Why does cinema keep returning to America’s… | Little White Lies

Why does cin­e­ma keep return­ing to America’s vio­lent past?

27 May 2016

Words by Alex Chambers

Man in military outfit stands in front of explosion
Man in military outfit stands in front of explosion
Matthew McConaugh­ey dra­ma Free State of Jones points to a fas­ci­na­tion with the nation’s bloody ori­gin story.

His­to­ry is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Inter­ests that must ever prove base. She is too inno­cent, to be left with­in the reach of any­one in Pow­er […] She needs rather to be tend­ed lov­ing­ly and hon­or­ably by fab­u­lists and coun­ter­feit­ers, Bal­lad-Mon­gers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius.”

This quote is not lift­ed from the pages of an 18th-cen­tu­ry jour­nal, but is rather a care­ful­ly com­posed pas­tiche by lit­er­ary fab­u­list and coun­ter­feit­er Thomas Pyn­chon. The author’s 1997 nov­el Mason & Dixon’ fol­lowed, expand­ed, and elab­o­rat­ed on the true sto­ry of a pair of sur­vey­ors whose famous bound­ary line is por­trayed as an act of sym­bol­ic, car­to­graph­ic vio­lence that divid­ed America’s cul­tur­al north and south.

It’s a nov­el full of metic­u­lous his­tor­i­cal detail, but Pyn­chon was self-con­scious­ly writ­ing in the late 20th cen­tu­ry with con­tem­po­rary con­cerns in mind. He was look­ing back at America’s past not just in order to pro­vide an account of a young nation’s for­ma­tive peri­od, but for a source of myths and sto­ries that would be a way out of the claus­tro­pho­bia of the present.

America’s tumul­tuous past is full of unlike­ly heroes like Pynchon’s sur­vey­ors, sto­ries of alter­na­tive found­ing fathers. The lat­est trail­er for Free State of Jones, the Civ­il War action-adven­ture movie from Hunger Games direc­tor Gary Ross, sees Matthew McConaughy’s based-on-a-true-sto­ry hero escap­ing through swamps and set­ting plan­ta­tions ablaze like the Kat­niss Everdeen of the pre-abo­li­tion South. Along with Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, which is set for release in 2017, it joins an grow­ing num­ber of recent films that revis­it the vio­lence of the years before and dur­ing the Amer­i­can Civ­il War.

Like Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave before them, both films are based on heav­i­ly researched actu­al his­tor­i­cal fig­ures. The Free State of Jones trail­er sees New­ton Knight, the Con­fed­er­ate desert­er played by McConaughy, unit­ing Mississippi’s down­trod­den and dis­en­chant­ed – black, white, rich, poor” alike – into a utopi­an guer­ril­la force. The Birth of a Nation is based on the slave rebel­lion led by Nat Turn­er, who escaped from slav­ery to fight against the over­whelm­ing forces of the South­ern sta­tus quo. They’re excep­tion­al lives that bear a poet­i­cism and dra­ma that marks them out from the monot­o­ny of suf­fer­ing that makes up most of his­to­ry. But they’re also lives that show pos­si­ble respons­es to this suf­fer­ing, exam­ples of alternatives.

Quentin Taran­ti­no is one direc­tor who’s nev­er let the action be hemmed in by details like his­tor­i­cal accu­ra­cy. But it’s inevitable that a film set in the past will be seen as a more gen­er­al account of that time, and Djan­go Unchaineds glee­ful­ly revi­sion­ist revenge west­ern drew crit­i­cism for its slim rela­tion to actu­al expe­ri­ences. Per­haps in response to that crit­i­cism, The Hate­ful Eight saw Taran­ti­no infuse gen­er­a­tions-old Civ­il War griev­ances into a tense char­ac­ter study – con­dens­ing sto­ries true and invent­ed, and wield­ing mem­o­ries like weapons, in the con­fines of a remote moun­tain cabin.

It’s ulti­mate­ly hard to make a film about America’s past with­out either acknowl­edg­ing or allud­ing to its trou­bled ori­gin sto­ry. None of these films should for­get the immense con­flicts that have left indeli­ble scars on the nation’s psy­che. But the sto­ry here isn’t wise and rea­soned Found­ing Fathers ink­ing out the future, or a Walt Whit­man plu­ral­is­tic idyll lying there wait­ing to be explored. The birth is messy and full of com­pli­ca­tions. Some­times the his­tor­i­cal research can become embell­ished or sim­pli­fied in the film­mak­ing process, but Pynchon’s point was that a his­to­ry as elu­sive and con­flict­ing as America’s is one best told by artists, writ­ers – and filmmakers.

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