#49 ‘Intolerance’
Four Timelines, Zero Self-Awareness, and a Giant Monument to Male Ego
Intolerance (1916) is D.W. Griffith’s wildly ambitious, wildly self-serving response to criticism of his previous film—you know, the one that glorified the Ku Klux Klan. This time, Griffith wants you to know he’s actually a misunderstood humanist, bravely using four sprawling storylines across centuries to denounce prejudice and injustice. How noble. How grand. How utterly exhausting.
Let’s be clear: Intolerance isn’t a film. It’s a three-hour apology tour disguised as a biblical epic, a medieval drama, a French Revolution romance, and a gritty industrial-age tragedy—all tied together with a woman rocking a cradle in what can only be described as cinema’s first overextended metaphor. And yes, it’s a technical marvel for its time. But innovation is no excuse for incoherence—or hypocrisy.
Griffith cuts between ancient Babylon, 16th-century France, 1st-century Judea, and turn-of-the-century America with the grace of a man juggling his guilt in public. The message? Intolerance ruins lives. But the deeper message? “Please stop calling me racist.”
The “Modern” story centers around a poor, innocent couple torn apart by meddling reformers and the criminal justice system. The woman is framed, the man is nearly hanged, and Griffith wrings every drop of sentimentality from their suffering to make sure you know he cares about injustice—as long as it’s set to an organ score and bathed in soft lighting.
The women in this film? They’re either maternal angels, tragic martyrs, or hysterical moralizers. No nuance. No agency. Just archetypes to be exalted or condemned depending on how well they support the men’s moral awakenings. And speaking of awakenings—Griffith seems to think that simply not liking intolerance absolves him of actively perpetuating it just one year earlier.
And then there’s the Babylonian sequence: a lavish fever dream of elephants, bare midriffs, and CGI-before-CGI decadence. It’s glorious, yes—but also the cinematic equivalent of waving a jeweled dagger around to distract from the fact that you don’t understand your own point. The fall of Babylon is treated like high tragedy, but we’re too busy being blinded by set pieces to notice that the politics are paper-thin and the Orientalism is in full swing.
Yes, the set design is astonishing. Yes, the cross-cutting was groundbreaking. But so what? Intolerance wants to be a monument to moral progress, but it’s built on a foundation of shallow symbolism and reactionary self-defense. It condemns bigotry while bathing in spectacle. It tells you to care about justice while framing women and minorities as tragic accessories to the white male narrative arc.
2.5 out of 5 cradles rocked
(One for the Babylon sets. One for technical innovation. Half a star for audacity. The rest lost in the whiplash of four timelines trying to atone for one massive, unacknowledged sin. History may forget, but the cradle keeps swinging.)
