This is an entry for “Cry Me a River,” the CMBA 2025 Spring Blogathon.
Note: If you’re new to Imitation of Life, you might want to start with a viewing or by reading some other more general pieces. I don’t want to spoil any of it for you. But the rest of you come on in, the water’s fine.
“Imitation of Life” obviously refers to Sarah Jane’s passing for white. That’s its marquee meaning. But it also refers to Lora Meredith’s career choice and her inability to separate reality from acting (per Turner’s daughter, Lana herself had started to have trouble keeping these straight offscreen).
It has other clear meanings as well: Annie’s worldview, forged in her struggle to simply survive, in which the world is in no way negotiable, is also an imitation of life because it is closed, airless, it can never grow or change. The only glory, the only relief from her endless servitude and work is death. That’s why she lavishes such attention on imagining her own funeral.
For Annie, there is no possible life available to anyone who isn’t white beyond the one she has toiled so relentlessly to achieve. Annie can’t imagine any life for Sarah Jane that is bigger, less fearfully constrained, than the one she herself has achieved as Miss Lora’s friend, comforter, housekeeper, foot massager, and surrogate mother to Lora’s neglected daughter, Suzie, who gets Annie as the calm, wise mother Sarah Jane can’t have bc Annie must prepare her for her inescapable life of hurt. It’s also true that Annie has unconsciously burdened Sarah Jane with all the anger she herself is not permitted in her persona of endless self-sacrifice, and seeing the anger in her daughter brings out her sterner self rather than the tender understanding and guidance Sarah Jane is going mad for lack of.
These days John Stahl’s 1934 version seems more popular than Douglas Sirk’s 1959 one, and it is a very interesting film in its own right. Comparing the two treatments of Fannie Hurst’s source novel offers striking contrasts of the culture of their two eras.
But I got my hands full with the 1959 version, a movie crammed with so much it’s a mess, a trove of Sirkian ironies and unbridgeable rifts between reality and the will of its characters. In particular I’m drawn to Sarah Jane, the movie’s designated problem.
What’s the matter with Sarah Jane? She’s a light-skinned black girl understandably baffled and hurt by the racism she sees, feels, experiences. She is also the daughter of a father who abandoned her mother before she was born, and they are one bad night from sleeping on the street. Sarah Jane needs all kinds of support and understanding. She is in trouble, but she is not the trouble.
However, her saintly mother and the rest of her accidental family are completely blind to her suffering. When she presents it to them, they instantly turn it back on her, insisting they don’t treat her as different (not true, but certainly they are not overtly or intentionally racist or cruel). When she tries to make them see, the door instantly slams the second they’ve reupped her guilt for even thinking they could be anything but irreproachable—which means she must be nuts. It’s a rhetorical trap: she never said they were the problem, but when they insist she’s wrong to say they are, she gets spun up in guilt and can’t reclaim her focus. Again they’ve succeeded in the moment by making it about them, the innocent, when she was trying so hard to be seen herself, to make them acknowledge her own predicament.
So what is she left with? If it’s not them, and if they firmly refuse to even consider her feelings and experience, they must be right—she’s the problem. I think this is why the life she creates for herself is so cheap and dreary: Sarah Jane feels wrong, all wrong, and even when she’s living her sad dream of passing it’s not a good life, it’s being a stripper or at best a showgirl in a revue, cartoonishly posing through a suggestive routine while the middle-aged clientele ogle her. These are the guys she goes out with after work. Is there any path to a sane, real life here? Nah. But if you’re as damaged as Sarah Jane believes herself to be—first by her race, second by her badness in rejecting her martyred mother and the life she forces Sarah Jane into, it’s as high as you dare aim.
It’s important to understand that Annie is completely unconscious of all this, that neither she nor Miss Lora would ever do anything to hurt their daughters. Like most of us, Annie is doing the best she can to play the hand she was dealt without being able to see most of the cards. By the time she realizes this isn’t just about Sarah Jane being difficult, that she has contributed to the situation even though she doesn’t understand how, it is too late. She has lost her daughter and her will to live.
The parallel between Miss Lora and Annie isn’t all that obvious but very much present. Both are trapped in an airless dream that runs their lives, and neither shows an iota of self-awareness. Throughout the movie, when anything problematic happens to one of them or the girls, the other one says something like “I’m sure it will all work out,” with a smile. They both skate away from reality with grace and ease.
Lora is dead set on becoming not just an actress but a STAR!—sure she’s starting late, but she believes in her talent and refuses to accept any facts that might interfere with her deep need to live out a particular success story. She’s bizarrely naive, as shocked as a schoolgirl when her sleazy new agent tells her the score re casting couches, surely a subject that would have arisen among her aspiring thespian friends at their drugstore hangout on Eighth Avenue. But nothing is going to stop her, and she will win it all: applause, love, a country home and endless beautiful clothes…Suzie will go to the finest schools and have the thoroughbred she covets. All of these things she achieves, and she loves them. It seems she is blissfully unaware of her own epic insensitivity to both Annie and Suzie, and of course Sarah Jane.
My favorite example of Miss Lora’s obliviousness to her nearest and dearest is toward the movie’s end, while Sarah Jane is in the village meeting her white boyfriend, who slaps her around in an alley because he’s found out her secret. We come in on Miss Lora and Annie in Lora’s master bedroom suite, Lora in one of the many Jean-Louis outfits she glides through the movie in. Annie sits across from her, giving Lora a foot massage. The foot massage thing goes back to Fannie Hurt’s source novel, where Delilah does the same for her friend and boss. Goes without saying Miss Lora doesn’t massage Annie’s feet, and if she ever offered to Annie would be mortified. They speak of how much they’ve been through together, and marvel that their little girls are all grown up. Annie mentions she’s well-fixed financially, thanks to Miss Lora, and that she’ll use her savings to send Sarah Jane to college (a black teachers’ college; Sarah Jane later says she wouldn’t be caught dead there), leave her something, and spend the rest on her funeral. “That funeral, again!” Lora says. Annie says it’s her one big splurge, how she knows just how she wants it done, it’s all written down, and the friends she wants invited.
Lora stands up, surprised, and says, “Why Annie, I didn’t know you had friends!”
Annie says she knows hundreds of people, from her church and the several lodges she belongs to.
Lora says, “I had no idea.”
Annie smilingly replies, “Miss Lora, you never asked.”
They’ve lived together in the same house for 11 years, and it never occurred to Miss Lora that Annie had any life beyond taking care of her and Suzie.
Annie has carved out a cramped place for herself in a hostile world. she is relentlessly cheerful, helpful, tirelessly working for the comfort of others (except Sarah Jane, who she sees as an extension of herself). She twinkles all the time, it’s irresistible. She asks almost nothing—no need to pay her! just a few square feet in a small storage room for her and Sarah Jane to sleep in. “Why do we always have sleep in the back?” Sarah Jane cries, but Annie shushes her. Annie is as determined in her ambition as Lora. Lora’s will compels her to strive ever upward, while Annie’s demands that she never stray from her chosen persona and role.
Annie is beloved by everyone, yet one more thing that isolates Sarah Jane, who has to carry all the rage Annie has forsworn. Annie has no idea the anger she has denied lives in Sarah Jane, and perhaps that’s another reason for Annie’s somewhat harsh treatment of her. Annie can’t carry the anger within her closed system, where there is simply no “negative” feeling allowed, and to her Sarah Jane exists within that closed system. Her mother is a saint, and here she is rejecting the life Annie insists is Sarah Jane’s legacy. Yet one more strike against her, confirming once again her worst feelings about herself.
Annie’s story is a tragedy because it was fully written unconsciously many years ago and can never be reexamined or changed. She is fully invested in it, so only death can bring her the release and appreciation life denied her. She isn’t aware of this, of course, so she has no idea she is on a path that will end her life and drive away the person she most loves in the world, her beautiful daughter. Sarah Jane is so totally muzzled by her mother, Lora and Suzie that running away is her only chance to avoid disappearing completely, her choice being annihilation by melting into Annie’s expectations or a furtive life that feels almost stolen, creating a persona for herself that isn’t subject to Annie’s rules.
Perhaps that’s Annie’s bond with Lora, deep down, they’re both dwelling in a shadow land that doesn’t leave room for other living beings. Lora wears her self-involvement on her Jean-Louis sleeves, while Annie wouldn’t even know how to process the idea that she was selfish.
But after Annie outs Sarah Jane at her school, where her race had never come up and she’s been passing, Annie speaks of the agony of having to tell her daughter she was “born to be hurt.” Looking back at the movie from this distance, we can grieve that this was the message Annie felt was sacred, that as her loving mother it was her duty to impart.
For Sarah Jane, the only paths she can imagine lead to an imitation of life. The movie’s first act is in 1947, the second in 1958,—three years after Rosa Parks’s arrest and only four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v Education ruling. The world is changing in ways that had Annie lived another 20 years would have powerfully challenged her worldview. The film exists in a parallel universe where there is only a narrow range of black experience, neither Annie nor Sarah Jane seem to have any models of black talent, achievement, success. Given that, Sarah Jane’s utter rejection of her blackness, her fixation on being white, makes sense. The tyranny of Annie’s own experience, which forged her pitiless approach to living, doesn’t admit to HBCUs or the Harlem Renaissance or the glittering black talents of her own lifetime. In the real world there were always black people who somehow managed to claim other places in this world and in their own imaginations. They were not spared the crippling perils of being black in America, but those notwithstanding they created spaces where they could live and flourish, and dream.
Maybe if someone who loved Sarah Jane could have given her a way to discuss her feelings, as if they mattered and weren’t some horrific threat that must be instantly vaporized, and access to the astonishing achievements of black Americans and a chance to move among them, she wouldn’t have been so convinced being white was the only path to happiness.
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