[For this year’s
July
4th series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural representations of
the Revolution and its era. Leading up to a special post on Hamilton!]
On the monstrous
issue at the heart of a Revolutionary blockbuster.
There are lots of
reasons why this AmericanStudier should be a big fan of Roland Emmerich’s historical
blockbuster film The Patriot (2000; serious spoilers in that hyperlinked
video). It features a protagonist who seems to be at least loosely based on one
of my childhood 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
than they do—but as an AmericanStudier, it’s Isaac’s over-the-top bad guy in The Patriot who really 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 of the film. 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
representation gets a failing grade in history.
Next
Revolutionary representation tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Revolutionary representations you’d highlight?
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