Reading Camp: Imitation of Life

Imitation of Life
Imitation world of vaudeville

by Richard Henke

from Jump Cut, no. 39, June 1994, pp. 31-39
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1994, 2006

In the much discussed final scene of Douglas Sirk's IMITATION OF LIFE (1959), Sara Jane Johnson (Susan Kohner) breaks through the crowd watching an extravagant funeral procession, pushes aside a policeman, and pulls open the doors of a horse-drawn hearse, crying, "I have killed my mother." The pathos of this moment depends upon the fact that Sara Jane is now too late to he reconciled with her mother, entombed in a space that the daughter cannot reach. This image is powerful because it makes emblematic what the film has thematically explored: the ways women are imprisoned and alienated, both in terms of gender and race.

Sara Jane herself becomes the paramount example of this, as she challenges the limitations of' her identity. Refusing to he either a proper lady or a proper black, Sara Jane throughout the film enacts a series of "imitations," or what we might more generously call self-fashionings. For instance, her radically disparate impersonations of a rich WASP for her white boyfriend (Troy Donahue) and a sultry chanteuse for sleazy nightclub patrons may he interpreted as subversive parodies of the roles played less self-consciously by the other female characters in the film, the debutante, Susie (Sandra Dee) and the performer, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner). read more