What Happened In The Tunnel

In Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 short film, What Happened in the Tunnel, miscegenation emerges as a filmic narrative.  In the film, there are three main characters riding a train: a white woman, black maid and white man. The climax of the film occurs when the white woman responds to the flirtations of the white male passenger by trading seats with her black maid as the train passes through a dark tunnel. When the train emerges from the tunnel the white male is seen unknowingly kissing the black maid, to which he immediately reacts with anguish, disgust and embarrassment. All the while, both the white woman and black maid are enthusiastically amused by the white male’s incidental romantic blunder. I start with this one-minute filmic creation because it is one of the first cinematic interactions to perpetuate the idea of blackness as the ultimate embodiment of undesirability in opposition to the epitome of desirability found in whiteness. Also, although meant to be a comedy, What Happened in the Tunnel also signifies one of the first cinematic representations of miscegenation, which is later deemed illegal by the Production Code Administration from 1930-1956.