Broken Blossoms

Broken Blossoms (1919) dir. D.W. Griffith

Broken Blossoms, a 1919 film directed by D.W. Griffith, tells the story of an unlikely platonic romance between a beautiful but abused girl Lucy (Lilian Gish) and the kindhearted but discriminated Chinaman Cheng Huan, or the Yellow Man (Richard Barthelmess). Lucy’s father, Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp) is an alcoholic prize-fighter. Lucy and The Yellow Man find comfort in each other, but when Battling finds out Lucy’s whereabouts, the story takes a violent turn and end in death and suicide.

The film is described by many as a “melodrama,” especially in relation to Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). In contrast to these two historical epics, Broken Blossoms is a much more intimate, tragic romantic drama, and it adheres to the general definition of melodrama in a number of ways.

First of all, the narrative features vividly archetypical characters: Lucy, the frail, innocent, beautiful damsel; the Yellow Man, the exotic, religious Chinaman who resorts to opium; Battling, the vulgar, alcoholic father of the damsel. For the most part, these three main characters are pretty flat throughout the story. There is simply nothing likable about Battling and it’s also impossible to dislike Lucy. The Yellow Man is also a character who one can easily sympathize with. This polarization of good and evil brings to mind Peter Brook’s initial definition of melodrama: “it seemed, in fact, to be staging a heightened and hyperbolic drama, making reference to pure and polar concepts of darkness and light, salvation and damnation.” In the film, it is clear that both Lucy and the Yellow Man are “damned” and they become each other’s “salvation.” One interesting thing to note: in Catherine Russell’s “Melodrama and Asian Cinema” she mentions that “the goal of egolessness, associated with Zen aesthetics, becomes melodramatic when it is narrativized within a discourse of history.” This can definitely be seen in the character of the Yellow Man, especially when he enters a foreign land as the selfless (and sexless) preacher of Buddhism.

In what ways are they damned? Lucy is brutalized by her father, and the Yellow Man suffers from discrimination and is disillusioned by how his dream to “take the glorious message of peace to the barbarous Anglo-Saxons” is shattered. In “Tales of Sound and Fury,” Thomas Elsaesser mentions how “Griffith tailored ideological conflicts into emotionally loaded family situations.” The ideological conflicts presented in Broken Blossoms concern racism, and societal issues such as alcoholism, child/domestic abuse are also the primary sources of tension. The final blow of violence occurs with Battling’s discovery of Lucy taking sanctuary at the Yellow Man’s shop, which is charged by racism (“You! With a dirty Chink!”). The violence Battling inflicts on Lucy as her father, and the Yellow Man’s intervention of the operations of this dysfunctional “family” become highly emotionally charged as Lucy is too pure of a girl to abandon her father or to fight back, which heightens the tragic and melodramatic quality of the situation. The intense, clear-cut dichotomy of “the ethical” and “the unethical” of the two sides of ideological conflicts points to Peter Brooks’ idea of the “moral occult; the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality”; it becomes especially noticeable in melodrama as the moral and the immoral are usually not at all subtle, just like in Broken Blossoms.

(The depiction of racism in the film is rather ironic, as the film itself is arguably racist since it plays on the stigma/stereotype of the Chinese opium addict and the weak Buddhist preacher, and the fact that a Chinese character is portrayed by a white actor who droops his eyes just speaks for itself… Given the controversy surrounding Griffith, Broken Blossoms doesn’t seem to deviate from the ideological basis of his more overtly racist films much. This brings my attention to a new concern: does melodrama makes the depiction of a “foreign” or “exotic” character more sensitive/easily subject to being assessed in relation to the ideological milieu of the country that produced the work?)

While the word “melodrama” originated from the combination of music and drama, indicating music’s contribution to the emotional effects in dramatic narratives (Elsaesser), we should look at how filmmakers approached Broken Blossoms in the era of silent films. According to Elsaesser, directors had to develop “an extremely subtle and yet precise language (of lighting, staging décor, acting, close-up, montage, and camera movement” hence “an intensified symbolization of everyday actions, the heightening of the ordinary gesture.” The aspect of heightened gesture is notably evident in Broken Blossoms as it could not rely on sound or music to convey emotional effects.

The facial expressions and actions are extremely exaggerated in the film, and Lilian Gish’s visceral acting especially gave a lot of life to the film. These exaggerations intensify the polarization of good and bad, which essentially spoon-feeds us the “moral occult” within the world of the film in a way since the actors don’t really hold back with the information about their characters and the events that surround them. This seems to be an important pattern in melodrama, which the “moral occult” is made obvious by heightened gestures that are usually deemed excessive in real life, but still lies in a context of realism. It is this very excess that points us to the hidden “operative spiritual values” in our daily lives, and in our world.