Screenshot from Imitation of Life (1959). Source: IMBD
Another review from my days gone by as a student. Enjoy!
Does your mother figure drive you crazy? Do you miss her like hell? Grab the tissues and put her on speed dial, waterworks are imminent with Imitation of Life (1959). Douglas Sirk’s final film is an adaptation of the 1933 novel infused with female agency and glamor. It’s a sappy tale of the triumphs and tribulations of motherhood, pumped to the extreme in the candy-colored world of melodrama. But it pushes all its intended buttons and unashamedly taps into the family-career conflict in a bygone woman’s world.
The film presents two philosophies of motherhood and lets you decide who raised the best girl. Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) plays a widowed, wooden, wannabe Broadway star with little blonde Susie in tow (later played by teenage actress Sandra Dee). She meets Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), a black woman with a light-skinned daughter Sarah Jane (later played by teenage actress Susan Kohner). Lora and Annie embark on a mutually beneficial relationship: recently divorced and with nowhere to go, Annie readily jumps into the mammy stereotype so Lora can pursue her stage career full time. Annie eases Lora’s white guilt by expressing her happiness in forsaking her ambitions to provide for Sarah Jane, and the two women become close friends.
After a rocky, flea-powdered start, Lora navigates the Weinsteins of her world and becomes a successful stage actress. Sarah Jane continues to rebel against her identity, rejecting her black mother in favor of white men’s validation and suffering the consequences of her lies. Lora and Susie weep over their estrangement while Annie and Sarah Jane mourn the schism of racial tension in their lives, and the film ends with a lavish funeral and plenty of tears.
Sirk weaves together the well-known heartbreak moments in raising a child, generating a landscape of emotion both overwrought to the point of eye-rolling and universal in its ability to tear-jerk. All the tropes are there: Lora frantically searches for her lost daughter at the beach, Annie sacrifices her personal ambitions to provide a good life for Sarah Jane, Lora continues to choose career over family, missing the developments in her daughter’s romantic feelings and almost missing her graduation, Sarah Jane is abused by her boyfriend and flaunts her sexuality in rebellion before regretfully sobbing over her mother’s grave. It checks all the boxes of a “women’s film,” the precursor to the chick flick, intent on reflecting the multifaceted struggles of female existence. The ladies entertain and yearn and cry on cue, flouncing about in aggressive pastels to a blatantly emotional score.
But even to the casual viewer, Imitation of Life thankfully pulls itself out of the fluffy atmosphere of melodrama with occasional reprieves in the form of Sarah Jane, despite the narrative’s pull towards Lora’s story. As a light-skinned Black woman, Sarah Jane’s path is neither predetermined by her looks nor limitless in scope. She lives the sad irony of rejecting her source of life (i.e. her mother, Annie) to live the live that she wants, pouting and arguing her way through a world where neither race feels like home. Mirrors, a signature of Sirk’s work, serve an added meaning for Sarah Jane: her face is her ticket to the world of white privilege, so she is consumed by how the rest of the world perceives her.
Her ferocious quest to pass as white, and the constant suffering it inflicts on her sacrificial mother, dominates the heart of the narrative and throws the superficial plights of Lora and the other white characters into petty relief. While Susie whines about which doll she gets to play with, Sarah Jane tears her skin to investigate why she is treated differently when we all look the same inside. She white-washes herself to her classmates, teachers, boyfriend, and employers, and unlike Lora, a model of social mobility, Sarah Jane’s options are limited by her looks. Annie is stuck in the stereotype of the maid, the best friend, and the nanny, and when Sarah Jane saunters in carrying a plate and mimicking slave dialect to address this dynamic, both of her mother figures scold her for disrespecting Lora’s charity. The racial tensions add to the melodrama, yet they serve a larger function of elevating a sentimental sob story into a work of intrigue for both 1959 audiences and modern viewers.
Imitation of Life asks how to be a good mother, but it doesn’t give a clear answer. Lora chooses to live her dreams at the expense of being present for her family, and her only daughter feels disconnected enough to prioritize a college far from home. Annie sacrifices the little she has to provide a good life for Sarah Jane, yet her love and concern smothers her daughter and pushes her to the other side of the country. Annie dies feeling like a failed mom. Maybe there isn’t a superior parenting style; maybe the crazy counterculture kids of the 1960s are too willful to parent either way. Or maybe good melodrama doesn’t have a happy ending, and we were foolish to think it would when we decided to watch it.
This story is unabashedly a woman’s story. The men are practically interchangeable, either charmingly harmless or exploitive and business-oriented. All the central characters are female, and the (white) women get their way by lying, speaking out, or playing hard to get with the men. Despite the film’s flashy posters of Lana Turner and her male lovers, however, this is a black woman’s story. Sirk sprinkles Imitation of Life with a cheesy script and absurd white decadence while layering issues of race, class, and gender into his tale, creating a world we are meant to scoff at loudly and sniffle at quietly.