Wow. Maybe I am a little dizzy or something, but I just wrote this roughly five page paper in less than an hour. And I honestly think it is one of the best things I have ever written. It flows a little better than my writing usually does, which, if you simply read this site often, you will see is often stilted and artificial. I never want for ideas, but I often have a hard time writing with a style that isn't tortured. Well here is my paper, unfinished. I like it especially because I got in a few jokes, and the last line is excellent if I may say so. I think part of the reason this came easier for me is that I wasn't writing about any movies I have a strong attachment to, though I like them all. Even though Sandra Dee is so cute in Imitation of Life you want to strangle her!

Know Your Place

The most fundamental characteristic of the “American Eden”—or any Eden for that matter—is that it does not, and cannot, exist. Ontologically, utopia is non-existent (the very meaning of the word—“no place”—tells us this). Since the alternative is unbearable, cultures create the fiction of utopia, an illusion that sustains the viability and survival of civilization. In the American case, utopia is always a work in progress, and this common ideal is a fundamental characteristic of the nation. All civilizations identify the impediments to utopia as the Other (therefore death is the ultimate Other), and living in harmony with this Other is not sustainable, because it entails the death of the idea of utopia, an intolerable condition. Conflict with the Other, then, serves the extremely important purpose of deferring paradise to the future, and paradoxically providing hope.

The Other can be defined any number of ways, but in America the primary conflict, the great “original sin” of this country, is race. To some extent anyone non-white is an Other, but in The Searchers and Imitation of Life, different approaches, different ways of creating the illusion of utopia, are presented for both the role of, respectively, Indians and Blacks in the American paradise.

The Searchers is at the same time a critique of the American utopian ideal and a powerful representation of that ideal. The film encapsulates nothing less than the fall and subsequent restoration of paradise in the American west. Like all Westerns, The Searchers represents utopia through the domestic. The Edward’s homestead, out in the middle of nowhere, is like a tiny garden of Eden. When Ethan arrives he brings death with him, in the form of his own dark and conflicted past. He immediately produces conflict with Marty, who is 1/8 Indian. Even though the home is later destroyed by Indians (who are not seen), the true destruction of Eden begins with the arrival of Ethan, and it is no surprise that only he and Marty, he and the Other, survive, with the one other exception, Debbie, a captive of Indians.

The rest of the film deals with Ethan and Marty’s attempts to bring her back. Eventually Ethan does find her, and the happy ending of the film suggests utopia is restored. Ethan, knowing his place now, expels himself from Eden, because it cannot exist in his presence. Ethan knows intuitively what is the Other, and what is not, and he knows Debbie is the Other, and he knows Marty is too. His self-banishment is a result of his desire to allow the Jorgenson’s to create the illusion of utopia, something not possible for him. In many ways the utopian ending is a fabrication of the supposedly happy ending, and the film’s true subject (as it is really only Ethan’s film) is his own personal banishment from paradise, represented by the illusion of the happy Jorgenson home. In this way, The Searchers goes well beyond its genre to become a work of supreme art about man’s tragic destiny. The film even goes so far as to suggest the final heartbreaking truth that man is his own Other, and that not paradise is possible for him. Ethan knows his place is not in paradise.

Imitation of Life deals with the other great racial strife of this country; that conflict between whites and blacks. Again, it shows that paradise is only possible when the Other knows their place in society. Instead showing paradise as domestic bliss, it becomes fame and money, a more contemporary version. Lora and Annie, at the beginning of the film are both poor single mothers. When Lora begins to achieve fame and success, Annie, who is black, gets to come along for the ride. But Annie is a very gentle soul (the title oddly recalls Imitation of Christ), who knows her place. Almost immediately, even before Lora’s fame, she takes the role of her maid. Over time, and as Lora’s stature increases, the roles become more ingrained, and more permanent. Annie’s unwillingness to assert herself even allows her light skinned daughter a chance to escape from the role assigned to her at birth by her skin color, as she passes for white at school. There are two separate roles for Annie in the film. On the one hand, Lora is able to enter paradise because Annie knows her place, and assumes the role, not of an equal, but a servant. (Consider the happy and contented slaves of the antebellum south in Gone with the Wind.) On the other hand, her very existence as Other holds her daughter back, and dooms her to that same subservient role. When she dies (of heartbreak?), she allows her daughter to escape from her destiny. Much like Ethan, in both cases she has to banish herself from paradise to make the illusion possible for the other characters. She too knows her place is not in paradise.

The Last of the Mohicans, yet again, gives us an Other that knows his place. The end of the film, in particular, presents the idea that the illusion of paradise is only possible when the Other knows their place. The lead couple, Hawkeye and Cora, both white, represents the future of America, and Chingachgook, Hawkeye’s surrogate father, denies himself this future at the end of the film. [check notes for some quotes.] Chingachgook, just like Annie and Ethan, learns to know his place, and that place is as the white man’s inferior. As a member of a “disappearing race,” he must “heroically” accept his tragic fate to make the American paradise possible.

The Stalking Moon shows what happens when the Other does not know his place. Sam Varner takes Sarah, a former hostage of Indians, and her half Indian son to his home in New Mexico. Like an Edenic couple, they plan to start over again and create a domestic paradise. When the boy’s father, Salvaje, shows up to claim him, and therefore to implicitly claim a stake in the future paradise, he must be banished. Sam does not desire to hunt down Salvaje and simply exterminate him; he is content to let him live so long as he lives outside Eden. But when Salvaje arrives and forces the issue by making a claim on paradise, he has to be put in his “place” by Sam. Notably, the principal action of the film shows Sam defending their home from Salvaje playing the role of intruder. His mere presence in the house defiles it, and utopia is out of reach so long as he sticks around to harass them. Once Sam kills him paradise, or the illusion of paradise, is possible. The conflicted identity of the boy will presumably become the next Other which defines the Same.

The Matrix uses science-fiction in order to make more abstract and philosophical statements about the role of the Other. The metaphysical context of the film conveniently side-steps any issues about possible utopias by suggesting that reality is the illusion instead. Utopia, you see, is only as far away as a state of mind. Neo, as the savior who will break all bonds, threatens the existing order and promises salvation. What is the role of the Other in such a scenario? While the Agents of the film, as the prime actors on behalf of the matrix itself, must be completely destroyed, and any and all humans still stuck in the matrix are potential threats and therefore Others that can be disposed of, what place does the Other have besides being dead? In order to “know the place” of the Other in The Matrix, one must see the matrix itself as the Other. That is, one must see reality itself as the Other. The matrix, as the reality of those trapped inside it, is forced to (or is beginning to be forced to in the first episode of this trilogy) know its place as an instrument of the people inside. The Matrix, then, knows that utopia is impossible in reality, yet it imagines that reality is amenable to human will. The place of the Other, the place of reality (defined as that which impedes utopia) is to disappear, and reveals itself to be illusion instead. Like the Others discussed previously, there is no place for reality in paradise.


And here is an extra picture of Sandra Dee being extra cute: