On when subtlety isn’t necessary—but why it still helps.
John Sayles’ Matewan (1987) tells
the still nearly forgotten story of the 1920 West Virginia coal
wars, when striking coal miners were pitted against both imported scabs and
hired guns brought in by the
Stone Mountain Coal Company (one battle within a long history of such
conflicts, as both of the latter two links indicate). Sayles’ hero, played by
one of his favorite go-to actors Chris Cooper, is a United Mine Worker labor
organizer named Joe Kenehan who has come to town to help unionize the miners
and is eventually killed by the outside thugs; it is to this character that
Sayles gives a line that sums up his movie’s entire ideology quite succinctly.
The white miners are planning to fight the newly arrived African American and
Italian American scabs when Kenehan notes, “They got you fightin’ white against
colored, native against foreign … when you know there ain’t but two sides in
this world: them that work and them that don’t. You work, they don’t. That’s
all you got to know about the enemy."
Sayles’ more political films can tend toward the preachy, and this is one
of his more overt such moments (although interestingly, the single most
effective labor advocacy in the film is delivered as part of a
far more subtle and symbolic sermon, one preached by the young activist
Danny who idolizes Kenehan). But does such overt ideological preaching
necessarily constitute a weakness or mistake? I would argue that, at least in
this particular case, there are strong arguments that it doesn’t. For one
thing, there’s no question that the striking Matewan miners were indeed facing
an enemy, one who had been explicitly paid to stop them at all costs;
recognizing that fact, as Kenehan urges them to here, was thus key for their
survival, much less their success. And for another thing, Sayles is dealing in
this film with a history that’s almost entirely unknown in late 20th
and early 21st century America—in such a case, you could argue that
trying to be too subtle or understated would risk not making his audience aware
of the history at all.
So I wouldn’t say that Sayles’ lack of subtlety in that quote, or in the
film overall, is a shortcoming. But on the other hand, that element, coupled
with the corollary black-and-white worldview it brings with it (for example,
the two characters who represent the hired guns are pretty much evil
incarnate), does elide the complex but unavoidable reality that every person
and group in this story were as human as every other. For a compelling potrayal
of that shared humanity, I can’t recommend strongly enough Diane Gillam Fisher’s
poetry collection Kettle
Bottom (2004); in it Fisher portrays the West Virginia coal wars
through the first-person voices and perspectives of numerous characters,
representing every group and side within these histories. Because whatever the
practical necessity of Kenehan’s quote, the truth is that it comprised a particular
and limited vision of “work,” one that includes certain people in the community
and excludes others; whereas a work like Fisher’s can help us think about the
work, as well as the lives, of every person in this historical world, wherever
our ultimate identifications and sympathies might fall.
Next film tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other films you’d especially AmericanStudy?
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