Imitation of Life

(Caution, spoilers follow.)

In my film class this past week we watched a 1950's woman's picture/social problem/tear-jerker film called Imitation of Life. I just wanted to say that this is one of those films where the movie poster got me really excited to watch it for some odd reason (see: Shadow of a Doubt, my Vertigo wallpaper), except that in this case the movie didn't quite... reflect the poster? I kinda noticed this in the other promotional images for this movie as well; it kinda portrays this image of the movie being about Lana Turner's character turning into some kind of vain star who drives her friends and family away from her.

Technically this is somewhat true- except that Turner's character didn't strike me as obviously vain as the poster makes her look. She still loves her daughter and tries to become better and all. In reality, the main plot of the movie is undercut by its holy-crap-it-made-me-cry subplot, to which the bottom right corner of the poster is devoted. The subplot follows the light-complexioned daughter of Turner's black nanny, Sarah Jane Johnson, and her attempts to reject her cultural heritage and pass as a white girl in a pre-Civil Rights Movement world. Which causes a lot of grief and heartbreak for the girl's mother, to the extent that the scenes involving the two of them made my heart wither inside.

What got me the most was one of the last scenes where Annie (the nanny) says goodbye to her daughter.

Annie[hugging Sarah Jane]: Oh, Sarah Jane. Oh, my baby! My beautiful, beautiful baby!

Annie: I love you so much. Nothin' you ever do can stop that.

Something about that scene just... I dunno. Maybe it's just Annie's unconditional love for her daughter. That girl totally didn't deserve anything after how much she'd been a jerk to her mom the whole movie, but even after her daughter ran away from her and continued to reject her, Annie still chose to love her daughter, even though the whole process started to kill her from the inside...

It's kinda like the story of the Prodigal Son, now that I think about it. Except it doesn't quite end as well as the Prodigal Son does. What happens when the son comes home and there's no father there to welcome him back? That is Imitation of Life.

:(

One interesting thing my professor pointed out - if you want a measure of how... misogynistic? or male-centered? a movie is, look at how many female main characters it has, and if there's more than one, whether or not they interact with each other or if they just interact with the male characters. Something I never thought about before.

[In other news, I finally beat the damn user-tweaked Protoss AI! But now I suck at TerranvTerran. And I'm probably going to add SC2 to my game ban now.]