Last week Jamelle Bouie wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in which he calls for a truthful movie about the Civil War. Here are excerpts from what he wrote:
This week, out of both boredom and my own impulse toward completionism — I’m slowly making my way through the many Civil War movies that have come out of Hollywood — I bought and began watching “Gettysburg,” the 1993 drama directed by Ronald F. Maxwell and adapted from “The Killer Angels,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 1974 by Michael Shaara.
I have not yet finished the film — it’s four hours, and I’m about halfway through — but I have a few thoughts nonetheless. The first is that, despite its made-for-TV looks, “Gettysburg” is a real achievement of set design and historical recreation. I am genuinely impressed by the level of detail seen in the uniforms and encampments, and it adds a great deal that a good portion of the film was actually shot at Gettysburg. Having been to the battlefield a few times (and having logged many hours in “Sid Meier’s Gettysburg!”), it is fun as a viewer to see battles being staged as they would have been fought.
My big problem so far — besides the so-so acting chops of most of the players onscreen, Sam Elliott and Jeff Daniels notwithstanding — is that the film is very clearly working from the notion that the Civil War was first and foremost an unfortunate conflict among brothers. It’s not a Lost Cause film, but it is Lost Cause-adjacent, in that it downplays the importance of slavery to the war and the individual soldier’s understanding of the war. If nothing else, it is striking to watch a film that is, in part, about Robert E. Lee’s generalship in Pennsylvania yet takes no note of the fact that the Army of Northern Virginia took time, during its march into free territory, to kidnap Black Americans and send them South into bondage.
But “Gettysburg” isn’t unique here. One of the most striking facts about our cinematic depictions of the Civil War is that, with a handful of exceptions, they are either sympathetic to the Confederate position or outright supportive of the Confederacy. It is a testament to the crushing triumph of Lost Cause propaganda that neither “The Birth of a Nation” nor “Gone With the Wind” are isolated instances of Confederate sympathy but emblematic of Hollywood’s perspective on the heroes and villains of the conflict. (And that’s before we get into the Western trope of the noble ex-Confederate looking for a new life in the frontier.)
Other than Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” which is a political drama more than anything else, we haven’t had a big Civil War picture in a long time and we probably won’t; the subject is too niche in an era where Hollywood is loath to take a risk on anything that isn’t based on an existing popular property. But if anyone is thinking about writing a Civil War film, I would hope that he or she would write one with an unabashedly pro-Union perspective — a film that foregrounds slavery and takes a skeptical view of Confederate mythmaking.
The war that began as a fight to restore the Union and ended as a crusade against human bondage stands as one of the finest moments in our nation’s history. It deserves a Hollywood epic that tries, as much as possible, to tell the truth.
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I find this article engaging the tenet of the Battle Hymn thesis/historiography, ‘the circle in the sand’, in the extreme.
He’s deliberately ONLY citing very specific examples of the long-standing American practice of forcibly impressing Black Americans into slavery to present an impression that Robert E. Lee is uniquely guilty of this in the war, let alone the long run of American history.
If he truly views the above conduct in the terms he puts, is he just as willing to condemn, for example, Abraham Lincoln?