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Hypocrites
Oct. 14th, 2018 08:43 amUnlike Lois Weber’s short film Suspense, her movie Hypocrites has not aged well. It’s a ham-handedly didactic movie that nonetheless doesn’t seem quite aware of what the word hypocrisy means. It is, in fact, hypocritical for a politician to campaign on HONESTY (he has a giant banner that reads HONESTY) while taking backroom bribes on the sly, but I wouldn’t call it hypocritical for a family to sit weeping at a dying child’s bedside, even though they may have hastened the child’s end by allowing her to stuff herself out of a box of INDULGENCE.
Yes. There is a literal box of INDULGENCE. Her brother is reading out of a book entitled SEX, by the way.
Anyway. The parents may be careless about nutrition, but that’s only hypocritical if they also take every opportunity to preach the importance of plain wholesome food for children while feeding their daughter on INDULGENCE. But there’s nothing in the movie to show that they’re espousing standards they don’t live up to.
The movie is most interesting to me because of the storm of controversy it aroused at the time. In the movie, these instances of hypocrisy and not-actually-hypocrisy-but-whatever are revealed by an allegorical figure of Truth, as portrayed by the ghostly figure of a naked woman (shot with double-exposed film, which does look pretty cool), who has to walk around with one arm held awkwardly over her breasts because it’s 1915. Shock! Scandal!
I have no proof, but I suspect that Weber chose to portray Truth as a naked woman precisely because she knew it would cause this reaction, and wanted to highlight the hypocrisy of film censorship boards. And in that, at least, she was successful.
Yes. There is a literal box of INDULGENCE. Her brother is reading out of a book entitled SEX, by the way.
Anyway. The parents may be careless about nutrition, but that’s only hypocritical if they also take every opportunity to preach the importance of plain wholesome food for children while feeding their daughter on INDULGENCE. But there’s nothing in the movie to show that they’re espousing standards they don’t live up to.
The movie is most interesting to me because of the storm of controversy it aroused at the time. In the movie, these instances of hypocrisy and not-actually-hypocrisy-but-whatever are revealed by an allegorical figure of Truth, as portrayed by the ghostly figure of a naked woman (shot with double-exposed film, which does look pretty cool), who has to walk around with one arm held awkwardly over her breasts because it’s 1915. Shock! Scandal!
I have no proof, but I suspect that Weber chose to portray Truth as a naked woman precisely because she knew it would cause this reaction, and wanted to highlight the hypocrisy of film censorship boards. And in that, at least, she was successful.
