Reel History 9: Amistad

In 1839, a Spanish ship named La Amistad, transporting 53 Mende slaves from one Cuban port to another, was taken over by its cargo, who killed the captain and most of the crew. The former captives, led by Sengbe Pieh (or Joseph Cinque, his given American name), demanded that the ship's navigator take them back to Sierra Leone, but he instead took them to Long Island, New York, where they were detained and endured a two-year long debate over their legal status. Were they free Africans or Spanish property, and where were they to go?

Amistad is the story of not only those slaves and their legal struggles, but of the United States as a whole and its struggle with slavery. In this movie we are given a tour of the American slave mentality, traversing the countryside with Martin Van Buren (seen stumping for the next election at a time when politicians didn't stump) and John C. Calhoun as they speak about impending war and black people's freedom, a crash course on the main players in anti-abolitionism. This is the problem with the movie; in an effort to give it lots of context and place it within the history of abolition, it compresses history in an effort to tell a stirring story.

And you can't say that Amistad isn't stirring. It's a Steven Spielberg film- heck, it might be THE Spielberg film. If you took the elements that Spielberg is both praised and criticized for, Amistad has them all- the swell of the score as Djimon Hounsou shouts 'give us free!' over and over again; the speech Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams gives to the Supreme Court which convinces them to give the Mende their freedom; the overly emotional moments towards the end that, depending on the viewer, may break down the rest of the movie (see: Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan). Some will think these things are beautiful and they resonate with them emotionally; others think it hokey and cheap. I am inclined to go with the latter more often than the former, but it's a long movie with lots in it; I will say definitively that Anthony Hopkins as former president and legal representative John Quincy Adams is the best (former) presidential performance I've seen in a movie yet, so there's a plus.

But Spielberg's methods mean that the history offered in the movie, however emotional, isn't exactly true to life. Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University and a man much more qualified to talk about historical inaccuracies than I, runs through some of the problems of the movie in this article. But if you're not inclined to read that, here are the problems that match the thesis of this here blog post: the characters of the movie are constantly bringing up the impending Civil War (which was twenty years in the future), and talk about the case as if it has a bearing on slavery at home (when it fact it was all about the international slave trade, which had been outlawed).

The latter issue is the bigger one. The movie revolves around lawyer Roger Baldwin (played by Matthew McConaughey) realizing that slaves aren't property, they're people. Apart from making white people the focus of yet another story ultimately about black people, it doesn't reflect the truth about slavery in America. As Foner says:

Most seriously, Amistad presents a highly misleading account of the case’s historical significance, in the process sugarcoating the relationship between the American judiciary and slavery. The film gives the distinct impression that the Supreme Court was convinced by Adams' plea to repudiate slavery in favor of the natural rights of man, thus taking a major step on the road to abolition.

The Amistad case is made more important than it actually was; Foner again: 

Incongruous as it may seem, it was perfectly possible in the nineteenth century to condemn the importation of slaves from Africa while simultaneously defending slavery and the flourishing slave trade within the United States. 

He highlights another case of slave revolt, this one with a less pleasing American slant:

In October 1841, in an uncanny parallel to events on the Amistad, American slaves being transported from Virginia to Louisiana on the Creole seized control of the ship, killing some crew members and directing the mate to sail to the Bahamas. For fifteen years, American Secretaries of State unsuccessfully badgered British authorities to return the slaves as both murderers and “the recognized property” of American citizens. This was far more typical of the government’s stance toward slavery than the Amistad affair.

Another less-than-fun fact that sheds a less-than-flattering light on the Supreme Court: 16 years after the Amistad case in 1857, the Court made their landmark decision in the Dred Scott v. Sandford argument, saying that African Americans, free or not, were not and could not be American citizens and therefore could not sue in federal court, and that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in federal territories acquired after the founding of the nation. A 7-2 ruling, this case was much more a factor in the inevitable Civil War than the Amistad case, but it seems Spielberg just couldn't resist giving that power to his own movie, albeit with a more positive spin for the Court and the country.

But hey, as a bit of history, it's one that definitely needs to be told. It's just not as important as Spielberg is leading us to believe.

NEXT TIME: Gangs of New York, violence, and immigration

Reel History 8: Django Unchained, the past, and the present.

Here be spoilers to a recent, high profile movie that you may or may not have seen! Advance cautiously. 

I had a former Facebook friend (henceforth known as FFF) who once wrote that slavery was a 'Hollywood problem'. This came after he wrote a status 'rhetorically' asking why, if so many black people are lining up for welfare, do we not reinstate slavery? (his response to no one taking this bait betrayed his true beliefs). I assume he meant American slavery, my FFF being inspired by the embarrassing American reconstructionist Rousas Rushdoony, and that he took kindly to Rushdoony's view that American slave owners were benevolent overlords (Rushdoony also said that interracial marriage was 'an unequal yoking' and opposed integration). I deleted him not long after he posted this, but I still think about it from time to time, especially when reading about the lives of people like Frederick Douglass. If I and FFF were still friends and I felt the need to respond to his question, I might post something like Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, 1865:

"Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

Or I might say that black poverty in America is the result of many factors- cycles of poverty; blatant discrimination (Jim Crow) and subtle discrimination (red lining, white flight, busing); I might point to violence against civil rights leaders and black Americans who had the audacity to believe they were just as worthy of respect as their fellow white Americans, or that the rules Rushdoony wants to abide by would allow FFF to sell his daughters into slavery if he finds himself in a financial pickle. But the thing is, his comment is part of a resurgent pattern of forgetting the vast sins of the past by focusing on the particular sins of the present. Not just in comment sections on news stories (as per the Internet @#$%wad Theory coined by known Internet @#$%wad Mike Krahulik) or on that occasional echo chamber of racism and sexism that is Reddit, but in actual, 21st Century political and cultural opinion: John Derbyshire's 'The Talk'; Jason Richwine, (formerly) of the Heritage Institute, writing a dissertation concluding that "no one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against"; the ongoing debate about what the Civil War really was about- slavery or merely states' rights?; whether slavery was really all that bad because back in Africa they sold slaves all the time! and even so they didn't really have it so bad here (see the awful revisionism of Rushdoony may he never gain real traction in Christianity); the anticipation of black rioting after Do the Right Thing ("dynamite under every seat" said one critic) or the Trayvon Martin verdict; leaders like Michele Bachmaan and Rick Santorum signing a petition saying that enslaved black children were more likely to grow up in a stable home environment than the black youth of today; etc., etc. On and on it goes, revising history to make people feel better about today.

All this makes the timing of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained more understandable. At first, it seemed like Tarantino was just making his way through history's greatest oppressions and turning them into revenge thrillers; first Inglourious Basterds had Jews getting the ultimate revenge on Adolf Hitler, now Django has a black freed slave shoot the living heck out of a plantation full of white people. You're left anticipating what atrocity he could pick up next- the Israelites in Egypt, perhaps?

But Django isn't part of a bloody, stylized travelogue through history. Django is a response to the present, and QT is using a story of an ennobled free slave as a big 'screw you' to anyone seeking to lessen the atrocities of the past and their legacy. Its colloquialism could be seen as disrespectful to the memory of enslaved Americans (Spike Lee certainly thought so); its pulpiness could be seen as a reduction of the awfulness, much in the same vein as the people I listed. But I don't see it that way. Tarantino has a genre style and loves exploitation, and he can deal with issues that couldn't be touched by the filmmakers he admires because of their own nationality (Sergio Leone, for instance). I wouldn't call it reducing atrocities for entertainment- watching slaves get whipped and torn apart by dogs is hardly entertaining- but rather bringing an issue into a sphere Tarantino knows best.

Django Unchained is the story of a slave named Django, unchained by the bounty hunter Dr. Schultz because he needs Django's help identifying some wanted men. The two become a team and, after finding the men, go on a virtual warpath, killing and collecting the bounties on the South's worst criminals. Their goal quickly turns to finding and freeing Django's wife from a plantation known as Candyland, owned by the evil Calvin Candie (a villain Tarantino says was the first one he actually hated). The scene in which Candie gives a speech on the phrenology of black people is almost as tense as the barroom card game in Inglourious Basterds, and truly is one of Tarantino's best.

Let's focus on some of Tarantino's historical...uh, reinterpretations, which are completely intentional and calculated so as to directly oppose the revisions of people who romanticize the antebellum South. The KKK, which is lampooned in the movie's funniest scene, wasn't formed until after the Civil War (the movie takes place in 1858, three years before the attack on Fort Sumter and the beginning of the war; though to be fair, the movie portrays them as the Regulators, not the KKK); as William Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker put it,  "there are moments where this convex history works brilliantly, like when Tarantino depicts the Ku Klux Klan a decade prior to its actual formation in order to thoroughly ridicule its members’ veiled racism."

There was also no Mandingo fighting, none that is documented anyway. It was against the economic self-interest of the owners to pit their slaves against one another, so say the experts. But the absolutely brutal Mandingo fighting scene is based less on reality than one of Tarantino's favourite movies: a blaxpoitation film called Mandingo, wherein a slave is trained to bare-knuckle box other slaves. I haven't seen it, but given Tarantino's enthusiasm and Roger Ebert's distaste, it sure sounds like an... interesting movie.

The movie, if you haven't realized, is incredibly violent, and the gory repetition of the violence makes it quite an uncomfortable experience. Take the repeated flashbacks to the dogs pulling apart a runaway slave that haunt Schultz, or when Django shoots Candie's sister (Candie himself killed by Schultz earlier in the film) without a flinch. The latter scene and the other executions surrounding it is Django's 'shooting-Hitler-in-the-face' moment, a use of extreme violence to keep the film in its exploitation corner all the while blow away the monsters of history, monsters who are also human and not totally unlike you (look at Hitler enjoying the movie of Allied soldiers getting shot and ask yourself, 'did I not have that expression watching him die?').

Tarantino sets out to challenge taboos, to make us flinch and think and grab the edge of our seat all at the same time. He doesn't reduce the violence of history so much as shove it in our face; not just the whippings or the dogs, but the all-too-real belief in the 'science' of phrenology and all the biological and social justifications it represents, my FFF's regards on the subject included. Quite frankly, FFF's comment that slavery is a 'Hollywood problem' is just a part of the expectation that fits the comfort of non-black people, aggressively opposite to white guilt; slavery ended 140 years ago, and the Civil Rights era more than 40- give us a break! Give up your cultural standards because hey, we're no longer racist, quit blaming the past!

Bullshit, says Django Unchained- loudly, aggressively, and defiantly. 

NEXT TIME: Amistad and the problems of inspirational Hollywood stories. 

Here's some of the main cast addressing the movie's critics. Jamie Foxx gives some good perspective on his character Django.

And for a really interesting map of the slave populations during the Civil War period, a map used by Abraham Lincoln himself, go here. If you're less inclined, here's a table from that map with the slave populations around 1860. Mississippi, where Candieland is located and the subject of a future blog post, has a slave population higher than its free population (as does South Carolina).

Reel History 7: Jefferson in Paris and slavery on film

Jefferson in Paris seems like your typical Merchant Ivory film: a long period-piece with lavish production values, repressed sexuality due to social norms, etc. And it's a fine movie, I suppose- I think Nick Nolte was miscast in the leading role as Thomas Jefferson, as he kind of looks too grizzled and angry. Compare him to Ken Howard, who played T.J. in 1776.

Nick Nolte- People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, 1992

The movie is about Jefferson's time as a diplomat to France, and his love life there- the affair with Maria Cosway (she of the 'jump a fence and break a wrist' incident), and his follow-up relationship with his slave (and half sister-in-law) Sally Hemmings. The Hemmings affair was something that was denied for a while, but reading more recent biographies of T.J., it seems historians just accept the overwhelming evidence that he had an affair with a slave and she had several of his children. Jefferson in Paris, which doesn't really have a good focus on one thing or another, includes this matter and does it tastefully and well, as you would expect from Merchant Ivory.

Jefferson in Paris has it pretty easy when it comes to telling a story of slavery- Jefferson was, like the title suggests, in Paris, and thus mostly avoids having conversations about race and the hundreds of slaves he owned over his lifetime, or the hundreds of thousands owned by many throughout the United States. It focuses on just two: James Hemmings, the slave Jefferson took with him and had trained as a French cook, and James' sister Sally who came to France taking young Polly Jefferson to her father. Once they step foot in France, the two Hemmings are free, so during the film they are technically paid workers and not slaves (though Jefferson makes it clear the situation won't stay the same when returning to America). And though the conflict comes up, it's just one of several conflicts the movie feels compelled to address.

And that's something seen in movies about this time; it's a monumental task to take on the institution of slavery, and, let's face it, futile to tackle in one or two movies. But that doesn't stop someone like Steven Spielberg from trying to jam it all in anyway. It's a complex history with debatable beginnings- slaves came with some of the first Dutch colonists to Jamestown to fill the need for labourers on tobacco plantations, but how it became a full-blown American institution, even as it was banned in Great Britain, is so complex that it's hard to get an exact answer to the question. But, by and by it became an awful way of life and early America wasn't going to let it off easy.

And the Founding Fathers had complex views on it and clashed about them all the time. In an original passage of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson condemned Britain for bringing slaves in the first place. The passage was unanimously voted out by the Continental Congress:

"he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain."

Unfortunately, Jefferson could never bring himself to break away from slavery; he owned thousands of acres of land and owned hundreds of slaves over his life, only freeing the children he had with Sally Hemmings when they turned 21. He did, as president in 1807, forbid the United States from participating in the international slave trade, but there were enough slaves already in the country to keep the market thriving.

Compare him with John Adams, because once you do it becomes hard to write off the great Jefferson's beliefs as of the times. Adams never owned a slave, always employing 'freemen both as Domesticks and Labourers, and never in my Life did I employ a slave' (as he put it in a letter to abolitionists in 1801). His wife, Abigail, after an epidemic of dysentery ripped through Adams' hometown of Braintree, she wondered whether it was God's punishment for the sin of slavery. But even John Adams wanted slavery to be eradicated in a slow, steady way. He believed that slavery was already on the outs, which, though Adams was a smart guy, was a stupid assumption.

I've had a tough time writing about slavery in film, so I may have to take the movies dealing with slavery one at a time. Either the movie tries to compress to much history to make the story feel more significant than it was (Amistad), or they just don't give a sh!t and just take the oppression and use it to fuel a story of vengeance (Django Unchained). I'll say this now, Django is much more entertaining than Amistad, but that doesn't mean it has something more profound to say about slavery (or does it? Maybe it's a stupid question to begin with). I can't wait to see 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen's newest movie about a free black man captured and sold back into slavery, which I'm sure has more to say than either movie.

Reel History 6: The Devil and Daniel Webster

It's 1840, we're in the midst of Jacksonian Democracy, and America is still seen as a collection of loosely unified States (they say 'the United States are rather than 'the United States is' and so forth). One man rises above to protect the innocent farmer from those who would take what's his- and that man is Daniel Webster.

Note: Some of this piece comes straight-up from a post I wrote last October; bear with me and my self-plagiarism.

It's just after Labour Day as I write this, which means that summer is done and we all just stop pretending we like the beach and let autumn, the greatest season of all, take over. There is nothing I don't like about fall- the cool weather, the leaves, the fact that football becomes bearable to watch just by virtue of the climate. It's great!


There's also this aura of spookiness that pervades everything, not only because of the impending Halloween season. Maybe it's that after the sheer brightness of summer, everything becomes a little more muted- it becomes darker sooner, the foliage starts fading, and you could almost feel ghouls and specters walking down every little path in the crisp evening air. And it's this time of year that I like to enjoy a little favourite of mine, a movie about history's greatest monster: no, not Jimmy Carter, THE DEVIL. The Devil and Daniel Webster, an oft-overlooked 1941 classic, pits one of the greatest orators of the pre-Civil War era, Daniel Webster, in a courtroom against the Devil, for the soul of one Jabez Stone.

In this movie, the Devil, or Mr. Scratch, as he is known in the tale (they dubbed the anthropomorphic Devil 'Old Scratch' in the Faustian tales of New England, tales probably influenced by German settlers to the New World), is hardly scary at all, at least from the audience's point of view (though I wouldn't want to meet him on some dirt road in the middle of the night). The Devil of The Devil and Daniel Webster hardly seems like the Biblical Satan, more like a mischievous imp whose sole purpose is to make deals with local farmers for their souls. And it's not like Jabez Stone was Job- he was angry, reluctant to go to church, and continually consarn'd it around his wife and mother, hardly a model soul.  

The Devil really let himself go

But that makes sense, I suppose: legends like the one this story is based on (the movie is based on a short story of the same name, written in 1931, which is in turn based on a story by Washington Irving written in the real time of Daniel Webster) put really small regions in the center of the universe, so it makes sense that the Devil would have the time to walk around the New Hampshire countryside, waiting for some poor sap to make the decision to sell his soul for riches and a hot Devil-mistress. And [spoilers!] Daniel Webster wins it in the end, another triumph of American ideals over the forces of evil.

The movie is great, in the It's a Wonderful Life vein but with less sap and more spook. There are many creepy scenes, like when the shadow of this pig-nosed demon is tempting Daniel Webster, or the ghoulish courtroom climax full of America's greatest villains straight from the bowels of hell. It also mythologizes a completely different time in American culture, telling a tale of a man who was good at speaking, thus making him worthy of tall tales and the public's adulation. Daniel Webster was one of the 'Great Triumvirate', three American Senators- Webster, a representative of Massachusetts, John C Calhoun of South Carolina, and Henry Clay of Kentucky, and these men are still famous for the way they dominated the Senate with their debating skills.

If you've ever been a college sophomore and read Neil Postman's Amusing Yourself to Death and went into a Huxlean, anti-cold medium state of mind, you'll know Postman extols the virtues of the Stephen Douglas-Abraham Lincoln debates, ones that went on for hours and attracted crowds from all over, and how these debates would never happen on TV, where the soundbite is king. Daniel Webster is firmly in the Lincoln-Douglas tradition (well, of course he was, he died 1852, only six years before those debates began), and pitting him against the Devil highlights just how good an orator he was considered to be- he's the best candidate to have take on the trickiest entity in the universe and it makes sense to have him win. It reflects him accordingly; his ' Second Reply to Hayne' is considered the most eloquent speech ever delivered to Congress, and the whole debate with Robert Hayne of South Carolina just kinda happened, no game plan needed.

Who would be our contemporary Daniel Webster? A politician like Barack Obama or Ron Paul? A lawyer like Johnny Cochrane? A 'newsman' like Keith Olbermann or Bill O'Reilly? Quick, think of a politician or famous lawyer (haha) you support and think about why you like him/her. Is it their speaking skills? Do we value our leaders being able to debate and defend what they believe on their feet, off the cuff, for hours at a time? Debate today belongs to the realm of Christopher Hitchens and William Lane Craig, and they now act as sideshows, when they were once the highest form of political conversation.

Back to Mr. Scratch. In New England, circa one of their Great Awakenings, it's understandable that the Devil was the scariest of all monsters, made all the scarier if you thought you could encounter him on some forest path or in the back of your barn. Like the witches of The Crucible, everyday malevolence was easier to believe in 19th Century, rural America. This story would be something you'd tell your kids to scare them straight, and the movie's strength lies in its capturing the feel of the time period. The setting was a time when unexplained phenomena could be explained convincingly with the epitome of evil. In the book Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts, author Rupert T. Gould recalls an incident in England, 1855, around the same time of The Devil and Daniel Webster, where a long series of hoof-marks were noticed criss-crossing the countryside in freshly laid snow. In a newspaper article, "Richard Owen" recounts:

The superstitious go so far as to believe that they are the marks of Satan himself; and that great excitement has been produced among all classes may be judged from the fact that the subject has been decanted from the pulpit.

These days, even the most religious attribute Satan to far subtler activities, and you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks the Devil or his demons will take the form of a human to outright trick you out of your soul. But this was the belief of the times- not only among popular, back country folklore, but among the preachers and teachers, the ones who held the most influential opinions.

NEXT WEEK: Leading up to the Civil War, looking at slave culture and how people- both real (Amistad) and fictional (Django Unchained)- fought back.