American Films, Essay Example

American films, always eager to entertain, have for some time now gone in directions once unthinkable.  While it is true that movie have from the start sought to present specific themes in certain genres and contexts, these have traditionally been simple assertions of variations on patriotic feeling.  Gangster movies, war films, and Westerns have particularly been true to established agendas which reflect only basic American values.  In more recent years, however,  less attractive sides of the American experience, fictionalized or drawn from reality, have been presented.

Martin Scorsese’s  2002 film Gangs of New York, for example, combines both real history with fictional characters and story to portray a New York City largely unknown to modern society.  Scorsese has never been shy about his deep attraction to clan and family existence, stemming from his Italian-immigrant past.  From 1970, when he first encountered the book which would inspire the film, it strongly appealed to his sense of tribal life as ongoing in America (LoBrutto 369).  Over thirty years later, as an established and honored director and producer, he could finally realize his vision.

Set in lower Manhattan in the Civil War years, the movie tells the story of rival gangs which wield great power and are tied to the actual, corrupt political machinery of the times.  The authentic figure of  William“Boss” Tweed appears, in fact, as a sponsor to gang leader “Bill the Butcher”, who seeks the destruction of the new wave of Irish immigrants.   The story itself, centering on personal vengeance, pales in comparison to how the city itself is presented: “Scorsese sketches a world in perdition, a hell on earth, where forces battle out each other, and where the strongest….survive” (Santas 64).  Hatred is dominant, everywhere, and it appears to be a condensed illustration of the greater conflict ripping the nation apart at the time.

That view aside, the film’s cultural, social, and political dimensions are virtually impossible to identify, and this is very much in keeping with Scorsese’s intentions.  That is to say, each component absolutely relies on the others in this nearly surreal and destructive environment. There are no friendships without obligations and loyalties; there is no culture save that of  maintaining survival in limitless corruption.  Beneath all may be seen a single theme, that of the inevitable senselessness of humanity at war with itself for meaningless reasons. This would as well relate to the Civil War serving as a back story.

Unfortunately, it seems that Scorsese unwillingly bows down before the power of his own characters.  It is as though the director wanted to employ these creations to demonstrate the ultimate foolishness of senseless hatred, but the dimensions revealed in the protagonists defeat this purpose. As ruthless as Bill the Butcher is, for instance, there is still the sense that deep injustice and injuries have made him the man he is, and this makes him at least somewhat sympathetic, as he is the most compelling character in the film. Scorsese’s direction in Gangs of New York is nearly at the level of grand opera: everything, violence included, is grandiose and larger than life.  The people, however, actually undercut the more blatant message or theme.  If Scorsese meant to state that only blind stupidity brings on bloodshed and factional wars, he loses his way because the audience understands too well what drives the characters, and cannot see them as mindless props in a bloody, senseless panorama.

Before Martin Scorsese attempted to use the Civil War as a metaphor for man’s inhumanity to man, or to expose how it impacted on every part of the nation’s life, other films explored radically different angles of it.  John Frankenheimer’s 1996 television movie, Andersonville, and Edward Zwick’s 1989 film, Glory, each chooses, and very deliberately, to focus on a single, less known aspect of the conflict.  Given that the theme of war in any film must inevitably demonstrate the horror and futility of it, both films achieve something remarkable in shifting attention away from this monolithic element.

Glory, more so than any other Civil War movie, is independent of that conflict.  Far more important to the film is the era, and the state of the society surrounding the war.  The story of the first all-black Union regiment, Glory uses the war as an environment, but one only reflective of life as it is lived anyway in the United States of the time.  In the movie, there is always the sense that soldiers are still men first, and that sieges occur in towns that are still only communities.  Life, Zwick seems to be saying, is merely life, even under the appalling hardships of war, and racism does not go away when men unite for what appears to be a common cause.

Interestingly, there is only one, very brief scene in which Confederate soldiers are seen.  This seems odd in a film centered on the dilemmas of an all-black regiment in a war largely fought over slavery, but Zwick’s agenda is elsewhere: racism anywhere and everywhere is the enemy these soldiers battle (Chadwick  272).  It is in themselves, as it is in the orders they receive from Union superiors with racially motivated agendas guiding them.  For example, this all-volunteer outfit, after sacrificing much and training hard, come to understand that they are seen as fit only for menial labor.  Only by volunteering the regiment to risk a dangerous assault on the enemy can the captain allow the men the chance to be worthy soldiers.

Clearly, all the action is dependent upon the war, yet, again, this is only employed to better illustrate how insidious racism permeates all arenas of living, and how a man’s need to assert himself beyond such narrow limitations is both unjust and compellingly urgent.  Glory succeeds as a movie largely because it has one thing to say.  The statement is important, but it is not especially striking, and the movie is ultimately nothing more than another, somewhat thoughtful treatment on racism in history.

More universal in scope and delivery is Andersonville,  for it addresses a theme both encompassing racism and far greater than it alone.  If Glory used the Civil War as a mere template to confront racism, Andersonville takes the device much farther.  Set in a Civil War POW camp, and based upon the real memoirs of a survivor, the movie is almost extraneous to the war itself.  That is to say, it could be Vietnam, or it could be World War II.  Then, racism becomes something of a minor consideration when the greater horror of how mankind treats itself under extreme conditions is presented.   The acknowledged, historical fact is that the Andersonville camp was little more than a cattle pen, in which many thousands of captured Union soldiers were imprisoned.  The real horror is not that brutality was exercised, although it was; it is that little or no thought was given to the situation at all.  It was living reduced to the most savage conditions, and the film powerfully asserts that battle itself is by no means the worst part of any war.

Both Glory and Andersonville have much to recommend them, but the latter has a force and a

message Glory does not attempt to match.  The evil that is racism deserves exploration, and the real, black heroes of the fifty-fourth regiment most certainly merit a long-denied recognition.  However, a war film of any kind has value only when it exposes what that extreme state of being does to humanity, both in good and bad ways.  It can create heroes and it can reveal monstrosities in human behavior.  Andersonville reflects a little of the former, but it derives its real impact from revealing, as is needed, how little more than carelessness can create the most horrific scenarios in human history.

When considered in its entirety, The Searchers is a traditional Western film that demands serious attention because it exists outside of the parameters and stereotypes of the genre.  Released in 1956 and directed by Western legend John Ford, the film remains a hotly debated one.  It is both a prototype of the genre and a complete departure from it.  It is a sweeping, typical, grandiose Western tale set in the wilds of the country, and it is a deeply introspective and disturbing look at the nature of man.  If Glory, Andersonville, and Gangs of New York infuse examinations of the nature of humanity into wartime scenarios, The Searchers set the bar first, and in a way not yet equaled.

The story, true to the genre, is fairly basic and based on an actual episode.  Ethan Edwards returns from the Civil War to his brother’s Texas home, and in short order a Comanche tribe raids it.  The brother’s wife and son are murdered, and two daughters have been taken.  The eldest girl is soon found dead, and the core of the film is Edwards’s search for the remaining daughter.  As such, this is, again, standard Western material; a cowboy hero must brave great danger to rescue a family member from the savage Indians.   All the classic ingredients are in place.

The Searchers, however, turns everything upside down.  To begin with, it is strongly suggested that Edwards has something of a dark history; he returns from the war with more gold than a veteran should possess, and he is unwilling to join the Texas Rangers, as any ordinary war hero would be.  Then, the real inversion of the story evolves as it becomes known that Debbie, the girl for whom the search is undertaken, has been assimilated into the Comanche tribe and is a wife of the chief.  Edwards is still determined to find her, but rescue is not necessarily the goal any longer.  As she has lost her humanity in his eyes by becoming Comanche, he seeks to kill her.

No examination of The Searchers can be properly made without addressing the impact of its star, John Wayne.  If director John Ford was at a professional and personal crossroads when he made the film, and perhaps artistically reckless due to a fading career, he took American legend John Wayne with him on the dangerous journey.  That Wayne is the star is crucial to the film’s power, and this cannot be said for many films in exactly this way.  For American audiences, there could be no more reliable “good guy” hero than Wayne, an image developed over decades of film success and consistent portrayals.  In The Searchers, this icon of the Western is portraying, for the first time, a dark and conflicted hero (Eckstein, Lehman 2).  If there is heroism in Edwards, it shares space with sinister motives and an implacable hatred for those not of his kind.

The film has been compared to ancient Greek tragedy, and rightly so; it contains in it the unspeakable element of murdering one’s own family for a perceived greater good, with all the emotional repercussions the situation generates.  It could be argued that the film would have more power were Edwards on his way to kill his own, abducted daughter, but it is likely that this would have made the film unwatchable to the audiences of the day, and even today; it is bad enough that his niece is to die at his own hand.

Ultimately, Edwards does not murder the girl, although he has the opportunity to do so.  He defiles her Comanche husband by scalping him and returns Debbie to her original home.  This is not, however, redemptive.  For one thing, it seem necessary that the man who defiled the girl should be mutilated by Edwards; this is at least a measure of the vengeance he insists on having.  Then, the ending does not indicate a reclaimed man who has, at the last moment, seen the better road to take in sparing the girl’s life.  Rather, there is the sense that he is disgusted by his own weakness, as he is mystified and disgusted by a world in which such things now occur.

The Searchers takes familiar ground and, ironically, transforms it by taking into the oldest artistic territory known.  It takes the ordinary Western and reveals just how unimportant the genre and setting actually is, except to frame a human tragedy with roots stretching back to ancient drama.  In this film, as in all great film or theater, there is essentially only one conflict, that of a man torn by the duality of his nature.  It is not heroism that drives this Western “hero”, but smallness, and of several kinds.  To him, the Comanches are nothing but savages and a woman is worthless if she has submitted to them physically.  Most horribly, she must die because of the perceived insult to the white man in the submission.  Tribal, ugly, yet not without all hope, The Searchers is a stunning example of how a film can use war to explore the heart of man.

Works Cited

Chadwick, B.  The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film. New York, NY: Random House, 2002. Print.

Eckstein, A. M., & Lehman, P.  The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford’s Classic Western  Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Print.

LoBrutto, V.  Martin Scorsese: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 2008 Print.

Santas, C.  The Epic in Film: From Myth to Blockbuster. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008. Print.