is comprehended in a beaten path from the box-office, to back-stage, and thence to an eating place. He doesn’t know America as yet, except as a huge aphis which he may milk.
It follows, therefore, that in all probability he is equally ignorant of American home life. He has not yet been able to understand what American domesticity means. The American home is an almost unknown quantity to foreigners of the Eastern races. An Armenian woman who has lived in America for five years says that she knows nothing of an American home save what she can see through the windows as she passes. This, of course, is a lack not easily to be bridged over. It may not be strictly true that the majority of movie producers do not know the interiors of American homes, but there is certainly every indication that they have not caught its spirit, and that their misrepresentation of it is more than a false picture, it is also a most dangerous influence.
It is dangerous to foreigners who gain their most impressive ideas of American life from the stage. It is dangerous to Americans who fancy that the life of the screen is the life that is lived by “the better classes.” If we could map the community mind of whole sections of our cities and trace the impressions of American people, American habits and American standards which those mind-groups hold, we should then see the dangerous misrepresentation which movie producers have given to things American. Falsity, artificiality, criminality and jazz are the keynotes of the mass of screen productions.
American life is bare and meager to the Eastern mind. It is not sensuous enough. It is devoid of intrigue. Its women of the homes do not play continuously and hysterically on the sex motif. It is a life made good and durable by interior qualities of faith and quietness—and these, of course, are ennui and death to the Orientally minded.
There lies the whole secret of the movies’ moral failure: they are not American and their producers are racially unqualified to reproduce the American atmosphere. An influence which is racially, morally and idealistically foreign to America, has been given the
