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BEYOND THE MYTHS
by Ronald F. Maxwell
The starry
cross of the Confederacy is at the center of a roiling controversy. Protesting
crowds want it removed from State Capitols, vociferous groups insist on keeping
the flag flying. The Saint Andrew's cross embedded in this emblem can be seen as
a symbol for the cross roads and cross currents of American history. To
many Americans, both black and white, the flag is like a dagger to the heart, a
painful reminder of the worst of America's past injustices and persisting racial
prejudices. To others, mostly but not all white, the flag inspires pride in a
heroic past, it stirs, even in Lincoln's phrase, the "mystic chords of
memory" for gallant and fearless warriors fighting for their independence.
Each side finds it difficult to appreciate the genuine feelings of their
counterparts or to be able to reconcile the one viewpoint with the other. Few
other icons inspire such passionate and mutually exclusive responses.
Into this highly charged atmosphere how can a filmmaker hope to make a serious
film on the Civil War without inviting even more controversy? While
cognizant of the legitimate sensitivity of his fellow citizens, he must do his
best to keep contemporary pressures out of the work. If not, the work risks
being a sanitized, lame and gratuitous exercise in political correctness,
unworthy of its subject or of the discerning audiences of today. And
unworthy of future generations who will not thank us for putting personal
career aspirations ahead of the first responsibility of all artists and story
tellers - to get to the truth of the matter - to the mysterious heart of the
human condition with all its paradoxes, contradictions and complexities.
There are more than a few in the academy, in the media, in politics, who
tend to reduce the fearful agony of the Civil War to simplistic jargon. They insist
on seeing the war in terms of the good guys and the bad guys. Since this is
Hollywood's customary way of looking at all of human history, it is all the more
challenging to avoid taking this dramatic turn in a film on the Civil War.
In his insightful essay, "The Legacy of the Civil War," Robert Penn Warren
posits the notions of two great myths persisting in the American consciousness
- for the South "the Great Alibi" and for the North "the Treasury of
Virtue." "Once the War was over," says Warren, "the Confederacy became a
City of the Soul... (O)nly at the moment when Lee handed Grant his sword was the
Confederacy born; or to state matters another way, in the moment of death the
Confederacy entered upon its immortality." In the Great Alibi, in the
attempt to recall and enshrine the best motives for Southern Independence, the
most repugnant factor is often overlooked or de-emphasized - the issue of
slavery.
"If the Southerner, with his Great Alibi, feels trapped by
history, the Northerner, with his Treasury of Virtue, feels redeemed by history,
automatically redeemed," Warren continues. "He has in his pocket, not a Papal
indulgence peddled by some wandering pardoner in the Middle Ages, but a plenary
indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future, freely given by the hand of
history."
Or, as Brook Adams once noted, "The Yankees went to war
animated by the highest ideals of the nineteenth century middle classes? But
what the Yankees achieved - for their generation at least - was a triumph not of
middle-class ideals but of middle-class vices. The most striking products of
their crusade were the shoddy aristocracy of the North and the ragged children
of the South. Among the masses of Americans there were no victors, only the
vanquished."
Warren offers a cautionary note to future novelists,
historians and yes, even filmmakers. "Moral narcissism is a peculiarly unlovely
and unloveable trait "(E)ven when the narcissist happens to possess the virtues
which he devotes his time congratulating himself upon" It would be taking
the easy path, seeking the approbation of those who guard the Treasury of
Virtue, to present the Civil War as a contest between good and evil. Conversely,
it would be all too tempting to strike the pose of the outrageous provocateur -
to indulge in the perpetuation of the Great Alibi.
What interests me as
a filmmaker and chronicler of the Civil War are the hard choices that real
people had to make. Our film is populated by characters with divided loyalties
and conflicting affections. Each character embodies his own internal struggle -
his own personal civil war. The film begins with a quote from George
Eliot's Daniel Deronda, referring to the importance of place, of the
local, of the particular. I included this quote because it sets up the central
dilemma. Humans by their very nature are attached to place and home. These
attachments can be powerful in both constructive and destructive ways.
People are also attached to family and to group. They can be motivated by ideas
and ideals. The characters in Gods and Generals are not immune to these
forces. They are all, to a man and a woman, pulled and pushed by these
conflicting allegiances. What may be novel in this film is the revelation of the
complex ways in which African-Americans, like their white neighbors, were
confronted with their own hard choices.
In this film "patriotism"
metamorphoses from a philosophical abstraction to an organic life force. For
many nineteenth-century Southern whites patriotism expressed a love of state and
locality that seems strange if not incomprehensible to inhabitants of the new
global community. For nineteenth-century Unionists, who found themselves on both
sides of the Mason-Dixon line, patriotism constituted a love of the entire
country, from Penobscot Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. For African-Americans
patriotism could mean all of the above, further leavened with the group identity
and group allegiance fostered by slavery in the South and prejudice in the
North.
Martha, the domestic slave in the Beale family, has a genuine
affection for the white children she has helped rear alongside her own. She is
also tied by emotion, tradition and circumstance to the larger community of
blacks, whose fate she shares. When Yankee looters come to ransack her home in
Fredericksburg she will not let them pass. A few days later, when Yankee
soldiers seek to requisition the same home as a hospital, she opens the door and
attends to the wounded.
Historians write about the forces of history,
about ideology and determinism. Whatever truth there is in such analysis, it is
not the place where individuals live out their lives. Ordinary people like you
and me and the characters who inhabit this film live their lives day by day,
hoping to make the bes t of it with dignity, hoping to get by - in the context
of this film, hoping to survive. They in their time, like we today, have bonds
of affection across racial, religious, sexual, and political divides. "To
experience the full imaginative appeal of the Civil War," says Robert Penn
Warren, "...may be, in fact, the very ritual of being American."
Gods and Generals, is only the first part of a trilogy of films on the
Civil War, the second being the already produced Gettysburg, and the
third the yet-to-be-made The Last Full Measure. Even a trilogy can
provide little more than a glimpse of the epochal event at the center of our
national consciousness. We are with Jackson as he steels the First Virginia
Brigade at Manassas, with Lee as he declines the command of the Union army, with
Chamberlain as he tells his wife Fanny he is going off to war and later in his
defense of Little Round Top. Across more than four years , across the
countryside and cityscapes of America we are with these men and others, wearing
the Blue and the Gray, as they write in their own blood the destiny of America -
our destiny.
Warren provides a kind of credo for the filmmaker with the
audacity to venture into these waters.
"Historians, and readers of history
too, should look twice at themselves when the (Civil War) is mentioned. It means
that we should seek to end the obscene gratifications of history, and try to
learn what the contemplation of the past, conducted with psychological depth and
humane breadth, can do for us. What happens if, by the act of historical
imagination - the historian's and our own - we are transported into the
documented, re-created moment of the past and, in a double vision, see the
problems and values of that moment and those of our own, set against each other
in mutual criticism and clarification? What happens if, in innocence, we can
accept this process without trying to justify the present by the past or the
past by the present?"
"(T)here is a discipline of the mind and heart, a
discipline both humbling and enlarging, in the imaginative consideration of
possibilities in the face of the unique facts of the irrevocable past" History
cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller
understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better
face the future."
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| Additional Gods and Generals Links
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Comments by reviewers
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Essays by Ron Maxwell
Beyond the Myths: Making Civil War Films
Poetic License in Films
Comments by James "Bud" Robertson, Stonewall Jackson's biographer
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Cast and Crew Announcements
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The official Warner Brothers Gods & Generals site
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info@ronmaxwell.com