THE LINCOLN FILM--THOUGHTS AT THE TIME (2012) AND JACOB LAWRENCE AFTERTHOUGHTS

Painting from Frederick Douglass Series (1939) by African American Artist Jacob Lawrence. Copyright restricted. See http://www.jacobandgwenlawrence.org/artandlife04.html. See the rest of the Lawrence's explanatory caption below:

 The rest of Jacob Lawrence's remarks concerning Frederick Douglass upon the mustering of the first lack regiment to fight in the Civil War:
 

"Douglass spoke before the colored men of Massachusetts. He told them that a war fought for the perpetual enslavement of the colored people called logically and loudly for colored men to help suppress it. He brought to their memories Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, and Shields Green and John Copeland who fought side by side with John Brown. The 54th and the 55th colored regiments were mustered--

Copy taken from Curriculum Blog Written in 2012 when the film first appeared:

Dear Students: Today is Thanksgiving.  I saw an early show of Lincoln at my local movie theatre in New Jersey.  I found it both overwhelming and breathe taking, and I was a little disappointed that those of you who had already seen it had done such an inadequate job of describing it. Obviously this is a corner of American history that is somewhat foreign to you. 

There are many things that struck me as extremely relevant to our current curriculum.  It helps in this case to read some of the better reviews, which may help to draw your attention to the more important historical features. I will make a folder of some of the links and place them among your course materials.

In regard to the first question I posed, that is whether it would be a reconciliationist, white supremacist or emancipationist version of the Civil War, it seemed to me that the film touched equally upon all three and ultimately did not resolve itself in favor of any of the three. In this sense, it was a fascinatingly wise contemplation on the legacy of the life of Abraham Lincoln, the conclusion of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment. But if I had to choose one, I would choose emancipationist in the sense that everything in the film pointed my thoughts to the future we actually live in, in which we have now a black president who is having as much trouble getting change through Congress as Lincoln had in having the 13th Amendment passed.

The film is about the difficulty of the political process as it occurs in a republic in which freedom of thought and word is a founding assumption.  In the scene near the end of the film in which Thaddeus Stevens and his mistress Lydia Davis are reading the 13th Amendment in bed, this is where D.W. Griffith's white Supremacist film The Birth of a Nation (1915) actually begins. Both Stevens and Davis are horribly caricatured in his film and portrayed as monsters determined to destroy the country and the white majority in favor of the mongrel ambitions of miscegenation and racial mixing. Lydia in particular is demonized.  It seems all the more fitting that Spielberg's film would end with Lydia humanized by the sensible acting of Epatha Merkinson, whom we have all known so many years from Law and Order.  I don't think the part is big enough for an actual nomination but I wish it were.

As for the reconciliationist perspective of a film such as Gone With The Wind (1939), the profound depth and tenderness of the mature relationship between Lincoln and his wife Mary seems to mock the trivial superficiality of such a treatment of the Civil War and hits consequences.  Abraham and Mary's contrast with Rhett and Scarlett couldn't be greater or more revealing.

What makes it such a great lesson for all of us is that it brings the legislation we have been studying vividly to life. I don't think you can come away from watching this film without becoming completely cognizant of what the 13th Amendment achieved (the abolition of slavery), or how it differed from the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as its limitations and ultimately the necessity for both the 14th (citizenship) and the 15th (the vote)Amendment. What is forecast as well, it seems to me, is that none of this legislation would finally succeed in transforming the former slaves into fully recognized and fully participant American citizens.

The portrayal of events takes for granted the omniscience of white supremacy at the time.  The very fact that Congressman Thaddeus Davis, who is in a relationship with a black woman to whom he takes the rough draft of the amendment to read to her in bed, is forced to renounce his own beliefs in racial equality on the floor of the congress in order to get the 13th amendment passed clarifies the hegemony of white supremacy at the time.  Nonetheless, it further embellishes one's enjoyment of these events if one knows what will follow--as you can easily find out by reading, first of all, the second chapter of W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (which you have already been assigned to do), not to mention as well the Reconstruction Wiki I assigned you.

Which brings me to the only disappointment I felt in this film and that is that there are no roles for blacks large enough to get your teeth into, not even that of Nancy Keckley who was Mary Lincoln's dressmaker and companion.  All of the black roles--in particular the soldier in the beginning who completes the recitation of the Gettysburg Address as he wanders off into the night--are lovely and beautiful but they are not allowed to take on important dramatic depth and substance. Perhaps it wouldn't be appropriate to this portion of the history, the month or so preceding the murder of Lincoln, and it seems petty in the end to quibble about this one shortcoming when so many other films in which black actors are featured have none of the pluses of this beautifully and densely written script, but it is hard to believe that this isn't an important consideration.  If it isn't important, why not have the densely written black character instead of not?

To which I have two perhaps contradictory answers.  First, part of the reason it is this way is because of the evils of the star system, and the fact that the name brand combination of the package takes precedence over whatever magic the script and the performance are able to produce. It's got to be an exciting package from the marketing point of view.  Nothing else matters.  Even so I can't imagine that this film will do particularly well at the box office but it should do very well indeed among the awards. 

Just look at the content of the advertising, the focus on the tortured face and figures of the stars--Daniel Day Lewis and Sally Fields--both wonderful but without their former reputations as actors, they would not be able to occupy these roles. Not as unknowns. Which also means the following.  First of all no black woman could be given a major role. Black actresses just aren't there yet. Not even Haile Berry. Not even Vanessa Williams.  Rather it would have to be a black male with a major name, and such a man (Denzel Washington or Sam Jackson or somebody like that) would never take the lesser role that such a part would likely be.  A major black male role would be in danger of completely derailing the subtle balance of the current script.  This film is not about the freedom or the equality of women or of blacks, but rather a moment still pregnant with that possibility.

At the same time, the racial equilibrium of this script speaks to the ongoing power of white supremacy in our culture, to the fact that we still don't know how to imagine what kind of moral and aesthetic hierarchy might actually follow.  That just like Lincoln and his most well intentioned contemporaries we still don't know quite how to incorporate the agency of actual black people (and former slaves) into the mainstream of the story we tell ourselves about the history of our country and our culture.

The Help: Black Women and Hollywood

Viola Davis, the real star of The Help (2009)

    The novel The Help by Kathryn Stockett, a bestseller and a big favorite with black women’s book clubs this year, is appearing as a film this month with Viola Davis (Oscar nominated for Best Supporting Actress in Doubt 2009), featured in the role of Abilene, the child-loving and conscientious black maid and nanny in 1960s Mississippi who risks life and limb to tell her story.  
      

If there were, in fact, lots of other opportunities for black women (of every hue) to strut their wares in the marketplace of American films, I would affirm The Help in its addition to the spectrum, providing a deeper resonance of an experience (working class black women) ordinarily underrepresented.  But black female acting talent rarely gets attention these days.
      
 In contrast to the stunning accomplishments of black men as actors and directors in the last decade, there continue to be only three variations on black female participation in American film. The more common of these is a “colorblind” role in which a black woman is cast in a part that would ordinarily be played by someone who was white, and in a story in which there is no attention to racial issues.  The second kind is the black cast film in which pretty much everybody is black, the most recent prominent examples of this type are the films of Tyler Perry.  The third kind of film (the category to which The Help belongs), which has always been the rarest, is one in which race is an issue or a problem, and the black woman plays a specifically black role, usually not the leading role.  
       
In the history of feature films, black maids have had a long and distinguished history: beginning significantly with Louise Beavers in Imitation of LIfe (nominated for an Academy Award as a Supporting Actress in 1934) and Hattie McDaniels in Gone With The Wind (Oscar Award Winner of Best Supporting Actress in 1939), both of whom had to struggle valiantly on set for every shred of dignity mustered on screen.
        In an era in which black female employment was primarily confined to domestic or acgricultural labor, black actresses were most frequently excluded from the silver screen entirely or forced to play maids regardless of abilities.  Thanks to interventions by NAACP President Walter White with the Hollywood studios, singer and actress Lena Horne never played a maid. Still her major appearances were confined to leads in two black cast films in 1943--Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. Billie Holiday even played a maid in New Orleans (1947).
        Viola Davis, who is stunningly gifted, has had an important and promising career thus far on stage and on screen but The Help isn’t likely to bring her any closer to breaking with the other less talked about Hollywood convention of not featuring dark skinned black women in dramatic (romantic) leads. The role this part is positioned to play in Davis’s career is to show her capacity for serious dramatic roles. Would that the role weren’t so entirely sexless as well, but rarely are black maids in the movies allowed to be sexual. There were some notable exceptions in the heydays of the 60s and the 70s (such as Diahann Carroll in Claudine and Abbey Lincoln For Love of Ivy) but The Help isn’t one of them.
     Davis's role in Help (Disney 2011) fails to break with the past in any respect. Featured in a supporting role as a maid in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, Davis is dressed down without makeup, to age her by a decade or so, and in order to disguise her striking good looks and fabulous figure.  Her work as Abilene, and that of the equally stellar Octavia Spenser in the role of her best friend as the rambunctious Minny, pivots around the central part which goes to the white actress Emma Stone as the young and spunky Squeeter (Emma Stone), the recent Ole Miss grad.  Squeeter, who is home for the summer, has the bright idea of secretly interviewing black maids in town about their work conditions under their white mistresses, who also happen to be her best friends.
   The film significantly mutes the dangers inherent to this plan for the black women in Mississippi in 1962, where James Meridith had just broken segregation by registering for law school at Ole Miss, touching off a riot which required the intervention of President John Kennedy and  U.S. Marshalls, and in which two people were killed.
    At the very point at which the story begins, the cooperation of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizen’s Council are making life in Jackson frequently harrowing for black people.  Hundreds of Freedom Riders, arrested in Jackson in 1961 for the temerity of integrating the waiting rooms in the bus terminal, were sentenced to hard time at the notorious Parchman Penitentiary.
     While events in The Help revolve around the sometimes humorous, sometimes ghastly interactions between the white women and their maids, the fatal shooting of NAACP Field Coordinator Medgar Evers on his front porch by the infamous Byron De La Beckwith (finally convicted in 1994) takes place off camera and in the distant background of the film.
    For white women in Mississippi in the 1960s it could be as dangerous to be perceived as sympathetic to blacks as it was for blacks to be perceived as hostile to whites.  Legal segregation was still in effect and crossing the boundaries could and did cost many people their lives.  Nonetheless by the early 60s, Mississippi was the scene of a major Civil Rights Movement initiative spearheaded by Bob Moses and SNCC that would culminate in the Freedom Summer of 1964.                
    Kathryn Stockett's fictional work casts this interaction between black maids and Skeeter as a minor yet significant chapter in the history of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet no such chapter exists in the annals of the Movement, now extensively documented. Stockett, who is herself only 40 years old, may be reflecting unintentionally on more recent working conditions for domestic help in Jackson, Mississippi.  
    Stockett has a brother who has for many years employed a nanny for his children named Abilene, currently 60 years old, who complains that the character Stockett created is based on her (same name and they both have a gold tooth), causing her great personal discomfort and embarrassment.  Fully supported by her employers, she is suing the author for damages in the amount of $75,000, an seemingly intentionally symbolic amount given that  the book has already sold nearly half a million copies and is sure to sell even more upon the release of the film in August.   I can well imagine that it might be uncomfortable for Abilene Clark to consider the prospect of thousands of readers confusing her life as a 60 year old woman (I, myself, am 59) in 2010 as a cipher for that of the character Abilene, a total victim of the Jim Crow South half a century ago.  

ENDIT