Hello, I am Dr. David Jamison
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Film Review:
Elia Kazan's Baby Doll
Elia Kazan’s 1956 film Baby Doll opens up by showing a crumbing Southern plantation. And it is very evident from the first frames of this film that the Confederacy lost the Civil War. The mansion that Karl Malden’s Archie Meaghan lives in shows signs of the financial straits Archie is in -- the wood is cracked and knotty, the paint is peeling and yellowed. Random pieces of refuse litter the yard. Archie’s mansion looks like a plantation whose owners could no longer bear the sheer weight of the moral cost of slavery.
And true to form, the plantation’s African American employees play an especially acerbic role in the film. Never interacting with the action, never pushing along the main narrative, they rather serve mostly as witty onlookers and detached commentators; a sort of laconic Greek chorus; more Statler and Waldorf than Oedipal; more Heckle and Jeckle than moral center. The black characters – all the characters of color, in fact -- interact almost as if they were watching the movie themselves; they are seen constantly in side conversations about the goings on of Archie and his wife Baby Doll, and all of their lines are awkwardly overdubbed. Two minutes and one second into the film, Archie asks his black employee Uncle Pleasant if he “didn’t have anything better to do.” Uncle Pleasant answered him with a cheery “Not a thing!” And yes, it could be interpreted that Uncle Pleasant answered that way because he was happy with finishing his work for the day. But from the subaltern perspective of every African American in America, he was also saying No, and I don’t have to look like I’m busy when you come around anymore because I am free. In the very next frame, two black laborers are shown lounging on dilapidated lawn furniture as Archie is trying to move things into the house. “Ain’t you gonna help him?” Laborer #1 says. “I’m retired,” Laborer #2 rejoins. Retired is right, the Subaltern Perspective echoes, retired from slavery and retired from doing anything else these people tell me to do.
In the Old South, blacks and whites adhered to a code of conduct that presumed white social superiority and black subservience. Blacks did not feel like whites were superior, but they knew of the grave consequences of not acting like they did in public, since so many crimes against them could happen and go unpunished. So in the Old South, if a white person even so much as looked like he needed your help, you sure enough better be over there in a hot minute asking if he needed a hand. And maybe it was not every time. Maybe every once in a while, every month or so, you would let a white man lift a box into a car on his own or pretend not to hear his plea for help. But you did not do that very often. Not often enough to be considered a “troublemaker.” Historian Kenneth Elkins labeled this tendency of African American slaves to adopt a subservient character in the presence of whites the “Sambo” mentality. The Sambo mentality was pure theater, but it was a theater for life; done for your very survival. In 1914, black literary critic Alain Locke wrote an essay called the New Negro, which made a bold new claim about American blackness. No longer were blacks going to expect each other to adhere to the Sambo code of conduct. From now on, the New Negro code of conduct would be self-respect, and not an immediate kowtowing and desire to help white people. In this scene, the first laborer was speaking from the perspective of the Old South, the second laborer was speaking from the perspective of the New Negro.
Some blacks in the film are remarkably compliant, however, providing us with a Sambo view of how things used to be. At 28:00, a white customer in a diner says the words “Hey Jenny, sing us song!” The camera then cuts to server Jenny, who is in the process of passing some dishes to the dishwasher. Literally before she has finished turning back around, she has launched into a rendition of “I Shall Not be Moved.” She then proceeds to sing the whole song, hands folded in front of her, servers and dishes be damned.
The side commentators are always men; and they all seem to know that Baby Doll will cheat on Archie the first chance she gets. And the fact that men of color are laughing at him burns Archie up. At 18:04, Baby Doll looks at a little girl’s ice cream cone and asks her husband enviously, “Why didn’t you bring me a double dip?” At that point, Elia Kazan dubs in a laugh track – I am not kidding – and immediately pans behind Archie to a group of Latino and Asian men. Kazan did not even bother to direct the men to laugh, he just dubbed in the track. Archie looks back at them and asks “What the Sam Hill is so funny?” After Baby Doll looks longingly at a cute one, Archie exclaims, “Even the Chinamen. You know, people know the situation between us.” He then goes into a rant about “public humiliation.”
The film is largely a commentary on the slothful white supremacy that many poor Southern men adopted to Lord over blacks and immigrants when their bank account could not do it for them. And it is not only people of color, but Eastern European immigrants who also provide a foil for Archie’s vaguely Western European background. At 33:07 cowriter Tennessee Williams lazily introduces Eli Wallach’s Silva Vaccaro by having Baby Doll mention that his name “sounds foreign.” I say “lazy” because the movie is set in 1955. By 1955, every high school in America had some student with a name that “sounded foreign,” even in the deepest parts of the South. Williams here is invoking a sensibility from 1855, but it is simply to move the plot along.
The film is relentlessly racist against Italian Americans from then on, but you cannot really say it is the characters’ fault because of an interesting device Kazan and Williams use. The word wop is used at least fifteen times after Baby Doll’s “foreign” comment, but for some reason Kazan has Wallach say it first. Baby Doll’s asynchronous commentary on Vacarro leads him to comment that he is “known as the wop that runs the Syndicate Plantation.” Vacarro does not say who knows him that way, but he is the first person to introduce that term to the world of the film. Using the word also gives Archie a chance to play a nonracist by chiding Vacarro for using it. From the character’s perspective, Vacarro could have been using the term to broadcast a silent racism that he already sensed was there. But Vacarro using the term first only seems to give the other characters license to use it, and abuse it. Later, when Archie abuses the term vigorously, one almost feels like Vacarro goaded him into it by giving him that license.
Kazan and Williams play with ambiguities. For instance Archie’s key status marker is his white identity. I do not say that because I believe it is true, I say that because Archie explicitly tries to use white identity twice in the final minutes of the film when he is in very dire circumstances. On his way to jail, he first uses it in an incredibly conflated way that leaves us confused as to what exactly he thinks of himself. “I ain’t a white man? I ain’t a white man?” he says to the sheriff. “No, I ain’t a white man, so throw me in!” And it is true, Archie Meaghan looks . . . ethnic. And it is also true, the actor who plays him, Karl Malden, was born “Mladen George Sekulovich” His father was Serbian and his mother was Czech. Although Czechs and Serbs are phenotypically indistinct from what we would today call a “white” person, they were not always identified as “white” by their fellow Americans. The 1924 National Origins Act was written with Eastern Europeans in mind in fact, as it tried to maintain the same percentage of them who came to America in 1914 because the ratios of Eastern European to the more eugenically pleasing Western Europeans was getting too high.
So Archie’s not a white man either, right? Just like Vacarro? But . . . no. Just a few sentences later, he confides in the town sheriff: “Sandy, you’re married aren’t you? You understand how I feel, don’t you, Sandy? Please, as one white man to another, don’t leave [Vacarro] on the place [with Baby Doll].” And Sandy does it. Sandy seems to accept Archie as a white man even and arrest Vacarro even though Archie himself called his whiteness into question seconds before. So is Archie . . . white? It could be that Kazan and Williams had Archie playing the assimilation game. Most European immigrants when they came to America had only ever been considered Scottish or Italian or Polish when they were in the Old World, but now they had to consider whether they wanted to be “white”—because in America the alternative option was being considered “black.” That meant that you were either the oppressor or the oppressed. And even though you might look white, the wrong set of social values could send you careening into blackness. At different times in American history, the Irish, Italians, and Jewish people were all seen as more "black" than "white" by the American mainstream media. And so American “whiteness” is totally contingent; very much conditional; and ultimately dependent upon the degree to which you consent to reject blackness and black people.
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The movie Glory depicts the infamous Irish rejection of blackness. The films Do the Right Thing and Ghost Dog both sport wonderful portrayals of stereotypically male Italian characters rejecting blackness and black people with wildly obscene and vile antiblack comments, far out of the bounds of how Western Europeans display racism. Both movies reflect stereotypes borne from real-life anecdotes that typified what these groups were doing — constructing their white identity. It was mostly only the Jewish culture that seemed to be really split down the middle, with a healthy number of liberal Jews identifying with black culture and causes, and another large chunk of conservative Jews identifying with the white mainstream. This is largely due to the high degree of anti-Semitism and persecution Jewish people in Europe have endured since the fall of Rome.
But that is largely the exception – most blacks and immigrants had to play the assimilation game in order to achieve mainstream success in America, at least up until the Countercultural Movement of the 1960s. And so Wallach’s Silva Vaccaro plays into Baby Doll’s stereotypes right up until she gives him the pertinent information he needs for his cotton gin. Then he throws off the Sambo mask and starts to torment Archie because Baby Doll is more attracted to him than her husband. Vacarro tormenting Archie is sort of satisfying, in that it plays to the core of racism and prejudice — the white fear of nonwhites contaminating their seed via the sexual violation of white women. That base paranoia and fear permeates American racism and this movie. It’s just a basic, base fear, and can only be overcome by deciding to (once and for all stop worrying about your shortcomings and truly accept that she cares more for your character than your ability to show might over another; and that there is no reason to hate this man or that man because that man is really far more worried about taking care of his own family than he is worrying about how much better you are than he is; and so wouldn’t it just be easier if you would just let go of all that self-doubt and insecurity and finally just love yourself like a man, like your mama does and how God does; enough to stop envying other people’s journey and finally just) Believe in Yourself.