Screen Cultures

Class #15: A generic longing: classical melodrama and

gendered/racialized excess in Imitation of Life
 “The Oppositional Gaze” (hooks)

• bell hooks anchors her re-vision of the gaze in her own experiences of gazing
while Black: in which ways does race by default re-define the mechanisms of the
gaze? How does she ground her understanding of the Black gaze in questions of
dominance, power, resistance, and agency?
• How does hooks understand the role the mass media plays in its representation
of race – and what is the crucial role played by “moments of ‘rupture’” (117) in
classic Hollywood depictions of race?
• hooks argues that this critical, documenting, resisting, oppositional gaze works
differently for Black male spectators and Black female spectators; why? Which
are the baseline conditions of Black male and female spectatorship?
• Having established that the image of Black women in film is marked by absence
and/or negation, hooks goes on to claim that “even when representations of
black women were present in film, our bodies and being where there to serve –
to enhance and maintain white womanhood as object of the phallocentric gaze”
(119). In this context, what does hooks mean by ultra-whiteness?
– Does Imitation of Life conform to hooks’s analysis? How (does it not)?
 “The Oppositional Gaze” (hooks)

• hooks establishes four ways in which Black female spectators can “[respond] to this
assault”: what are they and how do these different viewing position re-situate the
Black female spectator’s relationship to the screen?
• In one of the essay’s many confessional moments, hooks revisits her experience
watching Imitation of Life, when “[her] pleasure ended abruptly” (121).
– Which character in particular solicited this reaction, and what did you make of
this character’s arc, and, by extension, the film’s treatment of passing?
• According to hooks, Black female spectators approach films from a critical, de-
centered space from which disrupt – or deconstruct – the functioning of the White
and male gaze, which affords its own pleasure.
• hooks’s essay takes pointed issue with Mulvey’s treatise – and the subject of Woman
posited by (psychoanalytic) feminist film theory at large. How and why do Mulvey and
(contemporaneous) feminist film theory fall short?
• What are hooks’s prescriptions for a filmmaking that creates a space for Black women
characters? What does she mean by the danger of “transference without
transformation” (126)?
• Does Imitation of Life have in its “deep structure a subtext that reproduc[es] the
narrative of white supremacy” or does it “demystify” whiteness (127)?
 • How can we read Sarah Jane’s performance at
Harry’s nightclub within and against hooks’s
“The Oppositional analysis of the “transgressive” performance of
Gaze” (hooks) Black womanhood she traces in Louise and
Maggie’s performance in Passion of
Remembrance?
 “The Oppositional Gaze”
(hooks)

The loneliest I've heard of Anything

word is “empty.” empty is sad.

An empty can make a -- You hear

purse good girl bad me, Dad?

The loneliest I've heard of

Empty things
word is “empty.”

make me so with what I

So fill me up
mad. formerly had.
 Coda: The melodrama as an
intersectional genre

“[T]hough most of the films I loved

were all white, I could engage with
them because they did not have in
their deep structure a subtext
reproducing the narrative of white
supremacy. […] [T]hese films
demystified “whiteness,” since the
lives they depicted seemed less rooted
in fantasies of escape. They were, she
suggested, more like ‘what we knew
life to be, the deeper side of life as
well’” (hooks 127).
>>> Melodrama as a genre is ideally
suited for the project of identifying
and denaturalizating dominant power
relations because it necessarily
involves affective modes of
spectatorship that allow only for
painful identification.