Imagine being told you could not go to school because of your last name. Imagine, even, being barred entry into a city—unless you accepted a legal standing that made you part of a permanent subclass.
I’m not referring to current events, although I could be. That’s the thing about bigotry—it’s always a metaphor for, and a callback to, earlier bigotries. And so, while we turn on the news and see (or simply, live through) today’s hatreds, we can also turn to the past and see them manifested there. Even dramatized, as is in The Yellow Ticket.
You can say a thing a lot of ways. That’s why we watch silent films, isn’t it? To see how, when the sound’s taken away, some great artist got his or her point across. To be reminded of all the options.
Imagine, for example, that you’re watching the story of a man and his wife, both young. They were married under pretences the male party now considers false. They’ve grown estranged. Now he is out on a job and she is home. An intruder muscles his way into the house and attempts to take her away. Realizing, finally, that she would rather stay with her husband than move on, she dispatches the intruder. As his heavy body hits the floor, two dinner plates, set askew on the table behind her, slide into an even stack.
There is no intertitle to tell us their marriage is saved. But it is. The plates said so.
A Woman of Paris is most famous for who isn’t in it. Charlie Chaplin directed the film, a personal project to ensure star Edna Purviance’s lasting success, but aside from an indistinguishable cameo role, he’s nowhere to be found onscreen. History tells us this was a mistake. The movie fared poorly, with audiences showing up to see a Chaplin film and leaving disappointed. A Woman of Paris not only lacks a Tramp; it’s a drama to boot. Though no one who bought a ticket could have claimed to have been duped, their expectations were not met, and that’s what counted in the end.
The law today is the rich man’s law. The courts are the rich man’s courts. Lawyers speak not of courts of justice, but of courts of law, and this law can be twisted by hirelings schooled in deft evasion for the service of any rogue who is able to pay the lawyer’s price. This system becomes the rich man’s tool.
With a little tweaking, these could be the words of a current New York Times columnist. But they’re not. They’re part of a fictional op-ed; part of a script. When Mary Turner reads these words in a magazine, she’s inspired by them. If men can get rich on the backs of others, all within the letter of the law, then so can she.
