"Broken Blossoms" Review
The only way to critique a movie like "Broken Blossoms" is to envision living in the time period and social surrounding of when the movie was made. If someone viewed the film today, he/she would probably frown upon casting another race, especially Caucasians, to play a minority race. But during 1919, when Broken Blossoms was produced, miscegenation was illegal as was the portrayal of a white/minority relationship onscreen. To understand this movie, we must first understand the director and the time period this movie was made in. D.W. Griffith was the director of Broken Blossoms. Prior to Broken Blossoms, Griffith directed a highly racist and controversial movie entitled Birth of a Nation in 1915. In Birth of a Nation, Griffith advocated and promoted the Ku Klux Klan. This was when the North and South were waging war against one another and Griffith, hoping to reconcile the North and the South, portrayed the KKK as heroes and the Southern blacks as villains. So it becomes interesting that Griffith decides to direct Broken Blossoms with a sympathetic view towards the Chinese. John K.W. Tchen writes in Modernizing White Patriarchy: Reviewing D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, "Perhaps Griffith was still getting back at those
Burke had Cheng Huan committing suicide leaving a snake, his "love-gift" for Battling, who in the end attacks Battling and kills him. Instead of adapting the "heathen Chinese" stereotype, Griffith simply adapts the opposite stereotype, which portrays Cheng Huan as the alternative image of the good-for-the-West "John" Chinamen, a proto-Christianized model minority. The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited any Chinese other than male Chinese laborers to come into the country and, as a result of their emasculation, economic and employment limitations became placed on Asian men. This leads us to another discussion of the feminization of Cheng Huan and Chinese males at that time period. This explains the large number of Chinese laundries established in the West Coast during the early 1900s. In the film, Battling is the epitome of lower-class white trash, the "abusive lower-class white men with immature authority. This meant that the women usually had time to spare during the day and reading exotic and titillating stories such as "The Chink and the Child" kept them out of their boredom. Since Griffith pushed the movie on an upper-middle class audience, charging an expensive $3 to view the movie, "Broken Blossoms easily lent itself to upper-middle-class progressivism during the early twentieth century" (Tchen, 1991). This was the homogenized view of Asian living. This view of Cheng Huan is very different and the opposite of Griffith's portrayal of the "John" Chinamen. He was a poet, lazy and unpopular, a social outcast. When Lucy was gone, Cheng Huan could no longer live, because his love, his reason to live was now gone. Burke writes that Cheng Huan would tend to Lucy, "as might mother to child.
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Acceptance Essays
