Shoes (1916)

 

Shoes: Summary and initial thoughts

How far would you go to get what you need? How do you reconcile duty and independence? How much do you owe your family?

These are some of the questions explored by Shoes, a silent film about a young woman who has to support herself, her parents, and her siblings on a paltry shopgirl’s salary, all while desperately needing a new pair of shoes.

Shoes follows Eva Mayer, a young woman who works at a five-and-dime store and is the sole breadwinner for her three sisters and her parents (including her long-suffering mother, who struggles to hold the family together on Eva’s salary, and her lazy and neglectful father, who refuses to seek work in favor of lying in bed and reading all day). 

In addition to her family’s poverty and Eva’s feelings of responsibility, Eva’s shoes are falling apart at the seams. She regularly crafts new soles for her shoes out of cardboard, and she has to remove splinters and mud from her feet at the end of every day.

So when Eva’s friend offers to “introduce her” to wealthy local singer Charlie, Eva is faced with a dilemma: she can keep waiting, hoping her father will find work and continuing to believe her mother’s promises that next week, no, really, next week we can afford a new pair of shoes for you, all the while living in physical agony and frustration…or she can sacrifice her dignity, just this once but in a major way, and finally—FINALLY—afford her new shoes.

What would you do?

Well, spoiler alert, but one night Eva doesn’t come home until the early morning. She can finally afford her new shoes. As she is being consoled by her horrified (yet, for the time, surprisingly understanding) mother, her father makes an announcement. He has, at long last, found a job.

Why is Shoes on the National Film Registry?

Shoes is one of a bevy of what we might call "social issue" pictures from the Progressive Era, but there are a few elements that make it stand out. 

One is the (for the time) no-holds-barred, gritty, raw, realness of what is shown in this film. Most viewers were impressed with the way filmmaker Lois Weber handled the realities of life for thousands of poor people. 

Still, many critics were offended by Weber's refusal to gloss over some of the nastier aspects of poverty. Watching Eva Mayer clean her feet at the end of a day spent wearing a barely there pair of shoes was too much for some of them, who felt that Weber had crossed a line in her realism.

I find it interesting that watching a woman clean her feet was considered by many to be more offensive than the implication that she sold her body to buy a new pair of shoes. I can only assume this is because Eva's night with Charlie is never shown, but I will still raise a concerned eyebrow about what this says about how women are viewed in our culture.

Another factor that I feel sets this film apart is the ambiguous tone of its ending. Eva returns home after her night with Charlie and is forced to confront her mother about what she has done. Despite the social mores of the time, her mother is not angry, dismissive, or insulting. Instead, she is consumed with guilt and sympathy. She embraces her daughter and commiserates.

It is shortly after this that Eva's father enters and announces that he has found a job, at which point the film pretty much ends. Was Eva's decision worth it? How does she feel about what she has done? What will be the consequences of her choice?

We never find out. This open-ended finale brings the film's commitment to realism to its natural conclusion. These are not open-and-shut questions, and Weber respects that. At a time when many films wanted to impress a moral take-home message on audiences, Shoes instead aims to make audiences explore these questions on their own terms.

Final thoughts on Shoes

Shoes hit me right in the gut, gradually and unrelentingly, then twisted a dagger into my heart at the end. I really like the ambiguity with which this film ends. It shows quite clearly that Eva lives in a state of constant deprivation, desperation, and obligation, and she does not make her decision to meet Charlie lightly. She is wracked by feelings of sadness, guilt, and shame by what she has done, but at the same time, she now has her shoes. It's heavy stuff.

This particular scenario may be difficult for modern audiences to relate to. Most of us already have multiple pairs of shoes at home, and cheap sneakers can still be bought for under twenty dollars, so the concept of selling your body for a single pair of shoes might seem foreign.

But the desperation brought on by poverty has not changed. The landscape of the country and the ways poverty manifests and in which we can earn money have evolved into something unrecognizable from the Progressive Era, but poverty is still poverty. Desperation is still desperation. And the choices some of us must face between dignity, virtue, and ethics on one side and subsistence, survival, and success on the other are alive, well, and becoming more complex. The country’s Eva Mayers never disappeared—they just changed shape. 

This should be required viewing for everyone.