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Why They Hate The Patriot
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Thu, 13 Jul 2000 20:10:05 EDT
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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
Why They Hate The Patriot
John Carney
Mel Gibson and the film-makers responsible for The Patriot, a
wonderfully exhilarating yarn about our Revolution, are
quickly learning the dangers of celebrating the original spirit
of American liberty and the Old Republic in today's United
States.
The anti-gun lobby is up in arms not only about the scene
where Mel Gibson's character arms his young sons with
muskets, but also about the portrayal of a band rural, arms-
bearing militiamen as the film's heroes. Some British have
complained because the film's villain is an especially blood-
thirsty British colonel. And now a movie-critic for the
<italic>New
York Post</italic> has made the unlikely charge that The Patriot
is a
"fascist film" and engages in "something close holocaust
revisionism."
It's never been safe to make a movie about the Revolutionary
War. As Bill Kauffman pointed out a few weeks ago in the
<italic>Wall Street Journal</italic>, Woodrow Wilson's Justice
Department
sent silent film-maker Robert Goldstein to jail when it decided
that his film, The Spirit of '76, was undermining the war effort
by portraying our World War I British allies in a bad light.
Goldstein, accused of being a German spy, lived the rest of his
life an exile from the imperial regime that was supplanting the
Old Republic portrayed in his film.
The blacklisting of supposed German spies apparently
continues. In the online-magazine <italic>Salon</italic> earlier
this week,
<italic>New
York Post</italic> movie critic Jonathan Foreman argued that The
Patriot exudes a "strange, primitive politics," that he takes
great pains to link to Nazism. "If the Nazis had won the war in
Europe, and their propaganda ministry had decided to make a
way about the American Revolution, The Patriot is exactly the
movie you could expect to see," he writes.
Nothing could be further from the truth. But its worth taking a
moment to see what's behind this outrageous smear.
The centerpiece of Foreman's argument the scene in which a
British colonel orders the burning of a church filled with
American civilians. Foreman cites several historians who
claims that nothing like this incident ever occurred during the
Revolutionary War. To Foreman the church burning resembles
"one of the most notorious Nazi war crimes of World War II."
By making their British villains perpetrate what Foreman
thinks is a "unique historical horror" committed by the Nazis,
the film-makers have done "something unpleasantly akin to
holocaust revisionism," Foreman argues. To make matters
worse, the director and the screenwriter are German.
The problem with this argument is that church burning is hardly
a uniquely Nazi crime. In fact, most Americans will probably
associate the fiery massacre of civilians trapped within a
church with the events that unfolded during a siege by the
federal government in Waco, Texas rather than a Nazi war-
crime against the French. It is much more plausible that the
film-makers have daringly transposed Waco into the
Revolutionary War, drawing a parallel between the imperial
tyrannies of London and Washington, D.C.
Unfortunately, Foreman's argument works to enforce an
insidious bigotry in American films despite its flimsy logic.
Basically it leads to the conclusion that portraying anyone but
Germans as bad-guys is equivalent to denying the holocaust.
No wonder Hollywood insists on having so many of its
villains speak in German accents.
Foreman's other points are equally implausible, and often
they're just plain silly. I'm still baffled by Foreman's
complaint
that The Patriot presents "a deeply sentimental cult of the
family." This is evidence that the film is Nazi propaganda? Of
course not. The Martin family of the Patriot was no more
menacing than Laura's Ingalls family.
The arming of the young sons of Gibson's character also vexes
Foreman, somehow reminding him of the Hitler Youth. Surely
this is better evidence of what is going on in Foreman's mind
than what is going on in The Patriot. For my part, I was
reminded of a book about the Revolutionary War that I read
when I was kid, Sam the Minuteman, in which boys take up
arms alongside their father at Lexington. And again, the Nazis
were hardly the first (or the last) to put weapons in the arms
of
children. Its hard to see how The Patriot children are proto-
Hitler Youth members.
The exciting scene in which Gibson dispatches a band of
British soldiers with a native-American battle axe also does
not escape Foreman's Nazi hunt. He views this as a portrayal
of the "ax- wielding forest supermen so beloved in Nazi folk-
iconography: an 18-century equivalent of the Goth leader
Arminius (aka Hermann the German) who annihilated two
Roman Legions in the Teutoburger Forest." Actually, it was
closer to the ax-wielding forest superman Natty Bumpo of
James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. Only by
ignoring the closer home-grown parallel can Foreman
Germanize this scene to fit his Nazi charge.
Foreman's confusion of home-grown American culture of
liberty for a foreign, totalitarian political doctrine has deep
roots. A clue is provided when he criticizes the film for
neglecting America's political ideals in the
and yet complains in that The Patriot "misunderstands
patriotism" because it presents Gibson's character sees no
advantage in replacing the tyranny of one man 3,000 miles
away for the tyranny of 3,000 men, one mile away.
At first this looks like a contradiction. How could a film
whose hero makes such a dramatic statement against tyranny in
any form be accused of neglecting our political ideals?
Foreman, however, is merely echoing a clique of American
intellectuals who insist that the deep-rooted, locally and
regionally varied American tradition of liberty, stretching back
through our colonial period and beyond, doesn't count at all.
The only political ideals worthwhile are those stated as
abstract propositions in the opening passages of the
Declaration of Independence. And clearly The Patriot slights
both the Declaration of Independence and the idea that our
nation was brought forth dedicated to abstractions.
If you think that America is a propositional nation, and that
patriotism consists of mere dedication to the official
propositions, The Patriot will indeed appear subversive and
foreign. Underlying the film is a more historically-grounded
perspective. As I see it, The Patriot is a rare phenomenon: a
Hollywood film that truly understands and celebrates the
original American way as it was lived by the men and women
who fought and died for it.
July 13, 2000
John Carney is a recent graduate of the University of
Pennsylvania Law School
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