Elevators figure prominently in Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing; they mark the moments in which the protagonist Irene Redfield passes as white. When she takes the elevator up to the Hotel Drayton’s roof, an exclusively white space, it’s “like being wafted upward on a magic carpet to another world, pleasant, quiet, and strangely remote from the sizzling one that she had left below.” Later, when Irene leaves her old friend Clare Kendry and her bigoted husband, the elevator sends her “plunging downward.”
Rebecca Hall’s feature debut and adaptation of Larsen’s Passing retains the way the novel thinks about racial passing as a sort of technology that allows one to be in control of how one is seen. In Hall’s film, this technology takes the form of the camera rather than the elevator. The film begins with a tracking shot, of two women walking; the high contrast, black and white cinematography, along with the way the shot crops most of the women’s bodies makes it difficult to identify their racial identity. The camera looks at bodies obliquely, as if reluctant to reveal their identities—a sense we’re directly confronted with in the next scene in which Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson) appears, her head inclined downward, averting the camera’s gaze. The camera takes on Redfield’s sensibility—her desire to see but not be seen. When Redfield gets to the Hotel Drayton, we find that it’s quite empty. The only people Redfield sees is a young couple and two elderly women. The “whiteness” of the space is not linked to how many actual white people there are in the room or the physical space they take up. Rather, whiteness is a symbolic field that inscribes exclusion and privilege onto the hotel’s brightly lit, airy space. Even though there is hardly anyone around, Redfield’s self-consciousness is keenly felt, having less a desire to appear white than a desire not to be noticed at all. This is how Redfield passes.
Then she encounters an old friend, Clare Kendry (Ruth Negga), an African American woman who openly, brazenly in Redfield’s mind, passes for white and is married to a casually bigoted white man (Alexander Skarsgård), who doesn’t have a clue. Redfield and Kendry recognize in each other a kindred spirit, though Redfield feels a strong ambivalence towards the way in which Kendry has made a whole life of passing as white. At times Kendry’s passing appears a defect of moral character, a genetic inauthenticity, while at others it merely reflects a double bind both characters share: shame both in the ability to pass as white, and shame that one might not. Hall’s film feels like a timely contribution to how we discuss issues around self-expression and identity now, for the way the film engages the psychoanalytic concept of introjection: the way one internalizes and adopts as one’s own the hostile ideas or attitudes of others. As self-defeating as it sounds, the function of introjection is to manage feelings of loss and melancholy, to cope with the reality of living in occupied territory.
W.E.B. Du Bois notes in his essay “Conservation of Races” (1897) how much race and its consequences depend on the perception of just three things—“color, hair, and bone”—as if these things mean anything in themselves or can even be categorized along racial lines. Hall’s film works deftly with this notion that morphology, a person’s physical characteristics, is malleable and variable such that they can never conform to a fixed categorization according to race. And yet once a designation of a person’s race is made, the social and political consequences are the furthest thing from malleable—they appear oppressively absolute.
Perhaps the single most notable aspect of Hall’s adaptation is how the cinematography expresses race as an ever shifting visual language, rather than, as Kendry’s husband would see it, a fixed, biological concept. The film plays with shadow and light to show the changing hues of Redfield’s skin when she is in Harlem, in contrast to the overexposed, white tones when Redfield and Kendry are downtown. One advantage the novella has is its third-person narrator, whose voice brings us closer to Kendry’s inner life than the film, which remains anchored in Redfield’s point of view. As a consequence, the film doesn’t quite know what to do with the story’s dramatic end, which would have been better served if it had been able to better unpack Kendry’s self-divided character. Nonetheless, Hall’s debut film is an exemplary treatment of a novella whose adaptation is long overdue.