July 31, 2020: Great Movie Speeches: The American President

[On July 30^th, 1945, the USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine on its way back from delivering the components of the atomic bombs. That wartime tragedy became the basis for one of the great speeches in American film history, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that monologue and four other knockout cinematic orations!]

On three of the many phenomenal lines from one of the most inspiring, AmericanStudying movie speeches of all time:

1)      “You cannot address crime prevention without getting rid of assault weapons and hand guns. I consider them a threat to national security, and I will go door to door if I have to, but I'm gonna convince Americans that I'm right, and I'm gonna get the guns”: My feelings about both guns and their Constitutionality are well documented, so mainly I just wanted to add here that I would really, really love to hear a president put it this succinctly and potently. We did get rid of assault weapons for a while, and it worked in precisely this way; doing so again would at least be a significant step in the right direction.

2)      “That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle age, middle class, middle income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family, and American values and character, and you wave an old photo of the President's girlfriend and you scream about patriotism”: Make America Great Again, anybody? Perhaps my only revision to this whole speech would be to add the word “imagined” before “easier,” because that time being conjured up never existed. That why I call this form of patriotism, one of the four in my forthcoming book, mythic.

3)      “America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, ‘You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.’ You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free”: And speaking of my patriotism book (which is also named for a line in one of our anthem songs, Of Thee I Sing), I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a clearer vision of what I call (there and elsewhere) critical patriotism than the final lines of this quote. Word, President Andrew Shepherd. Word.

July Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other movie speeches you’d highlight?

July 30, 2020: Great Movie Speeches: Jaws

[On July 30^th, 1945, the USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine on its way back from delivering the components of the atomic bombs. That wartime tragedy became the basis for one of the great speeches in American film history, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that monologue and four other knockout cinematic orations!]

On two ways Quint’s iconic speech captures a historic horror.

As I wrote in this prior post on Jaws (1975), Steven Spielberg’s groundbreaking summer blockbuster is really a tale of two films: the Amity-set first half, which is as much about the community on that resort island as the unseen killer shark terrorizing it; and the ocean-bound second half, which is as much about the three men aboard the Orca as about the now-seen killer shark terrorizing them (well, technically they’re hunting it, but we all know how that goes). All three of those men are compelling characters given multi-layered life by the very talented actors playing them, but there’s no doubt that it is Robert Shaw’s Captain Quint who stands out and from whom the audience can’t look away. That’s true from the moment he enters the film until the (far more gruesome) moment he leaves it, but it’s never more true than in the scene where both the audience and his two companions finally learn a bit more about what has made Quint the way he is, both when it comes to sharks and overall: his experience aboard the doomed USS Indianapolis.  

That speech is interestingly inaccurate on a basic detail about that historic horror (Quint says in the speech’s closing lines that the Indianapolis went down on “June the 29^th, 1945,” perhaps because that date flows more poetically than “July the 30^th” would have, perhaps because he just got it wrong but had done such a beautiful long take that Spielberg didn’t want to re-film), but to my mind captures perfectly two sides to the event in the intimate and affecting ways that the best historical fiction can. The more obvious, but certainly crucial, side is the many stages of fear through which Quint’s masterful storytelling takes his audience, from the most graphic (that “high-pitched scream” when a shark attacks) to the more mundane (the look of a shark’s eyes, “like doll’s eyes”) to that ironic final fear as the men wait to be rescued. History and humanity are not always easy to keep in mind at the same time, and the numbers associated with the Indianapolis (which is considered the single most fatal sinking in US naval history) are a good example: Quint highlights those staggering numbers of both overall sailors and sailors lost in his closing lines too, but to my mind they don’t and can’t capture the event’s horrors and tragedies as well as the speech’s exploration of how it all felt for just one of those men.

How it all felt and, in the case of a surviving veteran like Quint, how it all continues to feel. To my mind, the single best and most important line in Quint’s speech is another one from that closing section, directly following the line about the time he was most frightened (while waiting to be rescued): “I’ll never put on a life jacket again.” 316 of the ship’s 1195 total crew survived the ordeal, and it’s fair to say that all of them likely suffered from some form or another of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But PTSD (especially in large cohorts of veterans) is another of those overarching categories that can at times be difficult to think about in its most individual, intimate realities. And in this one line, both the words themselves and how he delivers them, Robert Shaw captures that human side to the traumas of war and their lingering effects; indeed, both the line and the speech as a whole force us to rethink the character in every way, including his seemingly obsessive and certainly self-destructive pursuit of the film’s titular shark. That’s a pretty darn good film speech!

Last movie speech tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other movie speeches you’d highlight?

July 29, 2020: Great Movie Speeches: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

[On July 30^th, 1945, the USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine on its way back from delivering the components of the atomic bombs. That wartime tragedy became the basis for one of the great speeches in American film history, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that monologue and four other knockout cinematic orations!]

On what the concept of “Capra-esque” misses, and how an iconic speech embodies the director’s genuine vision.

It seems to me that one central reason why a great many AmericanStudiers and scholars embrace filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and the Coen Brothers—all directors of whom I’m not always the biggest fan, as I highlight in those hyperlinked posts—is that their visions of America and the world are consistently dark and violent (to be clear, another reason is that they’re all talented filmmakers and storytellers). [For whatever reason, Francis Ford Coppola’s darknesses work better for this AmericanStudier.] If that’s the case, it would help explain the frequent dismissal and even disdain implied by the adjective “Capra-esque,” a description often used to convey in shorthand the idea that a film or filmmaker is overly saccharine, creating a fairy tale vision of society that fails to grapple sufficiently with its darker realities and truths. Exhibit A for that definition of Frank Capra’s works would likely be It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), not just because of its feel-good title and its unquestionably happy ending, but also because of its idealized depiction of small-town Bedford Falls (as opposed to the—gasp—night clubs and other horrors of Pottersville).

As a critical optimist, I’ll admit to being a sucker for happy endings, and as I wrote in this post I find the ending of Wonderful Life quite moving and profound. But I would also connect that ending to my overarching concept of “hard-won hope,” as for much of the film Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey has been anything but happy and life has seemed anything but wonderful (a storytelling choice Capra apparently made in part because he saw the darker side of Stewart that the actor’s World War II experiences, like Capra’s own, had brought out). As with so many of the happy endings in great American stories, that is, the conclusion of It’s a Wonderful Life not only doesn’t erase the darknesses which the story has consistently featured and explored, but it depends precisely on such engagement with those darker sides of life for it to have any meaning and power. From what I can tell, that dynamic far more accurately reflects Capra’s films and perspective—and thus what we might mean if we call a story “Capra-esque”—than does a simplistically saccharine tone.

The same can be said for the most famous Capra speech (and another classic Jimmy Stewart moment and character), Senator Jefferson Smith’s filibuster in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Yes, Smith concludes his marathon speech by emphasizing another idealized concept, contained in what he calls a “plain, simple rule: ‘Love thy neighbor.’” But he recognizes full well that his fight for that rule might well be “a lost cause,” which are (quoting another Senator and Smith’s icon who has turned his back on the idea) “they are the only causes worth fighting for.” The ending of this speech and scene is just as fraught and dark as those middle sections of Wonderful Life, as reflected by the transcript: “I’m going to stay right here and fight for this lost cause, even if this room gets filled with lies like these…Somebody will listen to me. Some—[Smith collapses].” As Smith has noted, a person can “even die for” lost causes, and it seems quite possible in this moment that he has given his own life in service of this one. If that’s an ideal (and it is), it’s one with a painful and dark side, which, as Frank Capra consistently depicts, is how we always find our ideals, in Washington or in Bedford Falls.

Next movie speech tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other movie speeches you’d highlight?