Selling Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln with Allan Pinkerton and Major General John Alexander McClernand at the Battle of Antietam. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The civil war in Spielberg‘s Lincoln rages between two narratives: a smoky, boozy tale of desperate political skullduggery in the white man’s Washington of the 1860s; and a gauzier period piece, featuring soft light filtering through diaphanous curtains, stirring speeches, and Father Abraham_ in his rocking chair. We’ve seen the second, hagiographic, narrative frame, everywhere from the History Channel to campaign ads. It sits awkwardly alongside the first, which smells a lot more like the truth–particularly as the movie focuses its lens so sharply on the racism, greed, and hypocrisy of the era’s political culture. What’s more: it’s the most entertaining part of the movie. In this storyline, the protagonist isn’t Daniel Day Lewis‘ haunted president but the wily, sarcastic radical Thaddeus Stephens, played by Tommy Lee Jones. Stephens is for emancipation before it’s militarily convenient, trades artful insults with racist grandees daily in the well of Congress, and is instrumental in making slavery history. He inhabits Washington’s spittoon-lined corridors along with Lincoln’s drunken bagmen and, incidentally, has actual, personal relationships with actual black people. I wish that this story had won out over Spielberg’s teary presidential biopic.

At the same time that I saw Spielberg’s Lincoln, I was reading Bruce Levine’s Southern slave liberation narrative, The Fall of House of Dixie, a story of newly-emancipated slaves fighting alongside Union troops, taking over plantations, and running off their former masters–which to me suggests a much, much more interesting Civil War film.