Propaganda?
The release of the Patriot brought a chorus of condemnation from both sides of the Atlantic, ironically from both left-wing commentators in the US and right-wing commentators in Britain.
The most prominent US critic was director Spike Lee, who complained that the film ignores the issues of slavery. In an angry letter to the Hollywood Reporter, he pointed out that the founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned numerous slaves yet Mel Gibson’s character apparently was not a slaveholder. He called the film “pure, blatant American Hollywood propaganda….One can never forget that America was built upon the genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of African people. To say otherwise is criminal.”
Lee’s critisisms may be justified, but are not altogether fair. Firstly, The Patriot was never meant to tell the entire story of the American Revolution: it is simply one man’s (fictional) story. As writer Devlin puts it: ‘If we were making a film about the Revolution, we’d have made a film about George Washington. This is more in the tradition of Gone With The Wind or Last of the Mohicans. The historical event is a backdrop.’
Secondly, the idea that everybody at the time of the Revolution was of the same opinion about slavery is not true – there was a small minority of farmers in South Carolina who made a moral choice not to have slaves. Although they were the exception and not the rule, there were free black men in South Carolina in revolutionary times. And, although more fought for the British, many black Americans did side with the Patriot cause – 5,000 in the Continental Amy and hundreds more at sea
Thirdly, slaves, and pro-slavery views, are featured in the film, albeit as a minor sideline. And finally, the fact that Benjamin Martin does not own slaves is in no way absurd – let’s face it, he is an unaccomplished furniture maker, not a plantation owner.
Devlin adds a further point: ‘If we’re going to turn this man into a hero, should we take one who’s a slave owner and inherently a racist, or should we put the spotlight on somebody who made that moral choice? Would Spike Lee rather we made a hero out of a slave owner? I just don’t understand the logic.’
If there was critisism of The Patriot in America, there was near-hysteria in Britain. The week before the film opened in the US, the UK press lit up with furious headlines. "Truth is first casualty in Hollywood's War," read one in the Daily Telegraph. Another story, about the historical model for Mel Gibson's character was titled, "The Secret Shame of Mel's New Hero." The accompanying articles complained that the new Revolutionary War epic portrays British redcoats as "bloodthirsty and unprincipled stormtroopers" and "bloodthirsty child-killers."
The prizewinning historian and biographer Andrew Roberts called the film "racist" in the Daily Express, and pointed out that it was only the latest in a series of films like "Titanic," "Michael Collins" and the " Jungle Book" remake that have depicted the British as "treacherous, cowardly, evil [and] sadistic." Roberts had a theory: "With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt onto someone else."
One gets the feeling that some critics are suffering from a fair share of historical guilt themselves. As one commentator pointed out: ‘Before the Brits get too sanctimonious, let’s not forget who brought the slaves to America in the first place.’ But the point is a valid one. As pointed out earlier, the atrocities carried out by regular troops in the movie simply did not happen. And Gibson's comments confirm they were added purely to polarise the conflict in the audience's eyes between the good and bad guys. This may be good film-making but it's not good history.
A few historians and political commentators did weigh in one the side of the film. Thomas Fleming, the author of several books on the Revolution, said he believed the movie's atrocities were legitimate poetic license in conveying a sense of how brutal the war in South Carolina became. "There was a lot of savagery,” he points out, “even though most of it was done by small groups of marauding bands rather than regular troops who were kept under better discipline."
This in itself is of course true. One such instance took place just south of the Mohawk River in 1778. British loyalists and their Seneca Indian allies, enraged at losing their homes when the colonists declared independence from England, returned to the Mohawk, Schoharie and Cherry valleys with a vengeance. Nearly every settlement between present-day Utica and the outskirts of Schenectady was torched and the inhabitants either killed, captured or driven east to Albany. In all, 32 people, including women and children, were killed.
However, as an argument is a pretty weak defence for rewriting history in the way the Patriot does. Firstly, it doesn't excuse the fact that we don't see anything of the atrocities committed by the colonist side, regular or irregular (although they are alluded to in Gibson's memories of the French and Indian War).
But more importantly, atrocities by colonists and Native Americans and atrocities by the British are not moral or historical equivalents. It's precisely because it is the British - the governing power - committing barbaric acts in the movie that we sympathise with the colonists' cause. Had the film made clear that this was very much a conflict fought between colonists (rather than the clear-cut fictional struggle between two 'nations' portrayed) then it's unlikely we'd cheer so loudly when the 'good guys' beat the 'bad guys'.
So, cinematically successful propaganda then, but propaganda all the same.
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