Griffith’s stereotyped tolerance.
Lucy and Cheng Huan
Even if you’ve not seen the film, I’d love insight on the representation of class, race and gender in cinema in general.
Despite its intention as a work promoting tolerance, Broken Blossoms nonetheless falls prey to the privilege and ideologies of its maker. Griffith sets out to describe a story of purported inclusion, but uses a number of means to subversively (Although possibly not consciously) represent people of color, women and the poor as lesser beings.
While the Asians and Asian culture represented in Broken Blossoms certainly fares better than Griffith’s treatment of blacks in The Birth of a Nation, what we’re given is a white perception of Asian identity rather than a realistic interpretation of the Asian experience. All of the Asian characters are depicted as wearing ornate, cliched clothing, from their straw hats down to their slippers. The costuming serves as a way to set a visual distinction between the white “norm” and the “exotic” Easterner. We’re presented with images of Buddha and rickshaws and opium dens, and I get the impression that Griffith, in his privilege, was too short-sighted to comprehend that this handful of terribly stereotypic details cannot and does not compromise an entire people.
One interesting aspect of Broken Blossoms, however, and part of the reason I was very taken with the film, is that despite its hackneyed depiction of people of color and Asian culture, it establishes the idea that Eastern theology is possibly superior to Western theology. It even goes so far as to highlight this by way of Christian priests describing their intentions of traveling to the Orient to save the heathens to the Chinese monk who immigrated to London for the purpose of educating the barbaric Anglo-Saxons about Buddhist beliefs.
The principle female figure in the film is a slip of a girl who has virtually no autonomy, an idea that is compounded by the telling of her attempts to free herself from her abusive father. Lucy seeks the advice from the married woman weighed down by husband and a hoard of children, forever tethered to the kitchen, as well as local prostitutes, a representation of sexuality as deviancy and destitution. There is no positive female role model to be had for poor Lucy, which brings into play stereotypes regarding class, as well.
Julia Lesage made a really good point regarding the depiction of the poor as a means to isolate and forgive the flaws present in the white male characters, epitomized by Battling Burrows. From our first glimpse of Limehouse, the film inundates us with images and words supporting the idea that this is the bottom of the barrel, the lowest of the low, a place where the lack of money automatically equates with a lack of morals. Being poor drives people to do unfortunate things, perhaps best represented by Lucy’s mother leaving her baby with a notoriously abusive man to raise. Lucy’s mother was forced to this end by her lack of means, as clearly illustrated by the fact that she could leave her tiny daughter nothing more than a piece of fabric, length of ribbon and illiterate letter as legacy. While these characters are white, all of this serves to set them safely apart just as the Asian characters have been set apart. Griffith makes it easy for a privileged white audience to congratulate itself on its own standards of behavior and see itself as superior to the callous actions of the white characters in the film, because he’s placed an unrealistic but firm distinction between the classes. In this way, it doesn’t purport the wisdom of Buddhist culture so much as insinuate that anyone with any moral rectitude would naturally be above such behavior.
