‘Imitation of Life’ or — Piercing the Obscuring Artifice?
The opening credits are throbbing with meaning (but, then again, nobody knew how to do opening credits that throbbed with meaning quite like Douglas Sirk) as countless glistening jewels fall like tears against a black velvet background until they obscure our vision while Earl Grant softly croons “Without love you’re only living an imitation, an imitation of life.” Are these gems real? Does it matter? Or is Sirk asking us to see beyond any obvious veil of artifice to glimpse another meaning?
These countless jewels then morph into countless humans at the beach and then to a mother who’s lost her child among this mass of people. The mother is Lora (Lana Turner) and her daughter is Susie, now being taken care of by the kindly Annie (Juanita Moore). Annie also has a daughter, Sarah Jane, although Lora doesn’t realise this at first as Annie is African- American whilst Sarah Jane can pass for white.
Annie needs a job. Lora, a struggling actress and single mother, needs help at home so Annie and Sarah Jane move in with Lora and Susie and it’s not long until this unconventional family unit bonds… or, at least, appears to do so.
For the first half I kept asking myself — “What is this film about?” Initially it appears be focused on Lora’s career, but it’s not about that. Is it about her somewhat flighty love affair with Steve (John Gavin), a man as inert as that giant Ayn Randian head sitting on his desk? Nope, because Steve quickly becomes almost irrelevant (he does have an impact on the narrative later but it’s one he’s completely oblivious of and only achieves by accident). So where’s the drama? There are a few early signs — Sarah Jane discarding a black doll the way she’s attempting to drop her identity; Lora’s lecherous agent with the butter-smooth voice — but she’s still only a child and the agent happily withdraws his advances when spurned.
It feels deliberate because this apparent absence of conflict is reflected in Sirk’s use of colour, the visual palette consisting of muted greys, stable bronzes, warm hazels. For Sirk this is all remarkably, even suspiciously, restrained.
Then a ten year time jump occurs.
Lora is now rich and famous, Annie deftly controls the domestic arena and the daughters have grown into Sandra Dee and Susan Kohner. All cosy shabbiness has been blasted away by an isolating International Style modernity of dazzling whites and pubescent pinks (later in the film, during a musical number, there’s the most astonishing use of turquoise I’ve ever beheld). And Steve’s back on the scene! Everything is ludicrously perfect… and that’s also when everything gets ludicrously complicated.
Susie resents Lora for being absent. Sarah Jane resents Annie for her overbearing love. Susie is falling for Steve and Steve pretends not to notice. Sarah Jane starts sneaking out at night to see her white boyfriend. Susie is desperately trying to bond with her mother but Lora, now able to afford sparkling necklaces, is so remote, distant and glittering that Susie might as well be attempting to communicate with an orbiting satellite array. We also realise Lora doesn’t really know Annie at all.
When an inevitable moment of crisis happens it’s brutal and shocking. Just before it occurs we see Sarah Jane’s reflection in a window, a projection of her false self, only for her real self to be left bloodied in the gutter (our self-generated attempts at protection cannot save us). It’s sickening but it’s not so much the beating that contains the real gut-churning power but the image it cuts to next (I’m amazed Sirk didn’t use one of his famous fades for it) jumping from a weeping girl lying in a puddle to Lora reclining on her sofa dressed in pink and having her feet pampered by the battered girl’s oblivious mother. Violence, of many forms, isn’t just perpetrated by a single, racist brute but by an entire system and the American system has always been a target of Sirk’s. “Be yourself!” society instructs us, “But make sure you conform… or else!” We’re not so much dealing with the failings and flaws of individual people but the limitations of being human within such a set of contradictions and how a certain level of pretence demanded by the system is practically inescapable.
It’s why when Annie holds her daughter (and as she does Sirk starts raining jewels down the screen agai… oh no, those are my tears) before pretending to be her nanny is so emotionally devastating because although Annie is emphatically right in that you can’t live your life as a lie we can still understand Sarah Jane’s actions, even if we don’t agree with them. Then the opening song’s lyrics — “without love you’re only living an imitation of life” — come back to haunt us as we realise the film’s only truly authentic and loving person is going to be destroyed.
When that authentic love is finally recognised it is too late and we feel Sirk obliterating our hearts the way Peter Cushing obliterated Alderaan.
But again, we sense that Sirkian irony which causes his endings to bristle with such savagely contrasting ambiguity, and this one’s no different. Have they just said a touching farewell to a dear friend or has the only impediment to all-white happiness, along with Sarah Jane’s last barrier to a state of irreversible imitation, finally been taken care of?
Jewels start raining down the screen again but it doesn’t matter if they’re real or not, because our tears most certainly are.
