Lincoln
Directed by Steven Spielberg
This movie has been hyped and promoted far out of proportion to its merit. Even Lincoln scholars have gotten on the bandwagon heaping praise on this mythologizing propaganda. At first I was puzzled by this. I couldn’t understand why so many scholars would throw their support behind this film in the public way that they have. Are they just afraid to set themselves against something that is so popular and has so much money behind it? But after thinking about it for a few days, I realized that the scholars are actually the problem. Steven Spielberg consulted them and probably followed their advice. He didn’t make this up out of his head, and he didn’t do all the research himself. The community of Lincoln scholars is largely beholden to this idealized, honorific, and in many ways, false conception of Lincoln that the film presents. This film is a correct reflection of the way Lincoln is perceived and reconstructed in mainstream American society, and this in turn derives from the scholarly community that has created and perpetuated this Myth. This Lincoln could have come out of Leave It to Beaver. He’s a genial, storytelling, wholesome, fatherly figure. Everyone says Daniel Day-Lewis plays him so well. I don’t get it. He’s nothing like I imagine Lincoln to be. Lincoln was depressive. Melancholy. He was forbidding and aloof. He was indecisive on the one hand, and stubborn on the other. He had human compassion and a crude sense of humor. He was a very astute politician, he had a talent for making deals, and an appetite for power. Psychologically, he was very complex and hard to gauge. He did tell stories, but his stories tended to be earthy, if not vulgar. They served the purpose of entertaining people and making himself the amused center of their attention. At the same time, they served a defensive function in that they enabled Lincoln to conceal himself. Lincoln the story teller remained an elusive, private, enigmatic man. The film implies that the story telling was didactic, that he told parables like Jesus to teach people moral lessons. He might have done that. He won some court cases that way, but for the most part Lincoln the story teller was a man hungry for attention and approval. He was a politician looking for support and good will. This movie simplifies him and turns him into a warm, friendly cupcake. It is an apology, an attempt to elevate him, beatify him. It’s a feel good movie, to make Americans feel good about themselves, about America, about the Civil War, and about Lincoln. It starts out with soldiers quoting the Gettysburg Address back to Lincoln, as if the common soldiers were fighting out of a sense of idealism and dedication to the cause of liberty and freedom. Then there is a shot of Lincoln raising an American flag, and a scene with him and his wife, Mary, in private having an intimate conversation like a married couple that is getting along well and has good communication. It’s a lot of nonsense. The biggest lie of all is the portrayal of Lincoln’s marriage and of Mary Lincoln. This is an attempt to rehabilitate Mary Lincoln from the corrupt, mentally ill woman she was, who was the bane of Lincoln’s life, and make her appear to be some strong, influential participant in his decision-making and private deliberation. Sally Field is completely unconvincing as Mary Lincoln. This is a very contrived, incredible role that has nothing to do with the real Mary Lincoln. There was one scene that felt real and that was when Lincoln and Mary had a screaming argument over their son, Robert’s, enlistment in the Union Army. They even have Lincoln slapping Robert in the face at one point — a very unlikely scene that illustrates how far afield they are of Lincoln’s true character. In a couple of places the word ‘fuck’ is used as a curse word. This is an anachronism. ‘Fuck’ did not become widespread as a curse word in American English until the late 19th or early 20th century. They can get away with it, of course, because not too many Americans know this and they don’t teach it in school. The rest of the movie was manipulative, annoyingly distorted, and mendacious. The predominant content of the movie is actually the drama surrounding the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, rather than about Lincoln himself. This is also a rather simplified, sanitized, honorific reconstruction. I thought the acting was rather poor in general. Everyone was overplaying and the characters and scenes seemed simplified and cartoonish. This whole movie is just annoying from beginning to end. And it is rather dull, I have to say. I found myself waiting for it to end. I couldn’t get interested in anything they were doing. They have taken an extraordinary time and an incredibly interesting person and turned them into something mundane and ordinary. If you haven’t seen it, don’t go. Watch Ken Burns Civil War series instead.
If you want to learn about Abraham Lincoln for real, take a look at Edgar Lee Masters, Lincoln the Man. It was originally published in 1931 and the U.S. Congress actually tried to ban it. That speaks well for it right there. Of the many biographies of Lincoln, which tend to be redundant and hagiographic, Masters is my favorite, because it falls well outside this mainstream tradition. Most biographies of Lincoln deal overwhelmingly with the last five to ten years of his life, and they focus on his policies and actions as President rather than his personality or his character. Masters has his flaws, like they all do, but it strikes me as more realistic and it takes more interest in Lincoln as a person. C. A. Tripp’s The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (2006) details Lincoln’s affinity for same-sex relationships. My paper, “Was Abraham Lincoln Gay?” (2010) Journal of Homosexuality 57:1124-1157, draws heavily on Tripp, and examines Lincoln’s private life and the 19th century sexual culture in which he grew up and lived. Lincoln and Booth: More Light on the Conspiracy (2003) by Donald Winkler, is a fascinating study of the assassination of Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth’s relationship to the Confederacy’s intelligence network. David Donald’s Lincoln is informative and probably accurate in its facts, although it tends to fall into this apologetic, mythologizing tradition, and is heavily weighted toward the last four or five years of Lincoln’s life as President. One of the best books you can read on this subject is Lincoln in American Memory (1995) by Merrill D. Peterson. This is an excellent study of the growth and evolution of the Lincoln Myth in American culture, which this present film perpetuates and promotes. Peterson explains how Lincoln was transformed from this ineffective, indecisive, much hated, vilified president that he was into this godlike icon of American goodness. It is important to understand this because it enables one to see why it is well-nigh impossible today to get a balanced, “realistic” understanding of Abraham Lincoln. One’s position on Lincoln will be heavily influenced by one’s take on American history since Lincoln, and where one stands socially and politically in contemporary society. There is no such thing as “objectivity” when it comes to Lincoln. He has become almost a religious myth. It is an annoying myth to me. It is a false myth that embodies a saccharine view of American society and its history, that is conservative, self-congratulatory, glosses over unsavory developments, and is sometimes invoked to justify highly offensive policies, like the expansion of executive power and the abrogation of basic constitutional liberties. This film falls squarely in that mythological tradition, and I think was subtly crafted to resonate with some of the recent overreaches of executive power in the conduct of warfare and the bypassing of due process. I’m not going to make the case in detail, because I would have to watch the film several more times, and I am loathe to put myself through that. But I remember having that feeling several times as I watched it that I was being bamboozled and that it was really referring to our time, rather than being an honest historical piece.
Steven Spielberg has made a film that he knew would make people feel good and that they would be willing to pay money to see, not something that would disturb them and make them question everything they had been taught about Abraham Lincoln and American history. He has succeeded very well and will undoubtedly be well rewarded for it. But count me as a NO! I am not taken in by it.
