When Talkies Couldn’t Talk

Societal consciousness in John M. Stahl’s Imitation of Life (1934)

In the end, we are given an image: a daughter crying over her mother’s coffin begging for forgiveness. Yet, no one ever steps up to say why. The film’s crisis never resolved. The reason has however been made entirely clear to the audience, and yet was never stated. We have all of the pieces to the puzzle of their relationship - of the societal struggles these characters endured - and yet we are never explicitly told the truth: both mother and daughter are victims. That, while one ultimately did the other wrong, the root cause of their angst was not from within, but rather stems from these societal issues that were projected onto them. And so, from the dawn of talking pictures, Imitation of Life stands as the voice for the truly voiceless.