Intolerance: Beteen 1-2 Dimensions: Chapter 4 Part 2 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
INTOLERANCE (1916): BETWEEN ONE AND
TWO DIMENSIONS
One dimension (a straight line) might be likened to stage-four’s “straight and narrow”—the
moral assumption that the faithful could control their behavior rigorously, without
intrusions from the unconscious. Such an analogy, however, is of little use in literature,
because a statically virtuous saint remains undramatic.
A wavering line (with fractal measure between one and two dimensions) has wider literary
application. In Hänsel and Gretel, the Father’s malleability forces his children
into adventures that trigger their comparable pliancy. They voice no scruple against
lying to their father and the witch, or against devouring other people’s property
without permission, or against killing the witch and taking her treasures. Their
graph is a twisting line near the level of good while the Father’s wavers conspicuously
between that and significant acquiescence to evil. Whereas Graves’s stage four condemns
wavering in faith, morality, or anything else that concerns it, stage five makes
adaptability (i.e., wavering) the norm. Indeed, graphed wavering (in spreadsheets
of balance and loss) has even become a symbol of capitalist materialism. Such variation
may, of course, simply result from chance, but in film plots (as for Herakleitos)
fate usually reflects character. Consequently, subjective and unconscious elements
aid or thwart the personae, invisibly guiding fortunes, defying stage-five’s craving
for conscious control. Despite having rags to riches as its paradigm (a division
between one’s present and hoped-for self), it never achieves permanent success but
meanders melodramatically.
The most expensive film to its date and in other ways a monumental paean to materialism, D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance itself became a symbol of American capitalism’s vicissitudes, particularly what Kenneth Anger called Hollywood Babylon (Anger [I]). Anger introduces that book with three film clips from Intolerance and two photographs of the crumbling set. He spends several pages describing the intrusiveness of the architecture, “a make-believe mirage of Mesopotamia dropped down on the huddle of mission-style bungalows...” (Anger [I]). For “mission-style” read formerly Christian; for “Babylon,” read Capitol of Sin. A devotee of Aleister Crowley, Anger is probably not sincere in his application of stage-four standards to Griffith and is certainly not fair in doing so. Intolerance is a stage-five plea that they be modified, rendering them more pliable and tolerant. Although this agenda did not endear the film to the bible belt, as late as 1958, 61 of 117 film historians selected it as among the greatest films of all time—more than chose the stage-six work Citizen Kane (Budd 122).
Whereas stage four insists that every jot and tittle of the Law be preserved, stage five has the various Laws compete against one another like a market place and graphs the popularity of each. The movie’s subtitle “The Struggle of Love Throughout the Ages” assesses a variety of faiths, allegedly according to a Love beyond any Law. Deliberately contradicting the Bible, the movie (based on Mesopotamian tablets) attributes the fall of Babylon to the priests of Bel Marduk, who failed to tolerate the worship of Ishtar, the Goddess of Love. Next, a partly anti-scriptural version of Jesus personifies Love.
In the Reformation story, Love is on the Protestant side, which, according to Max Webber’s classic Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) was then allied to capitalism. By Griffith’s day, however, evangelical Protestantism (in such movements as prohibition) had almost the opposite function, as a check on materialistic pleasures. In the largely secular modern episode, thus, the only religious image of Love is a little Catholic statue of the Virgin Mary (because Catholicism had a somewhat more tolerant image at the time, particularly toward liquor). In the future segment, a Universalist Christ comes, not apparently to condemn the evil to Hell, but, lovingly, to save everyone.
In Intolerance, many cinematic devices shift the audience’s
attention and attitude according to Griffith’s agenda. For the monumental Babylon
set, iris-ins show the grand vista little by little. First, designed to be photographed
from a balloon, the opening shot pioneers employment of a moving track for the gradual
approach. The viewer is tantalized, waiting for more and more of ancient magnificence.
Instead of taking the Biblical attitude (categorizing Babylon as deserving God’s
Wrath for idolatry), spectators are to see the idols as realized dreams and appreciate
their worshippers cultural accomplishments. To this end, notes on title cards remark
such technological wonders as that chariots could pass one another on the walls.
The film’s most famous technique of suspense is its extreme use of montage, jumping
between the centuries when each story reaches a point of interest, sometimes approaching
the melodrama of the “cliffhangers.” Cumulatively, these conspicuous devices distract
attention from the stories themselves to the way of their telling and the splendor
of their presentation. Artistic creation (i.e., stage-five self expression) is the
movie’s ultimate standard of judgment.
Creation
Instead of celebrating rigid, eternal order, Intolerance begins by quoting
Whitman’s line “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,” describing an oscillating process.
Whitman’s next line is “Out of the mocking bird’s throat, the musical shuttle.” behind
Lilian Gish and the cradle, a shuttle is plied by three women, generally identified
as the Fates of Greek mythology, weaving the graph of the fortunes.
The visible figures of this creation, all four women, huddle as
if threatened by those forces against which “Love[ ] Struggle[s] throughout the Ages.”
“Fate” is a motif throughout the drama, but although the three weavers personify
it, actual control lies with unseen male presences behind the camera, so that, in
their weakness, the female charaters’ lives shift as conspicuously as that shuttle.
Indeed, the key to the movie is a cluster of images involving male self-expression
and ownership/authorship, such as Griffith’s conspicuous initials on the title cards.
Even more significantly, Christ manifests in triumph, at the movie’s close (like
a religious signature). Similarly, His materialization ends Birth of a Nation
(1915) and occurs in other Griffith films such as The Avenging Conscience
(1914).
One day during Griffith’s childhood, Christ appeared to him. Interpreting
this as happening literally, Griffith said: “My name is David, and you know that
means dearly beloved. I do hope you may like me a little, that I might even become
your dearly beloved, because I love you and always have” (Lynn 257). To his actors,
he likened the movies to “the hand of God” lifting audiences to “poetic simulations”
if the players would become vessels of the “divine fluid”—fluid, not a fixed (stage-four)
inscription on stone, but a changing flow (Lynn 257). Combined with his weak, frightened
Fates, these religious allusions imply a hierarchy. At pinnacle stands God/Christ.
He transmits his power (the “divine fluid”) to the creative forces on earth such
as mothers, but, judging from the way Griffith portrayed them, women in particular
are frail conduits (because of the sexism that stage five preserved from stages three
and four). The hysterical style he encouraged in their acting combined these dual
qualities: vulnerability yet divine energy, appropriate to the film’s fluctuating
between extremes.
In several places including a 1989 South Atlantic Quarterly
article and her book Babel and Babylon, Miriam Hansen notices in Intolerance
“ambivalence toward the female gaze—as a manifestation of the power clustering around
the female consumer .... [The presentation of women] destabilizes the film’s textual
system, unraveling its self-consciously ingenious architectonic structure” (Hansen
1991, 122). Just as at that time female consumers were thought to be supportive,
supported proxies for the males, so the women who remain subordinate while instigating
the action are invisibly guided by the director, (King) David, the dearly beloved
of God, the Author of history. Rather than being in an entirely secular sense “unstable”
as Hansen may imply, the movie’s wavering is more precisely paradoxical, rooted in
a stage-five (re)vision of Christianity.
The Tower of Babel
|
In Hollywood ... [a visitor in 1919] might have seen the Babylonian fertility goddess Ishtar reborn in lath and plaster, looming seventy feet tall at the corner of Sunset and Hollywood, on the crumbling set of D. W. Griffith’s superepic, Intolerance....Anita Loos remembered viewing the rough cut, and thinking as the lights went up in the projection room, “D. W. has lost his mind.” —David Reid, “The Possessed |
Just as Griffith’s grandiose stage-five conception of film was naïve, so also was his related interpretation of Babylonian cuneiform. Because the latter derived from pictures, he described it as a graphic writing—a predecessor of cinema. Instead, by the period he depicted, it was mostly phonetic, not ideogramatic. In showing the fall of Babylon, however, a title card laments the loss of cuneiform as a supposedly universal medium. Instead of God’s multiplying languages (as with the Biblical Babel), intolerance destroys picture writing and with it linguistic unity.
Hansen finds traces of Griffith’s idée fixe even in the movie’s style: “[Griffith’s] hieroglyphic analogy illuminates the peculiar organization of space [of Intolerance], the traces of frontality, the frequency of ambiguous if not unclaimed shots, such as the emblematic close-ups of faces and objects. Instead of attributing these deviations from classical standards to a return of theatrical space, the space of Intolerance can more precisely be characterized as reading space, as a space of hieroglyphic signification and interpretation. ...” (Hansen 1991, 195). The word “reading” is perhaps misleading. Rather than the kind of intellectual, analytic activity implied by that—a skill, that statistically, females learn more readily than males—Griffith seems to have had in mind stylized icons, a radically visual language—one particularly designed for the masculine gaze, even to bare breasts in a harem. To him, along with all other forms of love, voyeurism was holy, one more stimulant for wildly oscillating emotions.
In championing visual/visionary truth against the verbal inaccuracies of the Bible, Griffith found himself in an uneasy collaboration between his personal obsessions and his researchers’ findings. Notoriously, he capped his Babylon set with elephant idols, as hideous as they were large. They so perfectly epitomize the Hollywood of that era that an entire film (Good Morning, Babylon, 1987) has since appeared giving a fictional account of their construction. Actually, Griffith had seen something like them in the Italian film Cabiria (1914), its sets a hodgepodge of architectural styles. “Director Giovanni Pastrone of Cabiria took the idea [of the elephants] from ancient Indian art (the North Torana of Stupa I at Sanchi)” (Solomon 148). Therefore, they derived from the iconography of Indian, not Mesopotamian religions. Like Barnum with his Jumbo, however, Griffith wanted to offer the American public truly elephantine wonders. Consequently, research continued until someone found reference to pachyderm icons on the walls of Babylon (Hansen 1991, 176-177). That was enough. He felt no need to discover the style of them or how they fit into Mesopotamian theology.
Although the set design was an affront to good taste, the story
played there was even more controversial—an attack on the Bible belt. The version
known by the latter comes from Daniel 5. There “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin” appears
on the walls of Belshazar’s banquet hall, signifying that Babylon is being destroyed
for its sins. Instead, Intolerance follows a Babylonian version, according
to which the priests of Bel-Marduk betray the city. Research also revealed that Belshazzar
“invented a new eclectic religion by which he hoped to unite all creeds, castes,
and people” (Griffith and Hart 85). Griffith thus assumed it was a non-denominational
faith set in universal picture writing. From his point of view, Belshazzar was the
hero—the first in a line of Griffith’s own predecessors, including Jesus Christ.
Bel-Marduk’s priests bear blame for trying to make their (auditory) version of metaphysics
into the only one. By implication, Intolerance is showing the Christian fundamentalists
that their similar ambition is arrogant and evil. Title cards side with the Babylonians,
the justice of their courts and the harmonious life they try to preserve. Only during
the final horrors occasioned by Bel-Marduk exclusivism is a baby sacrificed—sectarian
zeal exposed as the ultimate enemy of Love, which advances, again to be persecuted.
The Gospel According to Griffith and his Researchers
In a special collection at UCLA, I found a clipping that records Griffith’s giving
$50,000, in memory of his Methodist Episcopal mother, who wanted him to be a preacher.
The money went to produce a 1920 film for that faith’s Centenary in Columbus, Ohio.
This two reel documentary emphasizes the need for missions against pagans. Griffith’s
donation does not receive much attention in studies of his life, since his well-known
films tend to be anti-missionary. His critically acclaimed Broken Blossoms,
for example, parodies the missionaries in the person of a Chinese come to America
to preach Buddhism.
Griffith exhibited pronounced prejudice against African-Americans (as in the KKK scenes of Birth of a Nation), but less so against the Chinese, yet even there his productions succumbed to stereotypes, as in having the Buddhist missionary of Broken Blossoms become an opium addict. At first sight, his racial intolerance and religious tolerance as well as his pro- and anti-missionary activities seem to cancel each other out. All his attitudes, however, are various shades of essentialism: the idea that everything has its inherent place. For him, women are to be mothers: at their best when they are silently rocking cradles. If they insist on having theological opinions, the honor due them as mothers requires a good son to tolerate, even generously donate to those religious causes. According to his notions, the various races are to keep in traditionally defined places. Since denominational squabbles concern mere words, the sects are to stop listening and see the material world as it is: everything in its place. Incongrously, behind the wavering pulse of stage five, there is usually this hunger for stability, a fixed background against which success can be judged.
As mentioned, Griffith may have felt divinely commissioned to depict his presumptions. Certainly, he devoted almost obsessive attention to that Jesus he glimpsed. The first cut of Intolerance had a much longer Christ section, reduced only because of the response of a trial audience. He kept Howard Gaye on retainer for Christ roles, yet nagged him constantly, instructing him to be more “mysterious, mysterious”—for the opposite of his religiosity was literalism (Drew 17).
He hired Rabbi Myers and Father Dodd (Episcopalian) for technical details of the first century C.E (Drew 17). From their researches, his title cards abound with pedantic notes about Jewish customs. Originally, he intended to make Christ’s fellow countrymen the great embodiment of bigotry, but Jewish leaders convinced him that anti-Semitism was not the best means of promoting religious toleration (Drew 36). In the final version (presumably thanks to Myers), his text has become fairly sensitive. Unlike most filmings of the gospels, he even acknowledges the Pharisees as not all hypocrites and scoundrels, but as a learned and respectable Jewish faction.
Griffith, however, cannot resist attacking Christian fundamentalism,
particularly the prohibitionists whose influence was growing. Consequently, he chooses
the marriage at Cana to dramatize, so that his Jesus “the greatest enemy of intolerance,”
advocates wine drinking and merriment, to the consternation of the hypocrites with
their obsession on the straight and narrow. Griffith deviates from the Bible wherever
he pleases. In John 2:7, for instance, Jesus meets his mother there and greets her:
“O woman, what have you to do with me?” In Intolerance, he silently, lovingly
embraces her. Thus, Griffith corrects the gospel, which at this point, does not evidence
as much respect for Motherhood as he thought proper.
Reformation
Like the rest of the film, the sixteenth-century section wobbles toward Love and
then back toward Hate, but is the least memorable part of the film. No longer do
most Protestants talk angrily about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of three thousand
Huguenots. Griffith, however, is not attacking Catholicism but using the incident
to scold Christians for killing each other over words and thus is protestant rather
than Protestant. The protestant cause has a special (perhaps even increasing) place
in American tradition. After extensive study of telephone surveys and other statistical
data, Phillip E. Hammond, former president of the Society for the Scientific Study
of Religion concluded: “religious individualism is triumphing over collective religious
values of any stripe” (Hammond 177). This is to say, that a large number of Americans
have advanced beyond stage four (many, further than Griffith did).
“Vestal Virgins”
The modern sequence is the most developed story, the one meant to bring home Griffith’s
“epic sermon” to his contemporary audiences (Barry and Bowser 23). Miss Jenkins,
the spinster sister of a rich industrialist turns toward massive charities because,
at a ball, she cannot attract a young man. While, for Griffith, the laissez faire
of capitalism permit things to find their proper place, her charities disrupt order
bringing bloodshed, vice, and injustice. Instead of her public pieties (a caricature
of the Rockefellers’), Intolerance admires dogma-lite, private spirituality.
A father prays with his daughter and a priest with a condemned man; then, in His
secret way, God answers each prayer. The episode ends with a climactic, successful
race to interrupt an execution. On this level, the nick-of-time rescue is a vindication
of faith—and, like the other episodes, a melodramatic swerve of fortune for the characters.
Second Coming
Fundamentalists argue about words, such as the Scriptural details of the Rapture
of the faithful, and of the grisly punishments non-Fundamentalists suffer during
the Apocalypse, particularly throughout Armageddon. Intolerance concludes
with a battle, but it does not seem much different from previous wars, except both
sides are apparently saved. The wavering line of melodrama runs off the graph.
Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 4 Part 5
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