Reel History 14: Walker

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Walkertheatrical.jpg

At one point in Walker, two characters are riding in a horse-drawn carriage   reading Time and People, discussing the affairs of William Walker, whose face graces the cover of both magazines. Quick cut to a car aggressively passing the carriage.

The year is 1856, and William Walker has just made himself president of Nicaragua.

Alex Cox's 1987 movie of the whole story is, to put it mildly, straight-up bizarre. It was filmed in Nicaragua with the complete cooperation of the Sandinista government, shortly after it was revealed that the American government had secretly funded the opposing right-wing Contras through illegal arms sales to Iran. It was a movie that ruined the director's mainstream career, and Cox (whose filmography includes Sid and Nancy and Repo Man) was never employed to make a major studio film again. It's not hard to see why: Walker performed poorly both at the box office and with critics. It's an anti-epic, an affront to the way paved by movies about unhinged anti-heroes like Lawrence of Arabia. But that's what I think makes it such an interesting movie to watch.

To be fair to the director, the story of William Walker is straight-up bizarre in real life; Cox's research probably lead to the conclusion that any depiction of the events would be weird, so he might as well make a contemporary political point at the same time.

William Walker was a a pirate to some, a hero to others, but the contemporary view is that he was a wannabe conquistador with a serious Messiah complex. His support came from forces in Nicaragua who saw his firepower as an answer to their problems, and wealthy Americans who wanted to control the accessible transportation system across Nicaragua which supplied San Francisco with goods from New York (this was before both the Panama Canal and a transcontinental railroad). Taking advantage of a civil war erupting in the country in 1854, and with the help of the Democratic Party (of Nicaragua), he defeated the rival Legitimist party and declared himself head of state in September 1855. Walker's process was known as 'filibustering', which back then meant taking an unauthorized military expedition into a foreign country in the hopes of starting or supporting a revolution. This wasn't his first attempt- he tried 'filibustering' in the Mexican states of Sonora and Baja to unfulfilled ends- but he found success in Nicaragua, and inspiration in the ideals of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny told generations of Americans that the North American continent was destined to be controlled by them, and it was an idea that found legitimacy in the political elite. President Franklin Pierce even recognized Walker's government the following year.

American Progress by John Gast, 1872
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:American_progress.JPG

Walker's plans were a lot grander, however, and he looked to take on all of Central America under his utopian wing. He had pissed off some of the most powerful people in the America, including Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt (played in the movie by Peter Boyle), who was not only one of the wealthiest people in the United States in the 1850s, but one of the wealthiest people in American history. After soliciting funds from two of Vanderbilt's former investors-turned-competitors, who were attempting to replace Vanderbilt's transportation system with a train, Walker found himself faced with an angry tycoon and a number of empires scared of his influence, including the British in Belize. When his tenuous grasp eventually gave out under intense pressure from neighbouring countries who did not, in fact, want to be 'emancipated', he surrendered himself to an American admiral in 1857 and made it back to New York and a hero's welcome. But you can't keep a good filibusterer down, and in 1860 he tried to return to Central America with plans to set up an English-speaking independent colony on the nearby Bay Islands. Unfortunately for him, he was captured by the British Navy soon after landing in Honduras. The British handed Walker over to the Honduran government, who executed him by firing squad on September 12, 1860.

Cox follows the general outline of Walker's life pretty faithfully regardless of the anachronisms, and he applied a dream-like filter to make the movie feel like a psychotic Western. Cox isn't subtle about Walker's politics; he filmed a movie about an American intervening in the affairs of Central America while America actively intervened in the affairs of Central America, so there's no other way to interpret it other than a strict condemnation of the long, bloody history of American influence in Central America since the Monroe Doctrine. Cox, in his own esoteric manner, firmly denounces the idea of Manifest Destiny and its 1980s equivalent, where American-approved right wing politics, no matter how authoritarian and violent, were better than any form of left-wing government.

He uses incredibly obvious anachronisms, from the aforementioned contemporary magazines to Zippo lighters, to make sure the audience realizes that what Walker did was no different than what the Reagan administration was doing at the time. In the movie, as his capital burns around him, black military helicopters and marines drop in unexpectedly to 'save' William Walker and his comrades. This references Walker finding salvation by turning himself over to American authorities when all of Central America was lining up to show him how they feel about his experiments in government. Cox is saying that no matter what the United States does, whether it's overthrowing a government explicitly or implicitly, the consequences will never hit close to home. The United States, its people and its interests will never feel the impact of its actions.

The people who did suffer those consequences are the ones America tried to save from themselves. With today's audience being so far removed from this history, combined with the sheer volume of contemporary leftist criticism, it seems like a rather cliched message for Cox to convey. But he conveyed it in the most direct way at a time when the country was at its most conservative; whether or not you agree with the politics, it definitely adds more gravitas to his and the film's legacy.

Reel History 13: The Death of Jesse James

When Jesse James was shot by Robert Ford on April 3, 1882, he was already a massive celebrity. America's love affair with Prohibition and Depression-era criminals- Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Al Capone- paled in comparison to its love for the James gang, who became out-and-out heroes among Confederates still holding on to whatever revenge fantasy they could grasp in the Reconstruction era; it helped that James was a former member of Quantrill's Raiders in Missouri (see Ride with the Devil), and that he appealed to his fellow Southerners in his letters to the media and by using Ku Klux Klan imagery in his robberies. James' legacy paints him as an American Robin Hood, robbing the rich and giving to the poor in dime store novels and folk tales, and it's a success in neo-Confederate propaganda.

But after killing James, Robert Ford had a rare opportunity not given to all assassins- going free and making money off his actions. Ford took what he could get and ran, capitalizing on the public's craving to see how the murder happened, and, not unlike his victim, parlayed his infamy into wealth. But even that can only take you so far.

Sam Fuller's first movie, I Shot Jesse James (1949), tells that story with a pretty liberal interpretation of what happened. It's a pretty standard Western, though it's mostly about the aftermath of Robert Ford's shooting of James than of James' life. James, now living in his hometown of St. Joseph, Missouri under the guise of Thomas Howard, was shot in the back of the head by Ford while dusting and straightening a picture on his wall. In I Shot, James is portrayed as a pastoral, quiet man, trying to leave his legacy behind and live a domestic life with his wife and children. Ford, of course, is a coward (see the title of the next movie), shooting his best friend and confidante so he could also leave the James legacy behind and live a quiet life with his fiance. This, I suppose, is a noble goal, especially since James was a cold-blooded killer wanted by the law, but Fuller doesn't hesitate to turn Ford into a crazy unhinged man. He has to wrestle with his conscience following the shooting, and the fame of being the man who killed the most notorious outlaw in the country doesn't mean much when that notorious outlaw happens to be a beloved folk hero.

Fuller fudges the details to create conflict, because hey, it's a cheap 8o minute Western where the most famous character gets shot in the first 10 minutes, you have to pad it with something. In the movie, Ford shoots James so he can earn the reward and move away with his fiance, who happens to have another suitor, a more dignified suitor at that. This rival is none other than Edward O'Kelley, the real-life murderer of Robert Ford, who shot him in the back in Ford's Creede, Colorado tent saloon in 1892. In the movie, O'Kelley is forced to shoot the drunken, deranged Ford, who is driven by jealousy to kill him first. In real life, O'Kelley gave no real motivation following his apprehension; it was suggested that he was driven by the same craving for notoriety as Ford, shooting Jesse James' killer as a quick way to heroism. 

Now, the same story was tackled in a movie that was twice as long as I Shot, and my goodness, it's just a better movie all around; even at almost three hours, it's never boring, unlike I Shot. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a beautiful, ethereal film, and a cautionary tale about meeting your idols, or maybe it's a good example of why you should kill them (with all due respect to Sonic Youth, of course). The movie came out in 2007 as part of an odd wave of unconventional Westerns, alongside There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. I think it stands alongside those two as a modern classic.

It's different from I Shot in many ways, first and foremost in that it's actually a great movie, but also because it skews more to the actual story of James' life. Ford isn't driven by jealousy to kill James, he's driven by a craving for fame. He worships the James gang, and wants nothing more than to be part of the group that entertained him as a child. When he finally gains access to James' inner circle, and sees his hero for who he really is, he's taken aback; this is Jesse James? Assassination portrays James as unhinged, driven mad by the man-hunt. When Ford finally shoots him, James accepts it as inevitable. He doesn't give two craps about how the picture is hung, he just wants it to be over. He knows the walls are closing in, knows that the Ford brothers, the two people he could finally trust, have given themselves over to the other side. These motivations may or may not be true, of course, but taking a creative look at what you can't know (what they were thinking) is a lot better and more challenging than taking a creative look at what you do know (the actual course of events).

Both movies include similar details: the shooting, of course, but also that Robert Ford and his brother Charley re-created the assassination on stage for a paying audience in a touring show, a wandering minstrel singing an insulting song right in front of Ford (played in Assassination by Nick Cave, who also wrote the haunting score). But I Shot downplays the Ford brothers' show, making it seem like Robert gave up after the first show because of his conscience; he actually played the role of himself a lot, though it wasn't well received and showed the public how the murder was actually cheap and cowardly. 

Why Assassination works so well for me is that it actually makes Jesse James a character in the story of his murder, and it's not at all sympathetic. Brad Pitt (playing James) and Casey Affleck (playing Ford) give incredibly nuanced performances, and the story is complex enough so that the audience isn't forced to choose between the two. Fuller, on the other hand, barely features the outlaw in his movie at all, so that all we know about him is what knowledge we already knew, and thus James' legacy as a righteous bank robber is kept intact. But Jesse James wasn't a good person. There's no evidence he gave his ill-gotten gains to the poor, and his robberies ended with murder and often targeted Union-sympathizers or ex-soldiers. He was a brutal man leading a brutal group of people- one robbery in 1876 saw the gang crack the skull of the cashier and hold a knife to his throat in an attempt to get the combination to the safe; they were unsuccessful, and when the authorities were called and on their way one of the James gang shot the cashier as they made their escape.

This ex-Confederate soldier gets sympathy/praise in the same way ex-Confederates are sympathized with/praised in so many Westerns- he represented a cool, anti-authoritarian position in the lawless West, sticking it to the government trying to hold him down. Unfortunately, the people he represented were Lost Causers living vicariously through outlaws just as evil as they, only bolder and better with a gun. James doesn't deserve his legacy, and I think Assassination gets that.

Reel History 12: Glory and Ride with the Devil- black soldiers and the Civil War

Oh dear. I was dreading getting to 1861. Or, seeing as I've already gone past it in Gangs of New York and in the life of Abraham Lincoln, having to backtrack and do something definitive about that darn Civil War.

The Civil War, to put it mildly, is the defining moment in American history, which makes it a complex and overwhelming topic to tackle in a blog about movies. You can experience it in relatively straightforward movies such as Gettysburg, Gone With the Wind, and Cold Mountain; or you can take the lighthearted approach and see the Confederate pratfalls of Buster Keaton's The General. Civil War movies are vast because they don't just recount events, they use the war as a thematic background, so you're going to get a lot of variety.

Quick rundown, then: Lincoln is elected; southern states secede in 1860-61 fearing he'll roll over their rights as states to own people like cattle; the Confederate States of America destroy Fort Sumter, bombastically declaring war; bloody battles fought back and forth until the CSA surrenders in 1865. If you want more details, you'll have to read books (it's really interesting! I promise) or try and glean something from my past posts, but in the meantime, just know this: before the war, it was "the United States are..."; after, "the United States is..." Now the relationship between the states and the federal government is clear(er). Black people are STILL not fully considered people though, even in the northern states; many Union soldiers didn't think they were fighting to free 'the coloreds' until well into the war.

But hey, a lot of progress is made for the black population during the war, even if some of it is just gaining the ability to fight in a war. In March 1863, three months after the Emancipation Proclamation came into effect, the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was formed by the governor of the state. The regiment was one of the first African American units in the Union Army, and it saw extensive action in the American Civil War. Commanded by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (who was white, as Secretary of War Edward Stanton did not trust black people to lead their own units), they fought all over the country, ending their time at the Battle of Boykin's Mill in April 1865, one of the last battles in the war.

The 1989 film Glory tells the bittersweet tale of the 54th, with the oddly cast Matthew Broderick playing the role of Shaw. It's bittersweet because, and here's a spoiler even though it's a 24 year-old movie about a real historical event (I didn't know the outcome either), almost half of the 54th, including Shaw, were killed in a siege on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, on July 23, 1863. The 'sweet' of this event was that after the valour was recognized, it increased enlistment and use of African-American troops, something President Lincoln recognized as helping end the conflict.

This all was happening, appropriately enough, during the great New York draft/race riots as documented in the last half hour of Gangs of New York, and this dichotomy highlights the hardships of living as a black person anywhere in the United States, even in the north.

Glory is about as good a movie about the Civil War as one could get, and it's consistently praised for it's accuracy and the lack of forced stirring moments (they exist, but they're played rather well). What's unfortunate is that this is yet another film about the black experience in America that is told from the perspective of a white man. I know Shaw is an important part of the 54th's history, but there are other perspectives that could have been taken- either Denzel Washington or Morgan Freeman, for example, could have been the focus, as both are important and much more interesting characters. Washington even won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor; maybe it could have been upgraded to Best Actor.

Ang Lee's Ride with the Devil has a much different focus than that of Glory, in that the protagonists are Confederates (or the Missouri equivalents, known as Bushwackers) and they are fighting the anti-slavery, pro-Union Kansas Jayhawkers (who are coming over the border to fight, as Missouri is a slave state). So these are people not normally associated with 'good guys'. This of course makes it a much more complex movie, and it doesn't always work, but Ang Lee's style definitely makes the movie worthwhile.

In Ride with the Devil, Tobey Maguire joins a group of Bushwackers as they seek vengeance on raiding Jayhawkers; one of the gang just so happens to be a black man named Holt (played by Jeffrey Wright) who fights loyally alongside his former owner. Maguire's relationship with Holt is but one of the many complex relationships in the movie (the relationship with Jewel, for instance, takes up much of the latter half of the movie), and thus Ride overextends itself into boredom, but it's still a lovely film.

But Holt's motives in the movie are complicated, and he feels loyal to the Bushwackers (and Quantrill's Raiders, the infamous Confederate guerilla group with whom he and MacGuire end up joining) despite their motives being opposite to his well-being. You can see the pain in his eyes briefly when the Raiders are stacking up the bodies of black men after their massacre at Lawrence, Kansas. So, why'd he stay?

It's an excuse you here from Southern apologists all the time: black men fought to protect the South's right to secede, so the Civil War wasn't about slavery! It's kind of true, at least the first part- a couple thousand slaves did indeed fight for the Confederate Army, as they were allowed to fight as part of a last ditch effort to win the war in 1865.

The Confederates forced them, of course, because these weren't free men fighting for what they saw was right; Holt's motivations in Ride aren't political, but myopically personal. His former owner, George Clyde, goes out on a limb to defend Holt, saying he's one of the few men he'd trust with his life. I doubt Clyde would feel the same way about any other black man he'd come across, especially not if these black men fought for the Union. The 54th, like all black regiments, were under threat of execution if captured; Jefferson Davis proclaimed in December of 1862 that any captured black soldiers or their white officers were to be sentenced to death.

By the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men (10% of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war—30,000 of infection or disease. 16 were awarded the Medal of Honor. But let's not forget the slaves who were forced to fight against their best interests- unlike their white fellow soldiers, they had little choice or stake in the matter.

NEXT TIME: Looking at Walker, a BIZARRE and oft-forgotten chapter of American colonialism, and then we catch up with an ex-Quantrill Raider and see what he's up to (hint: he's a famous bank robber!).

A recruitment broadside for black men in the north. Unfortunately, those who signed up were paid less than their white counterparts ($10 a month compared to $16 a month), and had to buy their own uniforms (as opposed to white soldiers, who were given a $3.50 clothing allowance).

Sources:

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/blacks-civil-war/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/54th_Massachusetts_Volunteer_Infantry

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/confederacy-approves-black-soldiers

Reel History 11: Abraham Lincoln In The Movies

Abraham Lincoln was, and this is hardly debatable, the greatest president in the history of the United States. Some polls say Reagan, but those polls, and those who voted for Reagan on them, are wrong. Lincoln exists in Americana as the anti-Richard Nixon: he was a virtuous, honest, wonderful man and is celebrated for it, whereas Nixon was a mean, spiteful liar who was out for one man and one man only- Richard Nixon. These two presidents have been depicted on film more than any others, but the stories told about them couldn't be more different (more on Nixon later).

Abraham Lincoln, born February 12, 1809, was a self-educated country lawyer at a time when law was a profession that accepted self-made men. He became a Illinois state legislator in the 1830s, then a one-time member of the House of Representatives, but was denied the trifecta by rival Stephen Douglas, who defeated him in the 1858 run for the Senate; Lincoln did, however, win over the heart of the object of Douglas' affection, Mary Todd, so really, Lincoln got his (ok, ok, they were married all the way back in 1842, so maybe Douglas was the one exacting revenge). He did eventually win the highest office in the country, so who needs the Senate, really? But upon Lincoln's election in 1860, slave-holding states started seceding one after another in quick succession, fearing the president would free their property and violate their 'state rights' (used as an excuse to glorify the South even to this day, sadly). This divided the nation and laid the groundwork for the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861 and the beginning of the Civil War. Lincoln wouldn't get to see the reformation of the union he worked so hard to achieve; he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 15, 1865, six days after Robert E. Lee and the Confederate army surrendered, and 25 days before the war formally ended.

Lincoln's story is this- virtue, hard work, and honesty, in office and out, will get you ahead; and while slyness and cruelty will also get you ahead, the former gets you hagiographies and enduring love, not demonization and hate. But hey, Nixon gambled and lost. History will see to that.

D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930) is one of the earliest movies about President Lincoln (but not the earliest; the first was made all the way back in 1909), and it tries to leave no stone unturned telling the story. The history of slavery, the Civil War, Lincoln's love life- everything is covered in a series of thinly connected scenes, some of which are in sound, some silent. It's odd for Griffith to cover Lincoln in such a sympathetic manner, considering he's the man who directed Birth of a Nation, a movie that glorified the Ku Klux Klan, but he does it. It's not a movie that holds up all that well, however, and is mostly boring and relatively plotless. Note that Lincoln is played by Walter Huston, who was also Mr. Scratch (a.k.a the Devil) in The Devil and Daniel Webster.



John Ford fared better in his 1939 movie Young Mr.

Lincoln, which starred the gangly Henry Fonda as Lincoln. As the title suggests, the movie follows Abe during his formative years as a lawyer, mostly in a fictional context. Lincoln in this movie isn't just virtuous, he's the best darn Illinoisan the state ever spit out- he's judging a pie eating contest, winning a rail splitting competition, and cracking up a jury with his hilarious antics. The movie surrounds a fictitious court case involving a fight and murder, with justice winning in the end. One thing that all four movies I watched make a point of including (to various degrees of success) is Lincoln's easy-going and joke-telling nature. He loved to make people laugh and tell stories, and that's partly why he was beloved by the citizens. The rather grim visage you see in pictures is often the result of both the Civil War and his family life wearing him down, but by all accounts he was a rather light-hearted and friendly person.


The movie (also Abraham Lincoln) includes the dubious detail of Ann Rutledge, Lincoln's supposed first love and his motivation for going into law. It's fierce debate whether or not she and Lincoln had a thing, but apparently it was first revealed after the assassination in 1865 by Lincoln's law partner William Herndon. Herndon hated Mary Todd Lincoln, and told the story much to her dismay, so it's possible it's fake, or at least embellished.

Steven Spielberg's appropriately named film Lincoln covers at least some of the part not covered by Ford. It's also probably the definitive Lincoln movie, one that, however you feel about biopics, manages to convey his true character and the problems he faced dealing with the Civil War and at home. The movie is about the last four months of both the Civil War and his life, as he tried to pass the 13th Amendment through the House before his second term was to begin and the country was to eventually be reunited (with the slave states back in the Union). This amendment would formally abolish slavery, as the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier was not law but a wartime measure and could easily be overturned by the court once the war was over. The movie is loosely based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, so Lincoln's genius is first and foremost in this movie. I may have denigrated Nixon's craftiness up there, but Lincoln had his fair share of it. The difference is Lincoln used it to free the slaves before time ran out and it became a fruitless pursuit; Nixon used it to maintain an iron fist over the White House, get re-elected, and bomb Cambodia.

With Lincoln, Spielberg may have directed the best movie about the man ever, and Daniel Day-Lewis the best performance. I know it's not saying much considering, but it's a wonderful, interesting biopic in a mostly maligned genre.

2012 truly was the year of super accurate Lincoln biopics, continuing with the supremely stupid Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Benjamin Walker is the Lincoln here, looking more like a young Liam Neeson than the sixteenth president, and he uses his rail splitting powers (under the most BS of pretenses) to hunt... vampires. Turns out, the Confederates were using slaves as a source for blood! And there's a Linkin Park song played over the credits. That should tell you everything you need to know about this movie. Seriously, it's infuriating how much this movie sucks.

Covered in tons of crappy CGI blood, this telling of Lincoln is clearly trying to be some kind of pulpy, stupid action movie, but there's too much weird self-importance that comes with taking such a beloved individual and hewing very close to the events of his real life while at the same time having him fight vampires. There's something incredibly off about having the Gettysburg Address recited over Union soldiers killing vampires at the Battle of Gettysburg. But what's even worse is using the death of his son Willie, and the grief he and Mary suffered, as some cheap emotional moment. Mary Todd's mental breakdown after the death of Willie was real; the vampire that killed him was not.

And that's why I hope they stop taking real history and trying to make it 'awesome'. Lincoln's life is already awesome enough, full of pathos, meaning, and moving stories- what good does it do to try and turn him into a superhero? It's completely unnecessary and at times, down right disrespectful.

There are tons more Lincoln-y things: he's been played by Robert V. Barron in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure,  Gregory Peck in a 1982 TV movie called The Blue and the Grey, and by Sam Waterston in not one, but TWO different TV shows. He's been portrayed in Bioshock Infinite and Late Night with Conan O'Brien and Doctor Who. He's pretty much everywhere, and that's because he's the virtuous president.

If you stripped all partisan politics out of the question, Lincoln would hands down be polled the greatest American president, and no poll saying otherwise will ever take away his status in politics or culture. Can you imagine Reagan traveling with Bill and Ted?

NEXT TIME: Looking at the Civil War a little more closely with Glory and Ride with the Devil.

Reel History 10: Gangs of New York

When gangsters dressed like Batman villains

Imagine you're new to the United States- you've just arrived and settled in and everything is straight-up bonkers: all the currency looks the same! What, gallons instead of liters? It's the 21st Century and this country is still not using the metric system? Why are there so many ads for medications on TV? Where can I get a maple log? etc., etc. I am assuming most of the people reading this are from Canada, so it's safe to say the culture shock would be less than monumental. 

Now imagine you've arrived back to the 1850s. As an immigrant, you might be German- 5 million arrived between 1850 and 1930- or an Irish Catholic looking to escape famine- 4.5 million Irish arrived between 1820-1930. You'd head to a large urban center, like New York, looking for a job in the emerging industry of the northern Unites States. As you arrive at the port, perhaps you're greeted by an opportunistic politician who sees you as nothing more than a walking vote; maybe an angry hordes is shouting at you to go back to your home. Maybe you walk right into a conscription line to join the Union Army, like the 144,000 other Irish or 177,000 other Germans. Or maybe, given your temperament, you take up with another army, one that would defend your right to live in New York.

Gangs of New York concerns itself with the last group, telling the story of those who chose to brawl it out in the streets for protection and influence, political or otherwise. Martin Scorsese's movie deals with warfare at Manhattan's Five Points district, the convergence of five streets that happened to be one of the city's most notorious slums, an area dominated by a number of large gangs. While most of the characters are fictional, the gangs of Gangs are not- the Bowery Boys, lead by Bill 'The Butcher' Cutting (played by Daniel Day-Lewis, the best performance of the movie) and the Dead Rabbits of our protagonist Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio), were very real, and just two of many different gangs representing many different interests.

Even Charles Dickens was less than impressed with the scenery- here he describes the Five Points in his American Notes for Circulation:

"What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies behind this tottering flight of steps? Let us go on again, and plunge into the Five Points."

"This is the place; these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruit as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home and all the world over."

"Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken forays. Many of these pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright instead of going on all fours, and why they talk instead of grunting?"

It was also packed with newly arrived immigrants, a sizable African-American community, and very, very territorial 'natives'. And from this convergence of poverty-stricken groups is where we get the movie's tension. It begins with a fight between the Dead Rabbits, a gang of immigrants lead by a priest played by Liam Neeson, and the Bowery Boys, lead by Bill the Butcher, 15 years before the Civil War. Neeson is killed, the Dead Rabbits are broken up and declared illegal by Bill's tyrannical street rule, and Neeson's son escapes the clutches of an orphanage. The story resets in 1862 with the son, now a fully grown Leonardo DiCaprio, working his way up the gangland hierarchy to get his revenge on Bill, which involves, in classic gangster fashion, getting close to his most hated enemy.

There's so much history in Gangs it's amazing- the history of the Five Points, sure, but there's the Civil War, PT Barnum, Boss Tweed and his gang at Tammany Hall, American nativism and its reaction to Irish immigration, the draft riots of 1863 against lopsided conscription, and so much more. America's early history is soaked in blood, and it reminds us that while the Fathers may have crafted one of the best republics on paper, the sailing was never smooth.

I like Gangs of New York a lot, but it's certainly one of Scorsese's more Hollywood offerings, which I think makes it a lesser movie in his oeuvre. He's a master at telling the stories of the personal lives of low level criminals, with movies like Mean Streets and Goodfellas being bona fide classics; and while he's certainly concentrating on the criminal element here, there's a scope that's far outside just the small time crooks. I was far more interested in learning more about the history of the movie than the actual plot, because while in Daniel Day-Lewis we get one of Scorsese's great villains with his performance as Bill 'the Butcher' Cutting, in Leonardo DiCaprio's Amsterdam Vallon we get one of his more boring protagonists. The Departed does essentially what Gangs does, but in a much more claustrophobic, tense, and ultimately entertaining manner. Gangs also suffers from a rather anti-climatic final act, with Bill and Amsterdam fighting in a cloud of smoke while the city riots around them; Bill is struck by the gunfire and is ultimately finished off by Amsterdam. The ending is pretty beautiful, though.

One thing that Scorsese makes clear is that this sense of 'otherness' created by nativists like Bill the Butcher still included black people. Despite New York's inclusion in the Union, it still wasn't safe to be a free black person in a large city, and the draft riots of 1863 quickly turned into race riots. In the movie, Amsterdam's friend Jimmy Spoils is easily spotted and killed by rioters; in real life, it's estimated that 100 black people were killed in the three days of rioting, and many abolitionists and black homes were targeted.

So while Gangs of New York shows a pretty bad side of New York, the reality probably was worse than any movie can convey. Herbert Asbury, the author of the book that Gangs was based on (yes, it was based on a book!), says that in 1862, more than 82 thousand New Yorkers, 10 percent of the population, were arrested by police. In 1862 alone!

Kinda makes you wonder what other great movies could be made about this same era.

NEXT TIME: Abraham Lincoln- one great citizen.

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).