On watching "The Patriot"...
Hollywood history has had its villains, and they seem to come in blocks. At the end of the forties (with strands oozing all the way up until the present day), these villains were from Nazi Germany. In the fifties, these villains were the Red Menace of Communists at home and abroad. By the end of the sixties, the enemy was becoming (more often than you'd expect) the government itself. By the time we reach the seventies and eighties, if the enemies were anything, it was probably taste. But that's another story.
But in this - the first year of the new Millennium, there are a whole new batch of bad-guys to hate and fear - the people who may come along while you sleep and replace your children with crude duplicates carved out of root vegetables - the people who wear exotic clothing and move in an almost sinisterly stiff fashion - mindless drones of cruel masters, the menace is now ... British ...
INTERLUDE: A man and a woman leave the cinema and walk towards their car. The woman turns to the man and says, "I thought that bloody film would never end." The man replies, "In some of the lower circles of hell, it never will."
The plot of the Patriot is loosely based upon actual events in the US. Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson) plays a retired Colonel with an infinity of Healthy, Wholesome Children and a cult of cheery non-enslaved black people who belt out the odd cheery number that wouldn't have sounded out of place in the Little Mermaid.
The oldest of his Healthy, Wholesome Children is called Gabriel (Heath Ledger) - a headstrong child, but with good moral fibre and teeth. His father - ashamed of his actions in the French and Indian War - decides to sit out the attempt of America to declare independence from Britain. But when Gabriel (who, I should add, resembles nothing more than a claymation duplicate of himself) enlists in the army, only to be captured by evil British Colonel Tavington - a man who subsequently burns down the family home and disposes of one of the middle Healthy Wholesome Children - Ben Martin realises that he has to get involved in the struggle.
Assembling a team of guerilla fighters, Ben Martin gradually takes a more and more central role in defending the good old US of A from the brutish Brits - but will his daughter come around and recognise him again? Will Joely Richardson (playing the sister of Ben Martin's dead wife) fall in love with him? And will he get the opportunity to run around in slow motion with a huge American flag.
Yes. Yes. And yes, I'm afraid he will.
INTERLUDE: The man and the woman return home to their flatmate, who works in the film industry. She is eager to hear all about the film, as the English villain is played by someone she used to work with. The man and the woman struggle to explain how bad the film is, how it plays fast and loose with history and how Mel Gibson really must have an issue with the British - particularly after Braveheart. Between them the three try out various new names for the movie, including "The Patronise" and "The Pantriot".
The Patriot was released in America some time around Independence Day - which is pretty much what you'd expect I guess. The reviews were pretty average in the US, and worse in the UK.
The problem with the film is that it passes over the opportunity to actually talk about a difficult time in American history - where loyalties were heavily conflicted between royalists and those who supported independence - and decides instead to opt for cheap jingoism, often at the expense of the truth. The "Old World" becomes the repository for all that is bad in the world, and the "New World" the representation of all that is positive.
Now before I go any further, I should point out that I'm not in any way here trying to defend the actions of Imperialist cultures of which the British Empire was one of the most globally successful and brutal. These cultures committed wide-spread atrocities world-wide, taking over less technologically advanced cultures and erasing people who got in their way.
But bear in mind that even in the time that the film is set, many colonial Americans still considered themselves to be, in essence, Europeans - members of the same culture that would be through this war divided into two. These same colonial Americans were systematically involved in the extermination of Native American cultures, they came from the same cultural background as the people they were fighting and they were supported by an anti-royalist French with their own colonial agendas.
It's very difficult to retrofit modern morals onto period politics with any success at all - but while "No Taxation Without Representation" still works for modern moralists, the fact both Americans and Europeans were still involved in slavery makes the clear moral division a harder one to delineate into a simplistic "goodies" versus "baddies" movie.
But rather than explore this tension, the film instead hides it, characterising the British as child-eating, church-burning, godless deviants, while all the things that Americans today find objectionable about their own past - the things that generate guilt (again, for example, slavery) are also shunted off onto the malevolent European.
Case in point: At one point, the Aardman-animated Gabriel makes a speech to a black slave who is fighting alongside them. He says something to the effect of, "We are fighting against the Old World, and Old Ways, this is the New World, and there will be no slavery in it". Actual facts - Britain abolished slavery FORTY YEARS before the United States did. And when the issue of slavery was finally to be decided in the US, it became a substantial component in a Civil War.
The Patriot can't and won't face up to this fact, and so remains an insult to history and a cheap attempt to depict a difficult and complicated struggle as instead Evil, Corrupt, Power-Crazed, Racist Big Monarchist Bad Guys versus simple decent farmer folk who love black people and freedom and don't really even WANT to fight and who are actually Australian in upbringing. It's like a part of American culture is still a teenager, lurking like Bart Simpson in the middle of a calamity, saying to itself: "I didn't do it!
INTERLUDE: The man and his flatmate who works in the film industry go to Sainsbury's on Finchley Road in London. Suddenly they notice the evil British star of The Patriot getting some groceries with his wife. The flatmate smiles and chats and says that she's heard good things about the film, determined not to say anything bad about it until she's at least SEEN the film. The man stands back, trying to work out why ANYONE would do a film in which they are helping to generate a revisionist view of history which slams their own country. He can't think of a thing to say...
... so I'll end with a quote from an article in Salon about the phenomenon of the EVIL BRITISH:
"The prizewinning historian and biographer Andrew Roberts called the film Patriot "racist" in the Daily Express, and pointed out that it was only the latest in a series of films like "Titanic," "Michael Collins" and "The Jungle Book" remake that have depicted the British as "treacherous, cowardly, evil [and] sadistic." Roberts had a theory: "With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt onto someone else.""
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
Any society which was large enough to colonise / bully other nations will always be treated somewhat unfairly in retrospect. I'm sure the English introduced lots of good things to Ireland, like Muffins, funny looking policemen, afternoon tea etc., but the fact remains that Irish culture was outlawed and hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed. Therefore any attempt to try an make a "balanced" view of history will more than likely be snubbed by cinema goers. So as usual it's the cash vs. truth dilemma...
→ Posted by: Ap at November 16, 2002 3:48 PM
wow, maybe you should relax about it a bit and realize that it was just a movie (hence, fiction)?
→ Posted by: freaktopia at November 17, 2002 6:08 AM
To freaktopia: I don't think that's true, actually. I think things that lie about history are extraordinarily scary - particularly when they're actually fiction. Extreme examples abound, but if you made a film about how apartheid was good or rewrote a murder story so that the victims deserved it you'd rightly get called up on your facts...
To Ap: I personally believe that films based around historical events should have to - by law - place a disclaimer at the front of the film if it either didn't happen or is considered by experts to be an innaccurate view of history. I think it's profoundly dangerous. I totally agree that countries that do horrible things may get (should, maybe) treated slightly unfairly in retrospect. And there's no doubt whatsoever that the British have done some bloody awful things around the world - although the successes and achievements are less often looked at now. But there are a lot of other things to look at with relation to America - firstly the majority of Americans ARE Europeans - the vast majority of white Americans share as much genetically with Europeans (and British people) of a couple of hundred years ago as I do. The country of America was taken from its native population who were essentially exterminated so that these Europeans could be there. A rejection of slavery is not something that Americans should be proud of and celebrate as some great achievement of their great freedoms. People around the world rejected it much earlier - the British among them.
Essentially what we're talking about when we talk about this period in American history is the pride of a king and a political party in England arguing with people who were essentially their relatives by blood who wanted freedom from taxation. There was a large amount of debate on BOTH sides about what was the appropriate response - there were those who didn't want independence in the States and there were those who didn't want to tax in Britain.
Neither side got through intact, neither side can take the moral highground completely. Either way, America has to take responsibility for some of the things it's done - slavery is one of those things, the extermination of the native population is another - and that's not including any of the stuff that's happened since. It's ludicrous to keep selling America this image of itself as perfect and sublime at the expense of another country.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at November 17, 2002 7:58 PM
I would agree with Tom. Given the current political situation in America and the world, I think it's actually very dangerous for propaganda like this (because that's all it is really; it's not even that entertaining, although IMDb users seem to disagree!) to portray America as being so morally superior.
→ Posted by: Tim at November 17, 2002 11:16 PM
Since when was the equation:
Movie = Fiction
always = True??
→ Posted by: Ap at November 18, 2002 5:44 PM
I'm trying to find an articale on the net about when an entire town was forced into a church and burned alive by the order of an English officer. Please e-mail me when you find one.
→ Posted by: vlar at February 3, 2003 6:41 AM
Tom, I agree the Partirot was a crap movie, but i disagree that "films based around historical events should have to - by law - place a disclaimer at the front of the film if it either didn't happen or is considered by experts to be an innaccurate view of history." The problem with this position is that it presupposes that there is some accurate view to which experts can agree. there isn't. and why would such a disclaimer be necessary. interested viewers can read reviews and discover the inaccuracies and misrepresentations. The second problem is that there is probably a trade-off between historical accuracy and dramatic effect, and the filmmaker must, and is right to, prefer dramatic effect.
Take JFK. excellent movie, but totally biased and inaccurate. see www.jfk-online.com/jfk100menu.html.
the reason we don't like Partriot but do like JFK is that Patriot's biases offend our sense of aesthetics whereas JFK's do not. we're just not interested in a feel-good, 4th of July type flick.
→ Posted by: Faisal at November 19, 2003 11:57 AM
I think you over-estimate the degree to which people disagree about history. There are things that can be checked and rechecked - information that exists, and standards that can be created (an impartial panel of prominent historians by 2/3rds majority maybe? levels of warnings?). All the things - in fact - that happen when you rate movies for age.
I'm not saying that movies that are historically innaccurate shouldn't be shown, I'm saying that there should be a disclaimer at the beginning. People can still disagree about them, read about them in greater detail - whatever. And people are more than able to make films that aren't historically accurate, as long as they're prepared to have a disclaimer placed at the front saying so.
And the reason I don't like the Patriot is not that it says positive things about America, but that it scandalously accuses the British of being in favour of slavery when America isn't - when in fact the States had legal slavery for DECADES after the States. People don't learn from their mistakes if they disavow them and pretend they didn't happen. Blaming the British for slavery is the surest way to make Americans believe that they can't possibly be actually responsible for anything unpleasant that happened in the past...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at November 19, 2003 12:12 PM
Tom, i agree people don't learn the lessons of history if they deny the facts. there are two isses here: 1) whether historical movies should be preceded with some kind of disclaimer about its historical accuracy; 2) whether Patriot "scandalously accuses the British of being in favour of slavery when America isn't".
Taking 1) first, you say i overestimate disagreement between historians. i think it depends on the events being depicted. What warning do you think should precede JFK? even the most historically accurate movies (apollo 13 for instance) contain factual inaccuracies for dramatic effect. Therefore, there would have to be a warning before EVERY historical movie, rendering the warning pointless, unless you conceive of tiers of warnings like the age rating. so the question becomes not WHETHER the movie is inaccurate, but HOW inaccurate it is. You'd have to factor in both the number of inaccuracies and the significance of the inaccuracy in terms of the overall rendering of the events (i.e., how misleading is the inaccuracy). This all seems terribly unscientific and impracticable to me, whereas for age ratings, there are objective criteria (number of occurances of bad language; extent of nudity etc.).
There is another logical problem to your warning idea in relation to movies like Patriot. Patriot, like Gladiator, does not claim to be a true story (even if the character is based on someone who might have existed). True, it is set in the specific past of the american revolution. But the only way your disclaimer could cover the Patriot is if the rule required disclaimers to appear before every movie set in the past (i.e., every movie).
Second, i'm not well versed in american revolution history but is it true that blacks were offered emancipation in exchange for service? as far as i remember, the movie never actually says that america was against slavery while britain still practiced it. so what was the mistake of fact you think Patriot makes?
→ Posted by: Faisal at November 19, 2003 1:40 PM
The specific instance I'm thinking about is when - in a film about the evils of the British - a slave asks why they should fight for freedom to be told that slavery is an 'old world' thing, and that America is there to fight against it and to push for freedoms. Heath Ledger's character says that I believe. Which makes it particularly ironic that America maintained and perpetuated slavery for decades after the British and that it would end up used as a pretext for an American civil war between those who fought against it and those who supported it.
Absolutely, I believe that some kind of graduated scale would be the best approach - and I also believe that criteria could be drawn up for the levels of historical accuracy without too much difficulty.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at November 19, 2003 2:16 PM
Final comment. respectfullly, i think you're wrong about the practicability of a rating system for historical accuracy for the reasons i described earlier (not all of which were responded too.... anyway).
I also think your memory of the Patriot is a bit off. I remember the scene you're talking about: A black man who is ALREADY fighting with mel gibson's militia sees a sign promising emancipation to slaves who serve for 6 months or 2 years or whatever it was. and another militia men asks "what are you gonna do with freedom". you suggest in your review that the movie is a simplistic "goodies" versus "baddies" movie. But the reaction i mentionned earlier ("what are you gonna do with freedom") is a counter example: old world attitides even among the new world "goodies".
Bottom line: i don't recall heath ledger saying that america is going to protect your freedoms. BUT, even if he did, where's the misstatement of historical fact? I'm pretty sure the movie does not say america abolished slavery before britain.
The point is that even if your version of the movie is correct, you still haven't demonstrated a misstatement of historical fact that would warrant a disclaimer.
→ Posted by: Faisal at November 19, 2003 3:43 PM
To be honest, I'd suggest you watch the film again. I wrote this review the day I saw it in the cinema and stand by it.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at November 19, 2003 5:09 PM
Surely if you are to compare history then where are the natives?
anyway the past is a brutal past.... However if you view this movie as an Iraqi/Afgan/Palastinian then the current problems make sense.... You have become what you detested however that what you detested in the movie has grown wisdom with age... All the best!
Lets hope you sort this out in the next election
→ Posted by: anon at June 14, 2006 2:14 AM
It's a movie. Chill out. Movies are made for entertainment, not to please historians. Yes, we all know that Americans are hypocrites, but the movie was made to entertain people with a dramatic version of the revolutionary war. It uses the Martin family to make the war seem more personal and dramatic so people would watch it and enjoy.
→ Posted by: Audrey at October 8, 2006 1:08 AM
I think that a movie should in no way have to represent historical fact. The sole reason of making the movie was to make money. There is no pro-slavery or anti-British feeling behind it, think about it. And if there was, it was the writer and/or director. There is absolutely no reason to go slam it, and America. sorry bud
→ Posted by: pep at January 17, 2007 12:35 AM
Yes America was 40 years behind the British in abolishing slavery. Every wonder why that was? The cotton industry made up 60% (rough estimate) of trade for the U.S. This made the decision strained as many Americans did not agree with slavery and never have, even when slavery was the norm around the world.
Every wonder who the overseas customer was for this cotton?
England.
So please enough with the 'We beat you to it'.
England was the enabler and the reason slavery was kept in the states as long as it was. Eventually the people who didn't believe it in abolished it. Good wins.
Back to the movie. The movie attempted to bring out the humanity. Humanity is lost in history as we ask our children to memorize dates and places. We forgot that when real people make decisions they are acting on emotions and personal circumstances.
The movie is a great movie. If you want real history, read the books.
→ Posted by: Presidio at July 14, 2008 3:43 AM