With the exam season coming up, it seems natural to include a review of the movie Lincoln written by whom else but David L. Robbins, the professor of USA History. How does he view Spielberg’s depiction of the famous American president, how much historical verity can one find in the film, what topics covered during the lectures are discussed? Such questions and more are answered in the professor’s review.
Steven Spielberg has proven himself to be an intelligent and interesting filmmaker, occasionally a great one. However, as with all filmmakers (and probably with all artists who aspire to popular success), there are inevitably contained within his work contradictory motives, dynamics, and vectors. A "serious" filmmaker needs also to be an entertainer and an entrepreneur, must aim understandably to make money by attracting the largest possible audience. There is thus in such work, however serious, a tendency to reach for the lowest common denominator – to dumb down, to simplify. This is perhaps especially true as regards historical events and circumstances, to which all too little attention is being paid in the American (and more generally postmodern) mental universe.
The selection dilemma, of course, clearly predates and precedes purely filmic and mass-market considerations, being intrinsic in many ways to "purely" artistic decisions themselves. But the centrality of the selection—often reduced to simplification—procedure is reemphasized in an age when consumer-oriented "market" entertainment has taken center stage in both culture (popular culture, at least) and consumer economics.
And, with both its virtues and defects, it emerges centrally in Mr. Spielberg's most recent product, Lincoln. In it, Daniel Day-Lewis is brilliant in his portrayal of the eponymous lead character, a performance fully deserving of his unprecedented third best actor Oscar. The Lincoln Mr. Day-Lewis portrays, however, is a Lincoln who is a folksy, partial, and popularized version of his mythic visible side, with the darker side(s) left un-illuminated.
In too many ways, it is an exercise in caricature and Disney-esque (and/or Spielbergian) contextual and moral oversimplification. Mr. Spielberg draws important material from Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals (2005). What emerges is, unfortunately, a cartoon of the resourceful saint who is willing to get his hands dirty just enough to make a good thing happen—a cliché straight out of Frank Capra. There are in Ms. Goodwin's book many cleverer and more unscrupulous initiatives undertaken by Lincoln in causes perhaps less inherently noble than the Gottedammerung of the slave system—such as the consolidation and inflation of federal powers and prerogatives (an attack on "states' rights," the central and original idea of the U.S. Constitution); and the economic program designed to redirect a primarily subsistence agricultural country toward industry, commerce, and the market. Lincoln was clever, all right, but his machinations and those of his Republican "team of rivals" reached far beyond the issue of black emancipation and far beyond their own time.
Mr. Spielberg's partial portrait also constructs Lincoln as far more of an abolitionist (or even an anti-slavery man) and less of a racist (which he was, along with most of his white contemporaries, whatever their opinions on slavery) than his record demonstrates him to have been before, and even during, the Civil War.
Portraying opponents (Republican or Democratic) as rogues, fools, buffoons, and/or villains (as this film all too often does) sins seriously against the spirit of the democracy that Lincoln so often and so influentially endorsed.
As Emerson warns us in his repeated cautions about the dangers of what he calls "partiality" ("New England Reformers," 1844), especially in reformers obsessed with good and noble causes: Beware the "Lest we forget" construction that might tempt us to lose sight also of the complexity and interconnectedness/interdependency of all things, of its fundamental inevitability and pervasiveness in all of life's choices and undertakings, in our effort to remember and honour specific moral insights, achievements, and heroism.
