SOURCE: "The Great Mother Domesticated: Sexual Difference and Sexual Indifference in D. W. Griffith's Intolerance," in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 3, Spring, 1989, pp. 511-54.

[In the following essay, Rogin analyzes the sexual undercurrents of Intolerance.]

A giant statue of the mother goddess, Ishtar, presides over Intolerance (1916), the movie D. W. Griffith made after his triumph with The Birth of a Nation (1915). Ishtar sits above Babylon's royal, interior court, but the court itself is constructed on so gigantic a scale that it diminishes the size of the goddess. Perhaps to establish Ishtar's larger-than-life proportions, Griffith posed himself alongside her in a production still from the movie. The director is the same size as the sculpted grown man who sucks at Ishtar's breast; both males are dwarfed by the goddess' dimensions.

Ishtar connects Griffith to the concern with originary female power current at the turn of the twentieth century. The appearance of the New Woman and the attention to the matriarchal origins of culture were signs of a crisis in patriarchy. But the great mother could support masculine reassertion as well as female power. Ishtar will help us see how.

Ishtar, the naked great mother, displays an unambiguous sexuality. Griffith complicated her sex by posing himself between her legs. Far too small to be the goddess' lover, perhaps he intended to look like her baby—the baby of the mother he'd created. But both Griffith's position in charge of the movie and his position in front of the camera suggest another possibility. Was Griffith supplying the great mother with her missing phallus? Was the director, like Freud at about the same time, linking the absent maternal phallus and the baby?

These questions may seem to have less to do with Griffith than with current critical fashion, and to deflect attention from the director's purposes and from his movie. Griffith, however, had organized his two most important previous films around the real and symbolic male organ. The castration of a black rapist climaxes the original version of The Birth of a Nation. And a phallic mother dominates Griffith's first, feature-length movie, Judith of Bethulia (1913). The censorship controversy surrounding Birth, moreover, the controversy that produced Intolerance, posed Griffith (as he saw it) against emasculating female reformers. Attention to Griffith's film history will serve here to introduce Intolerance and clarify Ishtar's function in that movie. The subject of the phallic mother in Intolerance, far from being foreign to the founder of American film, emerges from Griffith's own preoccupations.

1

Intolerance aside, Griffith made only one feature organized around a dominating female presence. In Judith of Bethulia he placed a sword in the widow's hand. The central scene of that movie, organized for a sexual climax between Judith and Holofernes, climaxes when she cuts off his head.

"To decapitate = to castrate," wrote Freud, and Judith, I have argued elsewhere, illustrates Freud's links between decapitation, castration, and fetishization. By cutting back and forth between Judith's body parts and the sword in the moments before the beheading, Griffith fetishized Judith's body. He substituted eroticized part-objects for the whole. The fetish, according to Freud, reassured the male viewer that the woman had not lost her penis and that he, therefore, was not in danger of losing his. The fetish was a comforting substitute, wrote Freud, "not … for any chance penis, but for a particular quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but was afterwards lost.… To put it plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman's (mother's) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forego—we know why."

The fetish defended against castration anxiety, according to Freud; decapitation evoked it. Freud himself used the Judith story to link decapitation to castration, and Griffith's camera made the same connection. Griffith cut from Judith's raised sword to Holofernes' head bouncing down a step to the king's headless body. The lone limp arm (one arm and not two) suggests at once the single phallic member and its absence. Holofernes is the headless body, Judith the woman with the penis.

Film techniques—close-ups and cross-cutting—are peculiarly suited to display fetishization, since these techniques juxtapose part-objects. Film also depends on another mechanism central to Freud: scopophilia, the pleasure in looking. If fetishization denies sexual difference, however, according to writers in the Freudian tradition, voyeurism establishes it. The male viewer observes what the woman lacks; seeking woman as the bearer of the bleeding wound, his gaze subjugates female desire. Holofernes, watching Judith and the other dancing girls, is the spectator's surrogate inside the film. But Holofernes is disempowered, not empowered, by his male gaze. As Judith illustrates the Freudian connections, it fails to reassure the male viewer. Judith relinquishes her sexual desire in order to dismember the man. Whether one sees the movie as denying sexual difference (through the fetish) or establishing it (through the gaze), Judith (contra Freud on the fetish) acquires the phallus from the king.

Judith also subverts Freud's account of female penis envy. The boy fears losing his penis, according to Freud, and the girl wants to acquire one. The boy must give up his mother to keep his penis; the girl must give up her wish for a penis and become a mother. Accepting the "fact" of her castration, the mature woman relinquishes her desire to take the man's penis; she wants it instead to give her a child. "The feminine situation is only established," wrote Freud, "if … a baby takes the place of a penis." That female acceptance of sexual difference inscribes heterosexuality and reproduces motherhood.

The exchange of phallus for baby occurs in Judith, but it occurs in reverse, accentuating anxiety instead of dispelling it. Lillian Gish plays the domestic mother in Judith, as she would in Intolerance. Judith admires Gish's baby early in the film. The contrast between the two women points to a future foreclosed for the childless widow, and Judith replaces the baby with the sword. In addition to reversing Freud's normative, developmental direction, this substitution also supplies Judith with a baby of her own. That baby, issued forth from the hole in his torso, is Holofernes' head. A shawl covered Gish's baby so that only its head was visible. Judith wraps Holofernes' head in a shawl, places it in a basket, and carries it away. Like Freud's mature woman, Judith has given up her phallus for a baby. But she has first used Holofernes' sword to turn his phallus into her child.

Links that established sexual difference for Freud are threats to male identity in Judith. Why do the founder of psychoanalysis and the founder of film share a symbolism of dismemberment and sexual difference and yet place the opposite valence on it? Why does Griffith ally himself with the black widow? Elsewhere I have located Griffith in the patriarchal crisis of the turn of the twentieth century. Judith, I argued, did not simply confirm male fears about female power; she turned them to rebellious advantage. Creating a modern art form against the conventions of the stage, Griffith made Judith his instrument for parricide. But the alliance of women and youth that was intended to liberate the sons threatened to empower the woman instead.

The New Woman—as figure of power or sexual desire—was taking over Griffith's screen in the films before Birth. The Birth of a Nation, I have argued, displaced female danger onto black men. The New Woman (from the book on which Birth was based and from Griffith's earlier films) is refeminized and made helpless. Birth took the sword from Judith and placed it in the hands of the Klan. Judith's sword saved the Jewish nation. The ritualized castration of a black rapist gave birth to America. Judith decapitated a patriarch. Birth returned the sword to the father's ghost, the white-sheeted shade who rode with the Klan.

The Birth of a Nation established Griffith, in the words of Photoplay magazine, as "the founder of [the] modern motion picture." Amidst anxieties about the power of movies to dissolve ethnic, class, and sexual boundaries, Birth created a respectable, mass audience for film. Transcending both the immigrant origins of the early one-reelers and the psychological disintegration threatening Griffith's films, Birth brought together in the motion picture palace northerners and southerners, immigrants and natives, cosmopolitans and provincials, workers and bosses, shopgirls, and professional men and leisure-class women in a spectacle of national integration. The Birth of a Nation, Griffith claimed—in its unprecedented critical and mass audience appeal, in its unifying social content, and in its cinematic power to stand in for history—gave birth to the modern United States.

But The Birth of a Nation also created a split in the forces of reform. Although most cultural guardians endorsed the movie, liberal humanitarians joined the NAACP in a campaign to stop the film from being shown. The conflict over Birth was not the only free speech fight being waged in the spring of 1915. "Films and Births and Censorship" ran a headline in the April issue of Survey magazine. The same people who believed Birth was not "objectionable from the standpoint of public morals'" supported the federal government's ban on Margaret Sanger's paper, Woman Rebel, and her indictment for sending obscene matter through the mail. The same vice crusaders who encouraged audiences to see Birth jailed Sanger's husband for disseminating information on birth control. The Birth of a Nation, concluded the National Board of (Film) Review, was historically accurate and educationally valuable. William Sanger, ruled the judge at his trial, was a '"menace to society.'" As Birth swept the country in 1915 and 1916, advocates of birth control went to jail.

Female reformers like Jane Addams who wanted Birth banned from the screen opposed censoring birth control information. Survey noticed this paradox without resolving it. But beneath the fights over free speech, in which players switched sides, lay a deeper consistency. Although Griffith published a pamphlet, The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America, to attack the censorship of his movie, freedom of speech animated none of the adversaries in the battles over birth control and Birth. The two controversies turned, rather, on the control of female sexuality.

Those opposing both birth control and control of Birth wanted white men in charge of sex and procreation. Birth of a Nation warned against interracial sexuality, the alliance of white women and black men. Birth control, its opponents feared, substituted female pleasure for babies. And those who favored marriage for sexual gratification were compared '"with the Negroes. '" Birth control placed white women in charge of their own sexuality; it stood against the reproductive family and the paternal inheritance.

Birth raised the twin specters of the rapist and the mulatto to warn against interracial mixture. The eroticism generated by birth control, its opponents charged, would produce not mulatto babies but no babies at all. The mulatto and family limitation may thus seem like opposed dangers, the one implying proliferation and the other sterility, but they were united in racialist consciousness by the alleged infertility of the hybrid. They were united in the racial unconscious because both miscegenation and birth control broke the law that tied progeny to the legitimate father. Whether white women produced black children, no children, or children only when they chose, they deprived the white man of his paternity.

Woman, according to Freud, needed to shift her desire from phallus to baby to accept her femininity. The controversies over birth control and Birth, by contrast, uncover the father's stake in sexual difference. Both supporters of birth control and critics of Birth, in their opponents' view, wanted to sever the connection between the paternal phallus and the baby. Birth and birth control, for those supporting the former and opposing the latter, offered alternative forms of castration. Birth's castration restored power to white men. Birth control left the penis intact, but it performed a symbolic castration. Birth control advocates might defend their right to speak, but their speech, it was feared, destroyed the ground of the symbolic order itself in the words, laws, and conventions that sustained the name of the father.

That very alliance of blacks and women imagined by opponents of birth control wanted to suppress Birth. In his cartoons for free speech, Griffith depicted the censor and female reformer as allies, who expropriate his control over castration and birth. The censor's scissors cut film in one cartoon and attack a baby in another. Censors (who had already excised Birth's castration scene) threatened to take from the director his power to cut film. The threatened baby stood at once for the movie, Birth, for the "infant motion picture industry," and for the nation to which Griffith's movie had given birth.

Opponents of birth control shared Griffith's concern to save babies. They feared birth control would lead to a declining birth rate among Anglo-Saxons and to "race suicide." Germany had won "the warfare of the cradle" in the nineteenth century, complained Theodore Roosevelt; if Anglo-Saxon women did not produce more children, America would be swamped by the proliferating immigrants and blacks. Castration, suggested the uncensored Birth of a Nation, was the alternative to race suicide. Whether they used birth control or the scissors of censorship, women must be prevented from either stopping or choosing the male seed. Censorship, like birth control, delivered over to women and blacks the power to make history and make life.

2

The sexual politics of the two birth control controversies produced Intolerance. "Intolerance" appeared atop every page of Griffith's pamphlet defending free speech. Griffith was advertising his new film, whose enormous cost and length, and four parallel stories, made it the most grandiose project in the early decades of cinema. The proclaimed subject of Intolerance was intolerance in world history, from ancient Babylon through the life of Christ and the Huguenot massacre to the modern metropolis. The actual subject of the movie was female sexuality. The theme of Intolerance, like the theme of the film about the Klan, was birth. As opponents of birth control were insisting on the political importance of producing children, Griffith shifted from political regeneration to sexual reproduction. That shift in subject also entailed a shift in point of view, and both emerged from the controversies that generated the new movie. Birth wiped out female sexuality; its heroine, Lillian Gish, was an innocent, sexually menaced virgin. Intolerance celebrated the goddess of fertility and tied reproduction to heterosexual pleasure.

The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America, Griffith's anticensorship pamphlet, made blacks into the sources rather than the victims of intolerance. "The malignant pygmy [of intolerance] has matured into a caliban," in Griffith's rhetoric, and behind the mask of virtue in one cartoon lurks the dark shadow of the censor. Intolerance in no way retracted the racial politics of Birth. In the scenes of universal brotherhood that close both movies, no black faces appear. But Intolerance does depart, in a return of the repressed, from Birth's aversion of female sexuality. Prince Belshazzar, an "apostle of tolerance and religious freedom," is introducing goddess worship into Babylon. He worships at "Ishtar's temple of love and laughter." Intolerance is the hatred of heterosexual pleasure. Intolerance supports female desire.

In celebrating fertility, Intolerance stood with the opponents of birth control. Its sexual displays, however, not only reversed the direction of Griffith's previous movies but antagonized opponents of birth control as well. Intolerance undercut the oppositions in the birth control controversies in part, as we will shortly see, because Griffith was responding to the changing relationship of family life to urban public pleasures. He was also responding to the terms of Birth's censorship struggle.

Radical supporters of birth control, like Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman, placed birth control in the service of free love. No one attacked Birth of a Nation, however, by defending interracial sex, for the power of racial sexual taboos made such a position unthinkable. The white women and black men who favored censoring Birth did not demand the right to sleep together; they rather opposed those who discredited demands for racial equality by sexualizing them. Sanger led the fight for birth control in 1915, Addams the opposition to Birth. But women who opposed sexualizing racial issues were vulnerable to being labelled puritanical. The taboo on interracial sex, which Griffith exploited in Birth, now permitted him to depict female reformers as hostile not to racist hysteria but to sexual pleasure. He could present himself as repressing black sexual aggression, not female sexuality. Blacks, the promoters of intolerance in the free speech pamphlet, disappear from Intolerance, the movie. Their place is taken by sexually repressive American women, the NAACP's allies in its fight to censor Birth.

The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America depicted censors as witch-burners, the filmmaker as their victim. The persecuted witches in Intolerance are women of the street in the modern story and supporters of the goddess cult in the ancient story. Juxtaposed against the female reformer—demanding control over sex in one of the battles behind Intolerance and over movies in the other—is the ancient goddess cult of love and fertility. And the effects of that cult subliminally reach into the modern city as well. By making female reformers rather than blacks its target, Intolerance opened up a space for urban, public, female-based pleasures. Attacking one negative stereotype of the feminist, the spinster, the movie sympathized with another, the libertine. Female sexual desire normally disturbed Griffith. Yet his deeper fear of female indifference to men, which, as we will see, Intolerance locates in lesbian alliances, opened up room for female heterosexuality. Faced with the withdrawal of women's interest in men, Griffith celebrated not simply women who satisfied male desire but women who needed men to satisfy themselves. The campaign against Birth had given Griffith back, and for the last time, the sympathy for modern urban women and workers that lay at the basis of his art.

3

Although Ishtar rules Babylon, she appears in only one of the four stories that constitute Intolerance. Lillian Gish is supposed to preside over the movie as a whole. Echoing her brief appearance as mother in Judith, Gish rocks a cradle in Intolerance's opening scene. "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking" reads the line from Whitman. Repeated to mark transitions between Intolerance's four stories, the shot privileges motherhood as the source both of babies and of the movie. But the cradle actually serves to take Gish out of the body of the film. By marginalizing the domestic mother in the name of sanctifying her, Griffith made room for the love goddess and the spinster/lesbian.

These three female archetypes—Demeter, the great mother, Aphrodite, the love goddess, and Artemis, the celibate huntress and killer of men—appear in the concern with originary female power at the turn of the twentieth century. The first two are identified in J. J. Bachofen's Mother Right. Bachofen contrasted "the Aphroditean principle of carnal emancipation" to "the chaste, Demetrian character of a life grounded in strict order and morality." Artemis, so D. H. Lawrence believed, signalled the return of the woman under conditions of patriarchal repression. Griffith probably never heard of Bachofen or Lawrence, and Intolerance's world history does not line up in every detail with theirs. But the similarities point to a shared male obsession with the feminine, a fascination that feared and celebrated women and wanted to make their powers available to men. The Aphroditean Ishtar, the Demetrian Gish, and Miss Jenkins the female reformer structure Intolerance and embed it in a larger cultural history.

Ishtar is a fertility goddess, and she presides over marriage and reproduction. Love ends in marriage in Griffith's Babylon both in the shots of the marriage market and in the story of Belshazzar's wedding. Ishtar brings forth children, as the opponents of birth control wanted, and she is surely a mother on a pedestal. But she subverts Roosevelt's grounding of motherhood in male respect for '"anything good and helpless. '"

The goddess' size is not disjunctive with other representations of motherhood in turn-of-the-century America. Giant statues of women, most prominently the Statue of Liberty, are a feature of the period. Woman symbolizes the republic in the central building of the 1893 Chicago exposition. She holds aloft an upraised globe surmounted by an eagle and a staff with a liberty cap. Woman blesses the metropolis both in Chicago's White City and in Babylon. A ninety-foot suffragette graced the 1915 San Francisco World's Fair, and women with cornucopias symbolized female nurture throughout the country. Comparable maternal images would soon be produced to support American soldiers in World War I. A magazine advertisement for the Red Cross, for example, pictures a pietà demonstrating concern for suffering soldiers by "The Greatest Mother in the World," and in an advertisement for the Y. M. C. A. the "great … mother love" of a madonna della misericordia enfolds her fighting sons.

But these Christian icons, like the classical statues, contrast with the oriental Ishtar. Like Gish at the cradle, the classical and Christian representations desexualize motherhood. Ishtar resexualizes it. Ishtar was "'the mother of mankind … who awakens passion,'" "'the fruitful goddess of the earth'" and '"the patronness of love'" in the Bachofen-influenced sources on which Griffith drew for his portrait of Babylon. Ishtar blesses marriage, to be sure, whereas Bachofen's Aphrodite presides over a promiscuous sexuality. But bacchanals and the marriage market insist on the sexual origins of motherhood. Ishtar also shatters the opposition between sex and female virginity. "Vestal virgins of love," nearly naked dancing girls, serve the goddess. Each virgin enters the temple of sacred fire (Gish reported in her autobiography) and gives herself to a man who comes to worship there. Griffith shows viewers the sex of his vestal virgins, the source of their future motherhood. He moves his camera up the legs of one seated young woman, for example, to expose the blank, black space between her legs—the space Griffith will himself fill in his production still.

Babylon appeals to the prurient interest. By showing the fall of the city, Griffith may seem to disown responsibility for its revelry. According to that view Griffith, counterposing the destruction of Babylon to the rescue of the endangered modern couple, stands with the family and against the city. The director's other feature-length films would support such an interpretation. But the cultural context for Intolerance and the images that dominate the film demand almost exactly the opposite reading.

Urban dangers threatened the family, in the Victorian view, and the home was a refuge from metropolitan life. Urban progressives, by contrast, promoted public activities to transform and strengthen private, conjugal existence. In creating Babylon, Griffith was responding to efforts to break down the opposition between the family and the modern metropolis. He intended a narrative not of binary opposition between the ancient and modern stories, the city and the home, but of incorporation and progress. But Griffith's images undercut the synthesis to which his narrative aspired. Unlike his progressive contemporaries, Griffith could not sublimate the city into the family. The city generated an excess of pleasure, weakening defenses and stimulating repression; pleasure gave way to impersonal, institutional control. Gish stands for the modern family, but Ishtar and the spinster/lesbian take over her movie. Ishtar is the archaic, whole mother. Instead of providing the ground for modern maternity, however, she is simply defeated. Her fall drains woman of heterosexuality and splits her in two. The domestic mother and the reformer supplant Ishtar. Although they battle one another they are also deeply allied, for both signify censorship not simply of male sexuality but of female desire for men as well. The good woman will take over Griffith's cinema in the decade after Intolerance and ultimately deprive him of his power to make films. Intolerance, Griffith's last stand for the modern metropolis and the New Woman, shows the sources and the limits of his modernism. We turn first to the progressive context for Intolerance, then to the interwoven four narratives, and look finally at the images themselves.

4

The modern metropolis and the domestic mother were born together, as opposite sides of the same coin. The confined privacy of the home, in Laura Mulvey's formulation, protected against the chaotic crowd in the street. Severing reproduction from female sexual pleasure, as Thomas Laqueur has shown, Victorians separated biological and cultural maternity within the house from barren sexual excitement outside. But the urban world of entertainment and leisure posed threats to the middle-class family from below and from above. The lower-class city-by-night and the leisure-class, male homosocial tavern both threatened the ties that bound together the middle-class husband and wife.

Popular entertainments such as the pre-Griffith onereelers, originating on the margins of society, threatened the sanctuary of the home. But domestic melodrama domesticated the city-by-night, first in English theater and then in Griffith's one-reelers, by making the subject of popular entertainment into the danger to the home. Although the metropolis in domestic melodrama justified the family by threatening it, melodrama thereby maintained the family/city opposition. The places of popular, working-class entertainment, moreover, proved dangerously seductive to the middle class. The family triumphed in melodrama, but the city retained its subversive potential.

The middle-class family was under siege from upper-class forms of entertainment as well. Leisure-class culture separated the sexes, leaving women in charge of society and men seeking pleasure outside the home. Respectable men consorted with prostitutes; eating and drinking in taverns, they abandoned their children and wives.

Babylonian prostitution and orgies of food and drink associate the ancient city with modern, leisure-class decadence. Intolerance's modern story, in which the urban underworld threatens the family, had roots in domestic melodrama. But the movie was also part of the post-Victorian effort to bring the family and urban nightlife together. Babylon signified sensual excess and tyranny in the nineteenth-century imagination; it was the city as evil. The 1880s London campaign against child prostitution, for example, labelled the British capital the "modern Babylon." Vice crusaders were invoking "Babylon, the Great, the Mother of Harlots and of the Abominations of the Earth" from the Book of Revelation. The Jews were enslaved in Babylon, but though Judith of Bethulia took the side of the Jews against the invading Assyrians, Intolerance omits the Babylonian captivity. Griffith's invading Cyrus may "war on vice" like the purity crusaders, but he liberates no Jews, for Intolerance stands against the war on vice and with Babylonian pleasure. Griffith presented urban public entertainment not as a threat to conjugal happiness but as an alternative to the restrictive Victorian family.

As progressives saw it, the repressive family generated its opposite, the disruptive city-by-night. Progressives in the new helping professions would mediate between the family and the city. They would organize leisure and drain it of its disruptive potential by sponsoring such institutions as urban parks and planned recreation, the school, the settlement house, the reform state, and the motion picture palace itself. Intolerance evoked one of these new institutions in particular: the urban cabaret. Ishtar, the ancient goddess of pleasure, blesses modern cabaret culture.

Cabaret culture strengthened the family by bringing the sexes back together in arenas that offered a good time. The cabaret promised to end the opposition between children and the family on the one hand, and sexual gratification on the other, the opposition enshrined in the birth-control struggle. Lewis Erenberg writes,

By permitting informal entertainments for respectable women, the cabaret marked a new departure in relations between the sexes and challenged the Victorian confinements that had limited the behavior of both men and women. In an open environment, good women could mix promiscuously with people of unspecified moral character from whom they formerly had been rigidly separated. By opening up an urban, public area, the café opened up respectable culture to a wider, more spontaneous world. [Steppin Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture].

The public dance craze of 1915-16, contemporaneous with the filming and release of Intolerance, insured the success of the cabaret. Dancing made cabarets profitable, transforming urban nightlife from all-male feats of drinking and eating to heterosexual performance. Public dancing offered a mixture of immediacy and distancing. Audiences observed a show whose dancing stars became celebrities; at the same time, members of the audience also danced, breaking down the audience/performer distinction. A comparable mixture of immediacy and observation characterized the progressive style in journalism, as genteel readers were made to feel present at behindthe-scenes revelations of real life. Movies also drew members of the mass audience into an immediate experience where they participated as observers. With its scenes of dancing and urban entertainment, Intolerance mirrored the audience participation in cabarets.

Babylon may have been exotic in progressive America, but new styles of dress brought the foreign into restaurant, cabaret, and boudoir. "Back to Babylon for New Fashions" headlined Photoplay in April 1917. "When Intolerance brought us Babylonian modes, straightway the designers took notice," announced the magazine. Fashion designers were making "the filmed ladies of Belshazzar's court" into "the real inspiration of the day." Intolerance fed a trend that it did not originate. Already in 1914 the New York Follies Marigny had announced an Arabian Night in its series of special balls. "When I turn into Broadway by night and am bathed in its Babylonic radiance," wrote an anonymous contributor to Atlantic, "I want to shout with joy, it is so gay and beautiful"

Two displacements made possible this celebration of urban pleasure: the extrusion of class conflict and the excision of the Negro origins of the cabaret. Intolerance registers them both, the first by what the screen displays and the second by what it hides. Working-class struggles disrupted urban America at the turn of the twentieth century. The metropolis threatened the middle-class family not only in pleasure-by-night but also in work-by-day. Class conflict at the point of production placed the middle class under siege, threatening the boundaries that insulated the home from the struggle for existence. (The 1894 Pullman strike, for example, kept Jane Addams' ailing sister from being reached by her husband and children before she died.) Like urban nightlife, class conflict corrupted the work ethic and invaded the family.

The cabaret shifted value not only from the restrictive, moralistic family to scenes of public entertainment but also from the conflicted realm of work to what Billboard magazine called the leisure-time "eager pursuit of pleasure." Intolerance domesticated leisure; and it removed class conflict from the open metropolitan present to the confined rural past.

A strike sets in motion Intolerance's modern story. Although a title places us in a midwestern city, we are shown a pastoral scene. From a traditional perspective it was radical to allow class conflict into the American countryside. Such Griffith one-reelers as The New York Hat and The Painted Lady, however, had already depicted a repressive, rural familial environment; the city (as in "The Musketeer of the Slums") was a liberating alternative. The strike in Intolerance perpetuates that opposition. The patriarchal factory owner, Jenkins, lines up with familial forces of repression. Although "the boy" (Bobby Harron) loses his father in the strike, that tragedy frees him to go to Chicago.

The most important industrial conflicts of the late nineteenth century, the Haymarket riot and the Pullman strike, took place in Chicago. Griffith, however, derived his industrial violence from the Ludlow massacre—the 1915 Colorado mining strike in which company militia killed strikers and their families—and not from an urban labor dispute. John D. Rockefeller, who controlled the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, was the model for Jenkins. Ludlow was contemporary with Intolerance; the struggle and its investigation by the U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations dominated newspaper head-lines in the months prior to the first filming of the modern story. But by placing his strike in the rural past (the past symbolically, since the countryside stood for an older America, and the past in the movie's chronology), Griffith freed Chicago to stand for a progressive future.

The war between capital and labor threatened middle-class America. But Griffith's workers are bowed down even before their strike and the director sustained sympathy for the working class by depicting its defeat. He would apply that technique of threat containment, successful at the beginning of the film, to Babylonian sexuality. But Griffith wanted to shift from work to pleasure, to sublimate female sexuality and not simply displace it. As the conjunction of sympathy with defeat slid from working-class victims to the fall of Babylon, it would ultimately undo Griffith's project.

The strike, removed to the countryside, is shown, but the urban blacks who originated cabaret culture entirely disappear from the film. These black entertainers replaced the minstrel show, where whites in blackface had created the first form of American mass culture. The original cabarets retrieved the role of performer from whites playing blacks. Minstrels, moreover, had mocked many targets through the mask that mocked blacks, but even in a comic mode black sexuality was off limits. The urban New Negro in the first cabarets was a sexually explicit entertainer. Birth of a Nation, to be sure, had made its whites in blackface libidinal, but only to invent a black sexual menace. Birth climaxed and displaced minstrelsy by turning its blackface performers into New Negroes. The movie located the New Negro in the Reconstruction South, where he did not exist, demonized him as a rapist, and punished him. Intolerance eliminated New Negroes entirely from the culture they had brought into being.

This excision followed the lead of the cabarets themselves. "Coon songs" featuring sexually active blacks peaked in the 1910s; by 1915 white performers like Sophie Tucker were replacing the blacks who had influenced them. At the same time that whites took over the forms of cabaret entertainment developed by blacks, Griffith eliminated blacks from the modern city. He moved them to his ancient story instead, where "Ethiopians" briefly appear as members of Cyrus' invading army. The blacks play rural primitives, threatening the cosmopolitan culture that was actually being expropriated from them.

Urban nightlife links Intolerance's modern and ancient stories, the two episodes that dominate the film as a whole. Griffith conceived the modern story first and began filming it as a separate movie, "The Mother and the Law." The massive scale and success of Birth, however, and the attacks levelled against that film, made "The Mother and the Law" an anticlimax. The director reconceived the modern plot as one of four stories that would cover world history and that his theme and camera technique would unify. The theme of "The Mother and the Law"—the husband faces execution for a crime he did not commit; the wife loses her baby—may seem to have nothing to do with Ishtar. But the metropolis spawns the romance between the young couple, and Ishtar's modern female antagonists generate the family tragedy.

"The dear one" (Mae Marsh) and the boy are both victims of the strike, but they only meet once the workers' defeat drives them into the city. The boy becomes an urban sophisticate under the tutelage of a gangster. The dear one attracts him by imitating the dress and walk of a woman of the streets. From one perspective Jenkins is the bad father, contrasted to the good but helpless fathers in the family. The strike Jenkins provokes kills the boy's father and sends the girl's to die in the city. But the movie also lines up all the fathers on one side of a generational conflict. The fathers stand for restriction, and the new urban family arises from the death of the old.

Prostrated by the first kiss between the boy and the dear one, her father dies soon after. He cannot adjust to the new conditions of urban life, a title announces, but his death offers opportunity as well as danger. The dear one goes out with the boy; when he tries to force his way into her apartment, she bars the door. Her resistance elicits a proposal of marriage, which replaces forced entry with domesticity. The marriage proposal, however, does not eradicate sex. In a shot sequence that deliberately eroticizes the break-in, the dear one opens her door just enough for the boy to place his head in the slit and kiss her.

The dear one and the boy bring street excitement into their room. But their new home will be menaced by the conflict between pleasure-seeking women and the forces of repression, the conflict that dominates both the ancient and modern stories. Griffith juxtaposes Babylon's "vestal virgins of love" to the "vestal virgins of uplift" in modern America. These menacing female reformers, the women who attacked Birth, close the public places of pleasure, the saloons and dance halls (and, by implication, the motion picture palace as well). A fine shot of ballroom dancing among the rich, with remarkable depth of field, introduces the modern story. The rich have their pleasures; workers dance in cafes. But working-class pleasure antagonizes the factory owner, Jenkins, and his "unmarried sister." Jenkins is a lonely, dried-up old man; he turns away from the working-class women who flirt with him in the street, retreats behind his desk, and gives his sister the money for reform.

Who are the women who tantalize Jenkins? Single working women in early twentieth-century New York (the city where Griffith made his one-reelers in the years before Birth and Intolerance) spent their evenings on the streets. They frequented public dance halls and other popular amusements. Seeking adventures with male companions, young women mixed easily with strangers. Their language and behavior broke down the traditional, rural distinction between the loose woman and the good girl. The exchange of sexual favors for gifts, meals, and entertainment was part of this working-class, urban nightlife; but although vice crusaders stigmatized working girls as loose women, and sought to raise the age of sexual consent to control female independence, the women of the streets depicted at the beginning of Intolerance are not professional prostitutes.

The law creates prostitutes in Intolerance by stamping out public entertainment. The prohibition of public drinking and dancing drives pleasure underground. Instead of going to dances, men pick up prostitutes; instead of frequenting saloons for drinks, each person distills his own. While men look on, women are rounded up and taken off to jail. Prostitution, Griffith's contemporaries believed, originated with the sacred Babylonian fertility rites, and brothels in urban America contributed to the "Modern Babylon." But since Babylonian girls earned their dowries by prostitution, according to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, they were learning to be prostitutes and wives at the same time. Gilman deplored the Babylonian origins of modern marriage; Griffith celebrated it. The vestal virgins of love who display themselves for male pleasure are the ancestors of the modern women of the streets. Griffith in both the ancient and the modern stories places himself on the side of these women. Social purity reformers opposed birth control because, by separating sex from reproduction, it would make all women into prostitutes. Intolerance, by contrast, derived the modern family from female sexual availability.

The high priest of Babylon opposes goddess worship. He secretly allies himself with Cyrus and the invading Persians. The bearded Cyrus resembles Holofernes. Like Holofernes and like Jenkins and the Babylonian high priest, Cyrus is a patriarchal villain. Since he is not weakened, as Holofernes is, by sexual ambiguity and desire, he is not in the power of women. And female power is even more menacing than patriarchy. The truly sinister figures in Intolerance are Miss Jenkins and her spinster allies. Instead of depicting sympathy for the Ludlow workers by such female reformers as Addams and Florence Harriman, Griffith makes their hard-heartedness cause the strike, as they raise the money to stamp out leisure-time pleasure by convincing Jenkins to cut wages at work.

"When women cease to attract men they often turn to reform," explains a title. The camera contrasts the misshapen "vestal virgins of uplift" to the pleasure-loving women of the streets. The Committee of Seven that orchestrates reform is composed entirely of women. Like the "Female Army" of suffragettes condemned in Walter Heape's Sex Antagonism (1913), Griffith's "spinsters" have "usurped" maternal authority. But Griffith opposes his reformers not simply to Victorian mothers but to pleasure-seeking young women as well. He cuts from the virgins of uplift in the modern story to the woman taken in adultery in the movie's third story, the life of Christ. Christ protects the adulteress from those who want to stone her. Cut to the modern prostitutes being taken off to jail. Even in the schematic Christ episode, which contains but five brief scenes, Griffith celebrates domesticity (the marriage at Cana and "suffer the little children") and condemns intolerance of female desire.

Catherine de Medici orchestrates the Huguenot massacre in Intolerance's fourth story, where the theme of religious intolerance also dissolves into sexual discontent. Although the Huguenot massacre supposedly has religious sources, religion is not visible on the screen. Catherine's hostility to romance between Protestant and Catholic derives from sexual perversion, not religious conviction; she opposes not Protestants but heterosexual love. Catherine, a large, mustachioed, masculine woman, is surrounded by effeminate courtiers. She controls "the heir to the throne, the effeminate Monsieur le France." At the massacre's climax Catherine's troops slaughter "bright eyes" and her betrothed.

Sexually punishing women—Catherine de Medici and Miss Jenkins—stand not just against pleasure but against the family as well. Urban nightlife made female sexual pleasure support the family. Catherine and Miss Jenkins, by contrast, embody a female invasiveness freed from masculine control. Female heterosexuality in Intolerance, as Bachofen had also argued, binds women to men. In the feminist debate of the early twentieth century, repeated today, over whether free (heterosexual) love liberates or entraps women, Griffith endorses entrapment.

Judith of Bethulia dismembered a king by feigning sexual desire, and flickers of genuine passion for Holofernes threatened her resolve. Ishtar, the mother goddess, blesses heterosexual love. Unlike Judith, moreover, Ishtar is not a human actor but a statue. The actual women with power in Intolerance, Catherine de Medici and Miss Jenkins, are demons. Two sympathetic women do take independent initiative in the film. One is the Babylonian mountain girl; the other is "the friendless one," the gangster's girlfriend in the modern story. Both are defeated. The mountain girl's ride to rescue Babylon fails to save the city and the friendless one will be incarcerated for shooting the gangster. Both women are allowed initiative not simply because they fail but also because their desire subordinates them to men. The mountain girl tells the priest's underling to "put away the garments of a female man. I shall love none but a soldier." She acts from her worship of Belshazzar, just as her modern counterpart is in thrall to the gangster. Alone in the city, the friendless one slips from working-class girl into kept woman. She gives herself to "the musketeer of the slums" and remains his sexual slave until she kills him. (A statue of a naked woman grasping a pillar appears on the screen after the friendless one and the gangster become lovers.)

Women without men threaten the family, the family to which the city has given birth. The underworld is part of the city, to be sure, and Griffith twins it with female reformers as opposing threats to the home. The musketeer frames the boy to punish him for leaving the gang, consigning him to the grid of prison and asylum that will also incarcerate his baby. But the threatened family, as we have seen, owes its existence to the underworld. Griffith counterposed the family to the city in his other features, virtue to sexuality. Instead of glorifying the family, however, that contrast made it claustrophobic and fragile. Intolerance derived the family from urban, sexual opportunities to give it a stronger foundation.

But Griffith did not believe in the synthesis of family, metropolis, and sexual pleasure to which his movie aspired; he could not imagine a sexually powerful man within the domesticated interior. Domestic melodrama, saving the family at the expense of its erotic urban roots, takes over the form and content of Intolerance. For when the boy relinquishes his gun to the musketeer, in order to marry the girl, he surrenders his manly power. Once in the family the boy is innocent victim, not active protagonist. After the gangster assaults the dear one and is shot by the friendless one, police arrest the husband for murder. As he is feminized, the friendless one plays the role of Judith, the female avenger.

Female reformers take the dear one's baby away, and the law condemns the boy to hang. Griffith has retreated to familiar thematic and technical ground. He cuts from preparations for the hanging to the ride of the friendless one to stop it. He intercuts a series of rides to the rescue in the modern story with the ride of the Persians against Babylon and with the mountain girl's ride to warn the city. The Huguenot massacre and the road to Calvary also appear. Babylon is destroyed, the modern family is reunited, and the friendless one faces prison for playing Judith. But Birth had already offered, in a more unified and powerful form, the climax through parallel montage. The four stories add grandiosity rather than cinematic or social complexity.

Melodrama subsumes the world in "an underlying manichaeism," writes Peter Brooks [in The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess], "putting us in touch with the conflict of good and evil played out under the surface of things." Through "heightened dramatic utterance," melodrama supplies "grandiose moral terms" to everyday, domestic life. Since melodrama relies on visual signs and intensified, dreamlike states, it is peculiarly suited to silent film. "The indulgence of strong emotionalism; moral polarization and schematization; extreme states of being, situations, actions; overt villainy, persecution of the good, and final reward of virtue; … high emotionalism and stark ethical conflict"—these all characterize Intolerance and reach their height in the climax. But since melodrama relies on the "logic of the excluded middle," it can only counterpose opposites and not create something new. As in Intolerance's climax, melodrama offers a return to innocence instead, "the misprision and recognition of virtue." But Griffith's ride to rescue innocence defeats the director's project, for the failure to give birth to new authority leaves behind the splits—between family and city, virtue and pleasure, phallus and female body—that it was the movie's purpose to overcome.

Parallel montage, the juxtaposition of contrasting shots, is the film technique most appropriate to melodrama; Griffith falls back on it to bring his movie to an end. But against the melodrama that drives the narrative forward to its oedipal conclusion in the home stand the female icons Ishtar and Artemis. The two sets of opposed images over which they preside resist reduction to melodrama and give Intolerance its moments of power.

One set of images—nightmare distortions, anticipating German expressionist cinema—depicts modern institutional space. The other set—crowd scenes and dynamic montage—anticipate Soviet constructivism. Griffith brings fresh excitement to the populated crowd scenes of strikers, dancers, and revellers. Like the nightmare, institutional visions that are their negative, these scenes embody the movie's originality, for they are where Griffith brings something new into being. But the powerful filmic images undercut the narrative progress that the movie's ideology intends. Griffith wanted to counterpose reform institutions to the family and to sublimate urban public pleasures into domestic happiness. But reform and the family alike survive urban, public defeat. Since the family cannot contain, either thematically or visually, the forces that pull against it, the visual power of Intolerance turns Griffith's domestic melodrama upside down.

Postwar German filmmakers borrowed the moving camera from Intolerance in the service of visual disorientation. They may have been influenced by the movie's spatial distortions and depersonalized figures as well. Intolerance's expressionist scenes open up into large, empty, misshapen spaces that dwarf the humans within. Like other modern artists, Griffith gives power in these shots not to the figure but to the ground. A long shot shows Jenkins alone behind his desk, a tiny figure stranded, as Robert Sklar puts it, in a sea of floor space. Counterposed to this "positive negative space," in Stephen Kern's term, are crowds of multiplied, uniform figures. A shot of the blank,, empty prison exterior when the boy enters jail is followed by the sight of the milling mass of anonymous, replicated prisoners inside. The reproducibility of these figures is meant to condemn impersonal institutions. But the motion picture itself, with its reproducible images, stands implicitly alongside them.

Three vestal virgins of uplift, in the most terrifying expressionist scenes, invade the dear one's room. These women, who dress and move alike, constitute (in Henry Adams' words on the death of his sister) "a vision of pantomime with a mechanical motion." They link the bad mother to the machine. The three women examine the dear one's baby on their first invasion; on their second they knock down the mother, seize the baby, and take it away. (Judith turned Holofernes' head into a baby; the vestal virgins of virtue appropriate the mother's baby for themselves.) Griffith next shows "the Jenkins foundation," a modern, impersonal building. Deep corridors accentuate the large, empty anteroom in the foreground. Tiny, robotlike figures move through the halls. These miniaturized, mechanical women scurrying through empty space accentuate (by contrast) the nurturing function of Ishtar's size. The goddess fills the space left blank by the absent, negative, institutional mother.

The institutional spaces, however, are not completely empty. Barred cribs in which babies lie unattended line the wall of the nursery. Uniformed female attendants ignore the babies to dance with one another while a lone man looks on. The long-angled shot, which shrinks and depersonalizes the figures, accentuates the disturbing effect of women dancing with women. This scene contrasts to the female dancing done with and for men in lively, populated dance halls. Griffith links imprisoning institutional walls to women who neglect babies and men. The walled institutions define the bad mother. Cut from the dancing nurses to the Huguenot massacre, presided over by a gloating Catherine.

Catherine displays masculinity by dominating weak men in Griffith's depiction of degenerate court life. Griffith's court scenes are fantasy, but they accurately indicate that the male nightmare of female erotic bonding post-dates the aristocratic age. Feudal sexual disarray implies male homosexuality. The director's modern lesbians form a community of women. Women also dance with women in Griffith's True Heart Susie (1919) to symbolize hostility to the family. But that scene lacks the cinematic and social interest of its counterpart in Intolernce. By linking lesbian sexuality to modern institutions, Intolerance displays a historically situated male nightmare. Artemis reappears in the modern city as a maiden in uniform.

Just as Griffith's celebration of Ishtar responded to progressive hopes for the family, so his demonization of lesbians made visible contemporary fears. The concept of lesbian identity, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Ann Ferguson have argued, emerged in the early twentieth century partly as a response to a new medical discourse of deviance and partly as the self-definition of women in urban subcultures. By weakening the patriarchal power of fathers and husbands, industrial capitalism increased the life chances of women—in wage labor; in urban boarding houses where unmarried women lived without parental supervision; and on the streets and in public places of entertainment. The New Woman in these settings posed the threat not simply of free love and economic autonomy but also of erotic female bonding.

The threat of the New Woman took different forms in progressive America—free, heterosexual or bisexual love in which Aphrodite was faithful to no one man; female independence, where women lived alone or with others of their sex; and self-proclaimed lesbian identity. Griffith was using the mannish lesbian to demonize all female autonomy.

On the one hand Griffith discredited female independence by (homo)sexualizing it. On the other hand, however, the fear of lesbianism expressed anxiety about the sexual turn of women away from men. Late nineteenth-century men had attacked unnatural mothers, who favored birth control and abortion. By the progressive period the New Woman was demonized not just for rejecting motherhood but for rejecting men. Roosevelt had warned against race suicide in 1902 to attack the female college graduates who refused to marry and reproduce. Within a decade such women were labelled lesbians. First-generation New Women like Addams and Gilman had replaced personal with social mothering. The next generation, emerging as Griffith filmed Intolerance, made claims for homosexual and not just homosocial satisfaction. Women cross-dressed and danced together in the nineteenth-century homosocial female world before lesbianism was invented. By the progressive period such behavior was pathological from one point of view, a self-proclaimed statement of new sexual identity from another.

The companionate family responded to the threat that women would abandon the home, the threat for which lesbianism stood. By contrast to the Victorian family, the ideology of companionate marriage joined sexuality to domesticity. But by defining the husband as breadwinner and the wife as nurturant and expressive, the companionate family reinscribed gender difference against the lesbian threat. A sexuality tied to fertility would recontain women inside the family.

Intolerance made visible the lesbian threat to the family. Worse yet, it located the danger in the very progressive institutions that were supposed to restore the family. The helping professions—teaching, social work, urban planning—provided careers for progressive women. Reformers saw the public sector and the family in relations of mutual superintendence and support. But the helping professions also provided space for communities of women, working and even (as in Addams' Hull House) living together. Describing such female institutions in turn-of-the-century England, Martha Vicinus writes, "The very idea of an effective women's community was frightening. It implied that women could be self-sufficient and that men were dispensable." Griffith's modern city thus generated two prognoses: heterosexual libido domesticated by public institutions and recontained within the family, or a lesbian alliance of women and the state against the family. Progressive optimists looked forward to the first possibility. They imagined reform women in the helping professions using the state to foster domesticity. Intolerance denounced the helping professions for undermining the family; the director wanted to replace female reformers with motion pictures. But in spite of Griffith's wishes, Intolerance placed the sexual family not in the American future but in the destroyed, Babylonian past.

Babylon is destroyed, in Griffith's narrative, as domestic melodrama reunites the family against the lesbian menace. The Babylonians celebrate their apparent victory over Cyrus with a bacchanal; it exposes them to Persian invasion. Revellers delay the mountain girl, and her ride to the rescue fails to save the city. The friendless one, by contrast, reaches the governor with her confession before the three hangmen cut the rope that would drop the boy to his death. (Their rehearsal is shown.) Griffith multiplies identical hangmen in his final image of murderous state power. Compare the cutting of the rope in this image with the cutting of film in Griffith's attack on state censorship. The three women barely visible in the background as Gish rocks the cradle move forward to join her in the movie's final shot. The three vestal virgins of uplift who took the dear one's baby away are now domesticated; like Gish, they revolve around the cradle. A priest, helpless to save the boy from the state, was able only to hear his confession. The new institution for the urban masses, the motion picture, replaces the church as the agent of salvation. Film alone can rescue the family from the movies' progressive institutional competitors.

But Griffith's images undercut his domestic restoration. Only the populated, constructivist images have the power to counteract the expressionist ones. This side of Intolerance—the active crowds, short shots, and dynamic montage—gave birth to Soviet cinema. Sergey Eisenstein and V. I. Pudovkin were decisively influenced by the film, and the latter abandoned chemistry for moviemaking after he saw it. Lenin himself arranged to have Intolerance shown throughout Russia, where it was exhibited for a decade; the movie enjoyed its greatest success in the Soviet Union. But Griffith's revolutionary film technique worked against his narrative intentions. Images that celebrated disorder inverted the cinematic values of Birth of a Nation. That reversal might merely have signified a shift in the sources of domesticity between the two movies, from cloistered female victimization to public female pleasure. The populated scenes are tied, however, not to apotheosis but to defeat.

Birth glorified the organized Klan mass and demonized the disorderly Negro mob. Intolerance reverses that choice. It first does so in the strike scene early in the film. The mob of strikers resembles Birth's Negroes and the militia lines up like the Klan, but Griffith has switched sides. His camera, instead of celebrating the line of force as in Birth, creates a classic example of dynamic montage. Griffith, as Sklar has said, cuts back and forth in shorter and shorter shots from the strikers, to their anxious families, to Jenkins isolated at his desk, to the militia. Jenkins, alone in empty space, gives the order to clear his property. The militia fires on the strikers, in the scene's culmination, and the camera pans over open space as the workers retreat.

The heavily populated spaces in the shots of this scene, like the technique of montage itself, offer more than the eye can see. Griffith displays the industrial conflict in different pieces and from different angles, shattering the illusion of a single, all-encompassing, observer's perspective. Dynamic montage democratizes and pluralizes point of view, decapitating the classic omniscient narrator. At the same time, by throwing images on the screen, dynamic montage puts the director and not the democratic mass in charge. Disorder and multiplicity place the audience in the power of the man behind the camera, for he determines what viewers see. The method of the scene undercuts its message, locating viewers in the relation to the camera that strikers are to the factory owner.

Just as dynamic montage overwhelms the individual viewer, so it does not encourage individual characters to develop and breathe. The technique creates sympathy for people as a mass rather than for individual, working-class lives. Joined with expressionist cinema, therefore, montage techniques place pressure on the traditional, autonomous subject, the individual that progressive reforms hoped to rescue. Expressionist images turn inward, arousing anxiety about a future for man alone; the strike scene celebrates the crowd.

Expressionist cinema dwelt on illness, according to Eisenstein; dynamic montage created something new. Eisenstein aligned the revolutionary film technique with social revolution. Dynamic montage signifies the director's power in Intolerance, but it registers the slaughter of the crowd.

Griffith also used dynamic montage to display Baby-lon's interior court. He celebrated the city by moving his camera freely around it (mounting an elevator on a rail-road car to sweep the camera up and over the city walls, the first crane shot in movie history), and by juxtaposing different parts of the urban landscape. Intolerance and Judith, the two films set in ancient cities and presided over by a woman, are the only two Griffith films to employ dynamic montage. The conjunction of woman and the city in these films freed Griffith from traditional, rural, patriarchal constraints. If the lesbian lies behind Griffith's expressionism, Ishtar presides over his dynamic montage. But the city that lies open before Griffith's camera is equally vulnerable to Cyrus. We see Babylon from the inside only after the illusion of victory has relaxed the city's guard. The opening of the populated bacchanalian spaces foreshadows a city open to invasion.

The Persian/Babylonian battle at the end of the film repeats the strike scene at the beginning. Massed Persians, shown in silhouette and head-on, echo the ride of the Klan. Griffith cuts from the Persians in directed, forceful movement to seminude, exhausted dancing girls. Babylonian revelry has left the city defenseless, but though there are traces of Birth's black mob in the character of the Babylonian crowd, our sympathies now lie with the city. Massed uniformed figures were heroic in Birth. Now, as the militia at the beginning of Intolerance or the Persians at the end, as the multiplied vestal virgins of uplift or the uniformed prisoners in jail, they are destructive of urban pleasure.

Birth celebrated the sword of castration that reestablished white male power. Cyrus repossesses that sword, '"the most potent weapon forged in the flame of Intolerance. '" '"Seize now the flaming sword, '"Ishtar's priests exhort her, but"' "the warlike Ishtar" '" (in one of Griffith's sources) fails to follow in Judith's footsteps and decapitate the king. The most prominent sword in Intolerance is the one the camera dwells on as it runs through the Huguenot ingenue.

The intended moral of Intolerance is that Aphrodite the sexual matriarch, threatened by Artemis the cultural superego, must give way to Demeter the domestic mother. Griffith wants to contrast institutional reform to the family, Jenkins alone at his desk to Gish rocking the cradle. But the two shots of single figures behind single pieces of furniture, alone in empty space, echo rather than contradict each other. Both contrast to the populated, teeming, alive urban scenes. The opposition between claustrophobic, vulnerable family interior and empty, impersonal institutional space only emerges once the modern Aphrodite, the modern city, is reformed. After the prostitutes are taken away, Griffith depicts first the dear one threatened in her small room, then the empty institutional space of the orphanage. He cuts to the contrast with Belshazzar's feast, with its eating and sexual display. Other filmmakers would incorporate such scenes into the 1920s celebration of consumption. For Griffith they remained transgressive and forbidden. Cecil B. deMille would make sexualized biblical epics for family entertainment. Birth control advocates, in a comparable domestication of the subversive, linked contraception to conjugal intimacy, not female sexual freedom. Griffith wanted to bring female sexuality, public pleasure, and the family together, but he could not do so. Griffith bade farewell in Intolerance to his embrace of the modern city and his flirtation with female sexuality.

Griffith's failure to move forward into the culture of consumption is more instructive, nonetheless, than the accommodations that succeeded him. The alliance of women and the city retains its subversive potential in Intolerance, as the retribution for Belshazzar's feast, the fall of Ishtar, leaves behind only domesticity and the state. That denouement returns us to the production still of Griffith between the great mother's legs, the visual with which this discussion began. What does the narrative of Intolerance as undercut by its images say about the fetish, the phallic mother, and Freud's narrative of female sexuality?

5

Ishtar presides over Intolerance as the archaic mother attentive to her sons. The modern woman is split between lesbian and domestic; Ishtar is whole. But woman cannot be whole in male fantasy, according to Freud, because she lacks a phallus. In the production still that commented on and completed his movie, Griffith gave her one: himself. Supplying Ishtar with her phallus and baby, Griffith endorsed Freud's equation of the two. But Freud insisted women made that equation; Griffith shows that the need for it is male. By what he shares with Freud, Griffith displaces the doctor from his privileged position as interpreter of sexual fantasies and makes him a patient, too. The production still from Intolerance, read as the conclusion of the movie, suggests the place of phallocentrism in establishing sexual difference.

Male gender identity, Nancy Chodorow has argued, is based on difference from the mother. The phallus is the sign of that difference; it signifies the separation of the male child from the original, maternal dual-unity and his entrance into language and culture. That separation, however, is fragile. At the same time that the penis signifies sexual difference and independence from the woman, it invokes the danger of its loss. To imagine a woman with a penis is to restore the originary unity and deny castration fear.

The integrity of the separate male ego, symbolized by possession of a penis, succeeds and defends against an earlier psychic unity, that of the unseparated mother and baby. Freud, however, began not with the mother but with the penis. In analyzing fetishes as substitutes for the penis, he avoided the primary male substitution of a part for the whole, the substitution of the phallus for the union of mother and son. The fetish stands in for the phallus because the phallus is already a fetish.

The original wholeness was the mother/baby symbiosis, the retrospectively imagined all-powerful dual-unity before consciousness of separation. The phallic mother restores that wholeness (Freud, sharing the male wish, had it exactly backwards) by substituting the penis for the baby. The phallus replaces the breast, in Geza Roheim's formulation, as the male identifies his own (fluid-producing) genital with the absent maternal source of pleasure. In posing before the nursing Ishtar, Griffith pointed to the phallic mother's origins in the baby at the breast. By restoring the missing penis to the mother, the son restores her connection to him.

Freud had proposed, like Griffith in Intolerance, to free women from sexual inhibition in order to save the conjugal family and to bind women to men. But the doctor lost faith in that enterprise as the early mother forced her way into his work. At that point, instead of analyzing the son's relations to his early mother, Freud turned to the girl's relationship to her missing penis. Insisting on sexual difference, the later Freud celebrated patriarchy. Griffith, unable to restore a credible patriarchy, exposes the mother repressed in Freud's project.

Calling the mother-son bond "altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships" in his writings on female sexuality, and attributing preoedipal conflicts to daughters and not sons, Freud voiced a male wish. Griffith displays the trouble with the early mother against which that wish defends. Freud continued, "A mother can transfer to her son the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself, and she can expect from him the satisfaction of all that has been left over in her of her masculinity complex." Claiming the mother wanted to make the son her extension, Freud voiced the son's wish to complete the mother by becoming her phallus. Griffith, creating Judith and posing before Ishtar, represented that desire.

Griffith imagined, with Judith and Ishtar, different versions of the archaic mother. The early mother who is whole by acquiring a sword threatens to turn on the son. Both Freud's and Griffith's Judith placed the phallus/ baby equation in the service of female revenge, woman's resistance to sexual difference. Ishtar, the mother goddess, sanctified sexual difference. The phallus turned into baby restores the mother to the son.

On the one hand, then, Ishtar is the great mother who takes care of her creator, her son. But giving Ishtar back a phallus also revealed the failure of Intolerance to dissolve the early mother into the companionate family. The phallus stands for the move from identification with to desire for the woman. But in that shift there is a loss. Griffith wanted the family union—father, sexual mother, and baby—to replace the original dual-unity. The progression that began with Judith, the woman with the penis, was to end in the modern home. The failure of the family to include sexuality and empower the father left the early mother as unsublimated excess. Since the baby could not do all the work of the maternal phallus, Griffith restored that organ to Ishtar.

Women, according to Freud, had to accept the "fact" of their castration. That fact is a male wish to derive female from male development, turn women into lesser men, and make motherhood their fulfillment. Turning women into castrated men, however, destabilizes the sexual difference it is intended to guarantee. The male oscillates between reassurance that woman lacks a phallus and is therefore different and inferior, and the wish that she have a penis so as not to remind him of castration. Phallocentrism, therefore, does not simply establish sexual difference; it enforces sexual hierarchy against the threat of castration, of men becoming women, of the end of the difference between women and men.

Lesbian reformers are the bearers of that threat in Intolerance. "What does a woman want?" Freud asked. Ishtar signified what Griffith wanted women to want; the lesbian scenes are the nightmare against which Ishtar as whole mother defends. Lesbian fiction, Sandra Gilbert and Catharine Stimpson have suggested, replaces the binary structure of sexual difference with multiple, fluid relations—like those caricatured in Griffith's communities of mechanical women. Griffith makes those women masculine to claim they want to be men; what he fears (the dancing scene shows) is that they do not want men.

Birth control, its opponents charged, allowed women to behave like men, for it severed sex from reproduction. Lesbianism, a more perfect form of nonreproductive sexuality, allegedly completed the phallicization of women. But the mannish lesbian, as depicted in Intolerance and contemporary cultural documents, defended against a still deeper fear that the object of female sexual desire was not the male at all.

In denying female sexuality, the culture that produced Freud and Griffith identified sex with the phallus. When the sexual woman returned, she brought with her in Griffith's production still that same identification. As the woman with the penis/baby, Ishtar insisted on her orientation to men. Disowning the male need for the woman with the penis, Intolerance attributed that need to lesbians. But lesbian sexuality, its proponents began to argue in the progressive period, emancipated the woman from desire for the phallus. Lesbianism aimed to establish woman as genuine difference, not as a castrated man who needs penis and baby to complete her. Since the lesbian—she claimed and Griffith feared—required neither the male organ nor his child, she would make the man insignificant. The oedipal mother chooses another man, but the son who has relinquished her can become a father himself. The lesbian lives in a world absolutely closed off to the man. She chooses a love object so different from the son that he cannot replace the object of her desire. The lesbian is the woman fatally and finally lost to the male-child.

"We should be … indifferent," says Luce Irigaray, naming Griffith's nightmare. Irigaray gives female indifference the three meanings it has in Intolerance: women no longer defined by their difference from men; women indifferent to men, leaving the mirror empty by refusing to reflect them; and women undifferentiated from one another, forming a female community. The distorted, empty spaces in Intolerance's expressionist scenes depict the anxiety of female indifference.

Posing with Ishtar, Griffith filled the empty space between her legs with himself. He filled the empty space in the movie with urban crowds and with the intercutting of dynamic montage. But the family restoration, I have argued, failed to incorporate these alternatives to the bad mother. Griffith's position between Ishtar's legs alludes thematically to Cyrus' invasion and dismemberment of the city, formally to the director's moving camera and dynamic montage. Unable to locate masculine reinsertion within the family, however, Griffith failed to lay the archaic mother to rest. The progressive cultural synthesis between the companionate family, regulatory institutions, and the city-by-night flourished in the urban 1920s. Intolerance, conceived as the foundation of that synthesis, could not support it. The movie's disintegration exposes the warring forces—regulatory family and surveillance state, subversive city and independent woman, female sexual self-definition and lesbian identity—that modern American political culture is still trying and failing to contain.