[On September
17th, 2011 the Occupy Wall
Street protests began in lower Manhattan. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy
that event and four other mass protests, leading up to a special weekend post
on mass protest in the age of Trump.]
On a popular historical
film that gets a Civil War mass protest frustratingly wrong.
I try not to watch movies with my
AmericanStudier’s eyes, at least not first and foremost; certainly there are
films (like many
from my favorite filmmaker, John
Sayles) that tap into my scholarly ideas and passions quickly and fully, and
in that case I feel no guilt about becoming an AmericanStudier while watching
them, but for the most part, I think I’m able to watch a movie as an engaged
and present audience member initially, and then step back after it’s done and
consider AmericanStudies kinds of questions and connections further. But
sometimes my scholarly perspective and connections do make it impossible for me
to stay in the moment while watching a particular film or scene, pull me out of
what the filmmaker is trying to accomplish and even, in the worst case
scenario, pit me against the film’s choices or purposes. And I don’t think that
has ever happened more fully or more strikingly than with the climactic
sequence of Martin Scorsese’s historical epic Gangs
of New York (2002).
The explicit focus of that
climactic sequence is the moment when Leonardo DiCaprio’s Amsterdam Vallon can
take his long-anticipated and much-delayed vengeance on Daniel Day Lewis’s Bill
the Butcher (who killed Amsterdam’s father in the film’s opening fight but for
whom he has worked for much of the film), but that personal plot climax plays
out against the backdrop of (and is influenced and even further delayed by) the
1863 New York
City draft riots. Scorsese’s choice to use those riots as his setting for
this final section is, to my mind, extremely disturbing on a couple of levels:
most overtly, because he takes a hugely complex and dark national moment and
turns it into simply (or at least mostly) a set of complications for his hero’s
plan for revenge; but more subtly and even more frustratingly, because the
community that is rioting—the city’s Irish American immigrants—are (or have
been throughout the film) DiCaprio’s people, the community that he has joined
and fought for and with (not in the false way he has joined with Bill, but as
his real home and family in the absence of his father), making the draft riots
into an event that, if we stop to analyze who’s who as we’ve met them, we would
in the movie’s logic have to identity with and even support.
It’s not possible to overstate how
wrong that kind of sympathy would be. The causes
of and factors behind the riots were certainly complex and multi-part, but
at their heart they illustrated the resistance of the city’s Irish American
population to being drafted into the Union Army during the Civil War. And in
case the reasons for that resistance were unclear, most of the more than 100
New Yorkers who were killed
during the riots were African Americans—not because they were taking part
in the fighting on either side (the riots pitched the Irish community against
the police and then the Union Army itself), but because the rioters were actively
seeking them out and lynching them. Certainly there are, again, other social
and cultural forces that were relevant too, many of which (like Boss
Tweed’s corrupt political reign) the movie includes in its broad if (I
believe) relatively superficial historical purview, and no analysis of the
riots would be complete if it did not engage with those forces as well. But at
the end of the day, these riots were not markedly different from the many other
19th century moments when significant portions of the white
populations of American cities rose up in violent opposition to African
American communities; and if anything, the fact that these riots took place
during the Civil War, when many Northern whites and (by this time) blacks were dying in support of the rights of
their African American countrymen, only highlights the ugliness of these events
in contrast.
DiCaprio’s final voiceover
in the film (set against an evolving New York City backdrop that culminates,
controversially or at least shockingly given the film’s 2002 release date, in a
view of the World Trade Center) notes that gang leaders and members like his
father, Bill, and himself are no longer remembered in New York, “as if we were
never here.” The moment (and thus the film’s) implicit argument is that we
should better remember these New Yorkers, include them more fully in our
history of the city and of the nation beyond it. Fair enough, Marty, but if we
do so, we’d better make sure we include the draft riots too, and not as popcorn
entertainment to cheer for. Next protest tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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