Skin of the Imposter: Looking for the Vanishing Self

Adapted from the novel of the same name by writer Neller Larson, Imposter Skin revolves around the story of two black women in New York in the 1920s. (Infographic/Figure)

The atmosphere is ominous, with gossip passing by, passers-by falling to the ground with heat stroke, and worrying trivia that quickly sets the tone of the film. If extravagant hopes such as "being yourself" are expected to hold true, then "Skin of a Name" is obsessed with showing the wobbles and crumbling of "yourself." The emphasis stems from skin color, a haphazard guideline that lives on like tentacles, blood, and roots.

"Skin of an Imposter" sets the story in the United States during the prohibition years, when the Great Depression is looming. Only the change of seasons or the laughter of the night soothes the crowd, and the jazz piano music that flashes often eases the tension.

The two middle school friends chose different life paths and had a middle-class life when they reunited. The twins, which come from black neighborhoods in New York, are lighter-skinned and have room to define themselves as white temporarily or permanently. This identity transformation is the "pass" in the English title, which roughly corresponds to the "impersonation" or "confusion" of the Chinese.

After a flurry of pretentious greetings, we learn that it was Irene who unexpectedly arrived at the upscale hotel, recognizing that claire lived in the upstairs suite. Claire now calls herself white and marries a wealthy white, a bigoted racist. She enjoyed her gorgeous life, away from other black people, offsetting her uneasiness with exaggerated mannerisms.

The problem is that Irene is unconsciously attracted to the relaxed and prosperous life of her old friends. She is relentlessly fighting for living space, but she is trapped in a barrier and cannot enjoy even superficial happiness. "Impersonation" was a glittering trap that gave blacks little respite. She "pretended" to be a white man to break into a fancy hotel for the summer, and was rather ironically treated as a courtesy by racists. In black and white, skin tones and the rules derived from them are even more illusory. It is difficult for the audience to define the "racial" identity of the actor, and the skin color is nothing more than a blindfold, like a journalist in formal clothes and a superman who takes off his glasses.

Without trying to "impersonate", Irene would face a more hopeless trivial life. Race involves many factors, and they glue together specific people. She faced the darker-skinned black maid irritably. The Negro seeks a meandering way to live in this way, and the shackles are always there.

The story lasts for more than a year, New York City from hot to cold, twin flowers envy each other, devour each other, Swiss boarding schools and breathing free air are out of reach. From accidental encounters destined to lose control, the shell of the "self" gradually melts, and the cost of crossing the line is by no means something that life can bear.

British novelist John Fowles Youyun: "Everyone's life must come to a critical moment, success or failure in this move, that is, must begin to accept who they are." 」 It is no longer what kind of person you can become, but the real you, and the one who will always be like that, who is it. (This is the translation of the writer Guo Johnson) Once it is no longer feasible to seek perfection, the tragedy will come irreversibly.

The writer has not been heard from

Steeped in alienation and fragmentation, Impersonation is based on the novel of the same name by writer Nella Larsen (1891-1964). Larson's two novels— Quicksand and Skin of the Imposter— were published in 1928 and 1929 and were both important works of the Harlem Renaissance. They are all autobiographical, and "Skin of an Imposter" has another straightforward Chinese translated as "Impersonating White".

Confusingly, before George Hutchinson's In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line was published in 2006, Larson's life course was like a fog. She was seen as the finest black female writer of her time, and seemed to deliberately seek forgetting and misunderstanding. There is no stark difference in skin color, and forced comparison can only be said to be like a "color palette", but the identity and boundaries generated by it will profoundly affect the individual's situation. The same goes for other labels.

Neller Larsen's life has always been associated with "impersonation". She was born in Chicago's impoverished neighborhood of European immigrants to a Danish tailor and father to a black chef from the Danish West Indies. When she was two years old, her father disappeared, her mother remarried a Danish immigrant, and gave birth to her youngest daughter, Anna Larsen. The color of the skin makes Neller a special status in the family, and the family is quite uncomfortable facing the outside world. Some studies have even speculated that the so-called stepfather was "impersonated" by the biological father, and the sister happened to be light enough to be white.

Considering Larsen's relatively unique identity, her mother sent her to Fesk University for teacher training. At this prestigious black university, she truly found herself in the African-American community, mostly descendants of Southern slavery. That experience was unfamiliar, and she was like Irene standing on the edge of the dance floor, staring at claire, the returning person, from a distance.

Larson was expelled for violating school rules such as dress several times, and then went to live in Denmark for a while. In 1912, she became a registered nurse at the Black Nursing School in New York and returned to New York after a year of working in Alabama. She was sent by the Municipal Health Department to Harlem, where blacks congregated, and the "white" Bronx, and was involved in nursing care after the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, with most of her colleagues being white. Her work environment is less influenced by ethnicity, but the work is always heavy and boring, sometimes unfair.

In 1919, Larson married Elmer Imes. Emos had just become the second African-American to earn a Ph.D. in physics and would later become a professor at Fisk University. The young couple approached New York's black elite and began a new life. As far as the eye can see, du bois, a scholar who co-founded the Naacp, and the poet Langston Hughes, who co-founded the National Association of Colored People's Association (NAACP), are enthusiastically celebrating the boiling black art. She entered the Library College of the New York Public Library, known as the first black female graduate.

In the 1920s after World War I, New York's black culture was remarkable. They created, gathered, and cathartically in an eclectic manner, hoping that the "new Negroes" would no longer be resigned. Participants from different backgrounds— such as French-speaking black immigrants and vassal-like white New Yorkers — made the cultural movement extraordinarily diverse. Larson was created by this vibrant environment, but unfortunately, his literary career will also die in the hustle and bustle.

Larson volunteered for the exhibition "Black Art," a hallmark of the harlem Renaissance in terms of visual art. She later moved to work at the 135th Street Branch in Harlem and began writing literature with the encouragement of novelist Walter White. White is also a black rights advocate and is actively involved in the work of the NAACP. When he went to the south to investigate social problems, he used "impersonation" from time to time to defuse tensions.

Larson first published a short story in 1926 and soon published two novels in succession. But the sense of alienation lingered, and she came from a poor European immigrant family, lacked spiritual ties to the Civil War, and was still trying to write about white life.

In 1930, one of Larson's short stories was unjustifiably accused of plagiarism. Still, she received the Guggenheim Creative Writing Scholarship as the first African-American female recipient. She used the money to live in Europe and returned home to find that her marriage was in trouble. Emos, who was uproot in academia, met a new lover, and the two divorced in 1933. She continued to write until Amos died a few years later. Perhaps forced by the economy, she returned to nurse management, and no colleague knew that she had written a novel.

As the Great Depression spread, the Harlem Renaissance came to an almost abrupt end. It nourishes the black civil rights movement of the future. In 1959, during the rise of the black civil rights movement, white journalist John Howard Griffin "pretended" to be black with the help of drugs, dyes and other items, and spent seven weeks traveling to Mississippi, Alabama and other racist states, but was happy to whitewash the peaceful Southern States. He recorded the truth and wrote The Book As Black as I Am, which led to death threats and severe beatings.

"This book is about what it's like to be a black man in a black country where black people are oppressed." Griffin wrote in the preface, "We don't have time to drill the horns and avoid the heavy." We argue about unimportant matters, confuse issues, and prevent us from focusing on the problem. ”

Larson lives alone, divorced, childless, extremely estranged from his sister, and no longer in contact with black intellectuals. About 20 years after Larson's death, "Skin of Impostors" gradually returned to academia, education, and then attracted the interest of readers. Scholars do not understand why Larson has not heard from him, and vaguely see that the twins are beyond the emotion of friendship, and the so-called "impersonation" may be more complicated. The library she worked for was renamed the Countee Cullen Library, a Harlem Renaissance poet.

Can't be at ease

In a lengthy essay for The New York Times Magazine, young American writer Alexandra Kleeman recalls her encounter with Imposter Skin. One afternoon when she was 16, she stumbled upon the novel in the school library and read about Irene and Claire's wobbling between two worlds. She is of Chinese descent and grew up in Japan and Colorado, USA, and the state of existence of her characters makes her feel "weird and amazingly moving." The manuscript connects the creators of the novel and the film, telling the story of Neller Larson, Rebecca Hall, and Kleeman himself.

Imposter Skin is Hall's first film. In 1992, at the age of nine, she starred in the British drama "Chamomile Meadow". The director was her father, Peter Hauer, who founded the famous Royal Shakespeare Company. Her mother, the American soprano Maria Ewing, identified herself as white from the beginning and was overwhelmed by racist swearing as a teenager.

Hall grew up thinking she was "an upper-middle-class, bohemian, privileged, well-educated white girl." But she also vaguely felt that there were some problems hidden in the family. Because of her parents' artistic achievements, she attended boarding school in the UK. When she travels to school in a taxi, the children sitting in land rovers stare at her mother as if admiring the "exoticism" of her.

When watching the 1959 film "Imitation of Life" with his mother, Hall had a sense of déjà vu. The relentless "impersonation" of the black young woman in the film is devastated by her mother, and she is also punished for her mother's death. There is also a 1934 edition of the film, and the original novel of the same name was written by the American writer Fannie Hurst. Because of his personal circumstances and association with the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, the Jewish-German immigrant was quite concerned about race and gender.

The mother did not want to discuss too much. Asked about her childhood in Detroit, Hall got a low but firm answer: "I don't want to dwell on the past." In his early 20s, Hall read Skin of The Imposter and felt like he had been hit hard. She quickly remembered the scene of the women meeting, a black-and-white scene, with Irene looking fatally somewhere. She had no plans to shoot and wrote the script in ten days.

When he had the opportunity to direct, Hall immediately remembered the script in the drawer. She was determined to make a black-and-white film that would present Life in New York in the 1920s in 4:3 classic ratios. Through the test of finance and casting, she made "Imposter Skin". It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in early 2021, and Netflix spent nearly $17 million to buy streaming rights. After seeing the movie, my mother began to reminisce about being absent for decades.

With the help of PBS's Finding Your Roots, Hall traced his family history. Great-grandfather was born into slavery and worked for the government in the capital after slavery was abolished; great-grandmother's ancestors were among the 5,000 blacks who fought for American independence. My grandfather's fabrication of calling himself a Sioux leader and "pretending" to be white made the family history even more obscure. According to the show's solemn DNA test, she included 9% of Saharan South Africans and another 91% of European descent.

Hall's films emerged from new trends in the industry, with black-and-white pops such as "Companions," "Belfast" and "The Tragedy of Macbeth," and actresses such as Maggie Gyllenhaal and Kristen Stewart launching their own directing works. The Guardian described her as having a diverse pursuit of film, represented by 2016's Christine. The film is based on real events, and she plays Christine Chubbuck, a journalist who suffers from depression and social problems, and eventually commits suicide during the live show.

In 2018, allegations of sexual abuse against director Woody Allen resurfaced. Hall donated the film Midnight in Barcelona to Time's Up, hollywood's anti-sexual assault campaign, and apologized for it. "Make another woman feel silenced and ignored." She wrote, "I can't feel at ease. ”

In the pen of Professor George Hutchinson, the search for Larsen is far more than literature, and even more than racial issues. Larsen underwent a rich transformation of social modernization, which can be traced from the history of labor, health care, public health, librarianship, children's book publishing, urban geography, and of course, women's identity and the rise and flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance. She was exceptionally quick to disappear, and many years later the adaptation of the work into a film was still popular, and the questions always flashed in every detail.

Tessa Thompson and Ruth Nega (played by Irene and Claire) performed the vulnerability of "Ego". Tragedy came so quickly that they saw their own vulnerability in each other. There is a photo on the set in the long text, and the director is talking about the first meeting. Irene had dyed blonde hair and wore a bright pink dress. In a world divided in black and white, beautiful colors no longer matter. This has been the case for many years.

Southern Weekend reporter Song Yu