in more complex ways, as the case may be).
October 18th, 2006
This week left me with many mental ellipses and I can’t say I’ve had the time, after managing to get sick, to read through everyone’s posts yet this week, but from a quick perusal, I didn’t see many people commenting on “Of Our Own Spiritual Strivings.” I don’t know about everyone else, but I feel like I could write this entire post on Dubois’ first chapter; there were so many thought provoking ideas, I don’t know where to begin. I really thought about the idea of our society as “a world which yields…no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (Dubois 3). This idea seems, as it was undoubtedly intended, applicable to issues of race, but I couldn’t help but look at it from the perspective of any/all individual(s). How does each individual really view him/herself? Is it possible, I wondered, to really see oneself objectively or only through the eyes of others? If we can and do only see ourselves as we are reflected through others, then wouldn’t gender and racial inequality be even more detrimental that is typically accounted for? I wonder just how deep seeded “this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” can be? I wish I was able to come to some conclusions or ideas about Dubois’ piece, but I really just found myself coming up with more questions.
Imitation of Life totally freaked me out, by the way. It reminded me just how disturbing issues of inferiority/superiority can become when honed; how certain ideas were norms and various types of discrimination acceptable will never cease to astound me. That there was a time when certain aspects of racism were unquestionable is senseless; I wondered how many assumptions of deep seeded racisms we live with still on a day to day basis that we don’t even notice. It also reminded me so much of today’s debates on sexual preference, where so many people have no problem telling others that they are inferior. The nature of humans seems so obsessed with judgment and obsessed with unchanging views of right and wrong. The whole things just really bugs me. Seriously, it’s so discouraging to remember just how much some people can really suck.
One thing I felt unsure about was what Foucault describes as “heterotopias” (24-25); I thought the most interesting aspect of Foucault’s piece was the conceptual theories on space and time that frames his discussion. “In any case, I believe that the anxiety of our area has to do fundamentally with space,” Foucault writes early on in the piece (23). This brought to mind quite a few questions. I wondered how much something transparent/invisible/conceptual/fundamentally ignored plays a part in so much of our daily existence. It also brought to mind The Day of the Locust in which space really does, in hindsight, seem to play a major role in the lives of all the characters; Homer, particularly, separates himself from people repeatedly with physical space until the very end, where he closes that gap with violence. Even during his first real encounter with Tod, Homer runs away, and avoids physical contact because he is afraid of people invading his physical space; Homer’s first real physical encounter is sexual and an ambiguous failure, but the next time he dramatically closes the space gap by getting so close to someone, he physically hurts someone. I wondered what conclusions, if any, could come from this concept of space. I wonder if the physical space we create is parallel to the emotional space we are forced to create; if we do create this space, then would Foucault think that this space is ever necessary?
From there, though, I think some of the concepts were hard to get by in order to really embrace the ideas. I thought the idea that these heterotopias of crisis were replaced was really interesting, but the correlation between the heterotopias of crisis being replaced by deviation seemed overshadowed, for me, by the concept of “honeymoon trips” (Foucault 24). These honeymoon trips where these girls lost their virginity “nowhere,” and the place where this happened lapsed space and time seemed like such a mind boggling sentiment. Though I know it’s not necessarily the topic of this discussion, but there are various gender issues throughout The Bluest Eye that I don’t think I paid as much attention to as I should have. After reading Foucault, though, I wished I had been more aware of the gender roles found throughout as they related to race.
October 18th, 2006
“Once a pancake, always a pancake.” Wow. Wow. The weird thing is that the 1959 version seemed far worse. I know I shouldn’t comment on it, but the DVD I got from Netflix included both versions and I couldn’t help myself. And it certainly was a different take. Bea was a movie star who was selfish and often chose fame over her daughter, and Peola was Sara Jane, a girl who decided to become a gentleman’s club dancer and later a chorus girl when she runs away from herself instead of a shopgirl. The biggest change, though, was in Mammy. She decided to “let her daughter go.” The last time lil Sara jane left, Mammy went after her, but only to tell her she loved her and would let her go and pretend not to know her. Wow. She then pretended to be her daughter’s maid when a fellow chorus girl came into the room. I don’t know why- maybe it was because of my expectations of a movie made in the 30s versus one made in the late 50s, but it was much more excruciating to watch the more “modern” version. So excruciating that I had attempt to let off some steam on the blog.
As for the 30s version, I feel like a lot has already been said.
This is a small point, but for some reason I feel silenced by the double feature I just watched, so I’m stuck on the small stuff. Foucalt writes about retirement homes being “on the boderline between the heterotopia of crisis and the hetereotopia of deviation,” he writes of “our society where leisure is a rule, idleness is a sort of deviation” (25). I just really wanted to replace “leisure” with “youth” there. It seemed more accurate, but perhaps just an American slant.
Another part of Foucalt that caught my eye was the “famous” traveller’s bedrooms in South America and Brazil. He points out how the visitor is “absolutely a guest in transit” and “not really invited” because they are never allowed access to the family’s central living space. They can come and go anonymously. After watching both Imitation and Bright Eyes, I couldn’t help but equate such a room to servants quarters as opposed to (or in addition to) motels. Servants quarters are always in such a place as to make entry and exit from them possible without ever entering the “main” part of the home. The servants are invisible which I guess can be seen in two ways: they are free to be invisible from those they serve, i.e., come and go as they please, in a way, and those they serve are free to ignore the sight of their servants with the exception of when they serve.
After reading about utopias, I also wondered if perhaps the makers of Imitation believed themselves to be creating just such a space. Did they imagine themselves to be presenting “reality itself in its perfected form” with a loving, profitable, positive relationship between a black woman and a white woman? Or did they see themselves as creating heterotopias, space that were “simultaneously represented, contested and inverted” (24)?
October 17th, 2006
Everyone else in class seems more capable than I in dissecting the texts; I learn a lot from you all.
Foucault suggests that the ship is the heterotopia par excellence (27). (My ears perk up any time life on the sea is mentioned). His romanticizing of maritime culture is accurate; particularly when compared to the life of land lubbers. Battling the sea erases all prejudices; all persons are undeniably equal when Poseidon unleashes a storm on a ship. But I see the heterotopia par excellence is found elsewhere. A heterotopia is where all other real spaces are “simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (24). This describes the Internet (I think it is accurate to say that the internet qualifies as real space). The challenge with the internet is “what type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements would be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given end” (think medical records, retail statistics, profiling for official government programs) (23). And “Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space” (23). We are constantly reminded of processing speeds or frequencies (that is mega-hertz, giga-hertz) and these are a representation of time (actually time is the denominator: 1/seconds). Also, any Google search returns statistics on the search: Your search returned 2,984,234 results (this statistic is concerned with space) in .05 seconds (the associated time is merely a footnote). Many more connections support the Internet as the hetertopia par excellence.
The stereotypes in Imitation of Life are obvious and many. But the film still had more depth of meaning and ‘discussion’ than I expected from a 1930’s movie (of course, I have not seen many). Delilah openly questions who is to blame for the complicated race relations (she says, “it’s not the law.”). Steven, in his first scene, expresses his stereotype of business women, which Bea actually matches, but her independence is not negatively portrayed in the film.
The progression of living spaces in the film (old house, restaurant, mansion) do fit Foucault’s Fourth Principle (as Joe mentioned). The Fifth Principle (receive permission and make certain gestures to enter a space) also apply: persons must be announced when entering the large home, the doorbell must be rung, Elmer must stand in the doorway of the restaurant until invited in (because he is not a paying customer). The Second Principle (heterotopias function differently as history unfolds), in a way, applies to the billboard. At first, it is a novelty showing the up and coming product breaking into the baking supplies market. After the product is established, the numbers reach the many millions, and now the sign is re-affirming the quality/validity of the product (confirming its success is not a fluke). (I know this is a stretch, but it is all I could come up with for the Second Principle).
Peola’s otherness is most directly caused by her mother. Obviously, however, the current society is the main cause of her otherness. It is easier for Peola to disavow her mother than to rearrange the “real dialectic between my [Peola’s] body and the world” (Fanon 111). Fanon points out that “Consciousness of the body is solely a negative activity” (111). Bea recognizes that her feet are sore and Delilah messages them. Delilah looks forward to the day her body can rest and she eventually dies. Peola wants to be comfortable with herself and we are led to believe that she finally is comfortable (she goes back to a black school). In all cases, but most importantly with Peola, consciousness of the body is a “negative activity”. - Tim
October 17th, 2006
As Joe mentioned, the racially charged plots/moments/visual constructions in the film Imitation of Life seem almost too obvious to be worthy of any decoding. Yet I’m still tempted to venture an analysis of the title, even with the understanding that it could hardly claim to be exhaustive.
First of, at least a few “imitations” are not terribly hard to detect:
1. Bea “imitates” Delilah, by appropriating Delilah’s pancake recipe and black mammy image. Bea is the business owner but her business is called Aunt Delilah’s Pancake (first restaurant/shop, later, Corporation). By posing Delilah as a lovable mammy with a “big laugh,” Bea takes the position of Delilah and becomes the spokesperson for the pancake business. Delilah the stereotypically innocent and naïve black soul has willingly disowned her family-inherited secret recipe, letting Bea to take control in popularizing and profiting from the pancake powder on Delilah’s behalf.
2. Peola “imitates” Jessi, by envying and wanting to possess Jessi’s whiteness. An interesting parallel with the above “imitation” can be drawn here: just like her mother good-naturedly gives her recipe ownership to the white businesswomen Bea, Peola desperately wants to disown her black mother Delilah. In the first case, the black mammy by revealing the recipe allows the white lady to “pass” as black Aunt Delilah; in the second, the black girl by concealing the mother-daughter kinship relation wants to pass as a white lady, just like Jessi. Yet Peola is ultimately unsuccessful in her endeavor - while Bea can “own” Delilah through a “consensual” agreement, Peola cannot disown her mother, even at the latter’s death.
3. Jessi “imitates” Bea, in her love for Stephen Archer, in addition to her sense of fashion. It is certainly debatable whether the two could be the same kind of love. After all, it has only been five days since the teenager met Stephen, but her mother had been single for the longest time (fifteen years?) before finally letting herself to fall for the geeky ichthyologist. Yet “noble” Bea then decides to put off her romance for the sake of her daughter’s future, drawing another interesting contrast to Delilah’s obstinate refusal to let Peola “go white.”
Not surprisingly, Bea reminds me of the white woman for whom Pauline worked in The Bluest Eye. Given their race and class in that time of history, they feel that they can “direct” the black maids to good causes, whether it is leaving her man or sending her daughter to a black college in the South. Most disturbingly, they are not in a position to become aware of their own condescendence, as if they “had the right” to teach the black women how to live, by holding off the payment for Pauline, or by putting Delilah’s (only 20%!) of the profit in the bank. Where does this condescendence come from? It has for sure to do with the high-low social construction of class and race – and visually, if you recall the scene when after the party and foot massage, Bea goes upstairs and Delilah goes down (again, too obvious to even point out).
And just for the fun of it, some “imitations” in the male characters:
4. Stephen “imitates” fish, as he self-effacingly says “when one lives with fish for too long one becomes more like them” after he learned that Bea is the “pancake queen” whom he was formerly making fun of.
5. Elmer “imitates” lizard. That was just my impression watching his idiosyncratic, highly dramatic performance - always on guard, always angry, always ready to “bite.” (Didn’t Bea herself describe him as “a wonderful watch-dog?”)
Lastly, I want to note a bit on space/time and gender, in relation to Joe’s comment on Foucault, heterotopia, etc.. In this film, the passing of time is chiefly visualized in the changing of space, although verbal markers such as “five years” and “ten years’ anniversary” help to reinforce the idea. Interestingly, the girls by the changing of their actresses have grown up over “scenes”, but Bea has not appeared to be much older over the years, except for her attires and hairstyle. As a (Hollywood-constructed) grand object of desire, she “cannot” change, only her residential surroundings can. She will remain perfect and unobtainable (if not mystified), beautiful and smart, caring for her daughter as well as the “lower class/race.” Her daughter, and Delilah’s daughter, however, would have to grow into their “object” position so that they can be put into nice clothes and become ready for the gaze of their male escorts, customers, and viewers. (Even without invoking the Lacanian M(Other), this appears to be a rather crude gendered reading, I admit.)
October 17th, 2006
Well, I feel drained. The mid-term took it out of me, “Imitation of Life” was horrifying on many levels, and I feel poorly qualified to begin this discussion. But life is crazy Mon-Wed, so here we go.
Frantz Fanon: “I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance” (116).
Delilah lives and dies for Bea. She doesn’t want money or much to eat. She just wants to serve and have Bea think for her. Etc. Bea makes a pile of money off her labor and it’s fine. She is a “horse,” a “mountain-lion” and dumb as hell. Fine. Fine. Etc.
What is so disturbing here is that not only does this movie enforce a whole slew of racist stereotypes but it also documents the process of producing these stereotypes. Bea forces Delilah to smile, big, bigger–her eyes bulge, her mouth opens. Her face is made cartoonish. The camera clicks and this image is reproduced on a store sign, on pancake boxes, on billboards. There’s an irony here. How self-aware of this irony is the movie?
If this was the first major hollywood film to “give a black woman’s problems significant emotional weight,” it also enforced a tremendously naive, unproblematic view of the world and race relations. No characters here are racist in a negative way. Their racism ensures a mutually beneficial social heirarchy. It is only when one tries to disrupt this rigid social structure (Peola) that there are problems. If Peola represents the real dramatic problem of this movie by complicating binary conceptions of race, this problem is resolved by having her choose over and over one or the other.
This all seems very obvious (and inexact).
Foucault: “[Utopias] present society itself in a perfected form” (24); “the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space” (23).
Most of this movie takes place in 3 homes. The original house, the shop-house, the mansion. In each an ideal, unproblematic relation is enacted between Bea and Delilah. Delilah is the ideal housekeeper and worker in the first two. In the final, her role is more questionable. What does she do in that mansion? She seems to exist only as a sounding board for Bea. Her role here is dangerously ambigious, so she dies. Each space and the roles Bea and Delilah play within it, from the perspective of the ruling class, is a utopia–a social model to strive for. It seems significant that the scenes that take place outside of these domestic settings, aside from the funeral procession, are the most turbulent.
Lets not get into what the title implies or how gender plays into this. Or the heterotopia of the theatre. I’m having trouble saying anything useful or exact.
Fanon’s, at first, curious, nuerotic tone, seems all the more appropriate after viewing this movie. It’s all been said. The invention of race has been dismantled so many times. And yet it flies back together at the slightest inattention and one has to go through the same maddening mental exercises to dismantle it again. This is where “Imitation,” in its historic context, seems so devious. It says quit fighting over and over–racism works out just fine if we accept the social and economic roles assigned to each race.
October 16th, 2006
