On the monstrous
issue at the heart of another historical blockbuster.
There are lots
of reasons why this AmericanStudier should be a big fan of Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot (2000; serious spoilers in that video). It features a protagonist
who seems to be at least loosely based on one of my favorite American historical
figures: Frances Marion, the
Swamp Fox on the Revolution. It includes multiple, compelling scenes set in
the South Carolina State Legislature (seriously). And it’s a got a heaping
helping of Chris Cooper, which is more than just about any other summer
blockbuster outside of the unquestionably great The
Bourne Identity. What’s not to like?
The very, very
very, unlikeable villain, that’s what. As embodied by Jason Isaacs,
The Patriot’s villainous British
colonel is a thoroughgoing monster, the kind of man who will shoot a young
child just for the heck of it, with a smile on his face. There are of course
generic reasons for this choice—the film is what we might call a historical revenge
saga, one inspired quite directly by Mel Gibson’s previous Braveheart as well as similar films like Gladiator; those films featured equally monstrous villains played
by Patrick McGoohan
and Joaquin Phoenix (respectively),
characters designed in each case to insure that audiences would root for
nothing more than to see the protagonist achieve his vengeful goal. Maybe if I
were a British or Roman historian, those villains would bother me more—but as
an AmericanStudier, it’s Isaac’s over-the-top bad guy who gripes my cookies.
The problem isn’t
just that making Isaacs such a monster reduces the film’s narrative of the
American Revolution to a story of primal revenge (although that sure doesn’t
work on any historical level, unless you want to argue that everybody really
took that Crispus Attucks
thing personally). Nor is it just that it makes the British look really
bad, although they had some
justifiable issues with that effect. To my mind, the biggest problem with The Patriot’s monstrous villain is that
he makes the film’s Revolutionary protagonist into an equally one-dimensional
saint, turning our hugely complex, politically and socially layered originating
moment into a simplistic saga of good vs. evil. I’m sure there were monstrous
men in the British army, and in the Continental one as well—war
tends to bring out such types. But they didn’t define the Revolution’s
causes or stories; and so whatever its charms, this Revolutionary epic gets a
failing grade in history.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So what do
you think? Responses to the week’s posts? Blockbusters you’d highlight,
remember, or analyze?
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