American Chivalry

It has been a long time since I reviewed a film on this blog. And this is kind of a shame because I love movies, and so did one of the principle intellectuals I studied for my MA thesis. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. loved the cinema the way George Will loves baseball, Reinhold Niebuhr loved God, and the way Driftglass loves to tell every member of the beltway's pundit class that they are full of it. Schlesinger felt that cinema was the American art form, more than jazz or rock and roll, and though he did not shoehorn a film reference into his writing very often, when he did it was to make a strong point. So in that vein I will try to make the point strongly that historical movies are fun and usually entertaining, but no substitute for real knowledge. What movies can do, however, is inspire our better angels to be better than we are. It is important that we aspire to an ideal.

Though I cannot hold a candle to the ways Rick Perlstein works movie references into his writing and successfully frames serious historical study with the tool of the theater. The way he seamlessly does here to immerse the reader who may otherwise be have no reference point for the crime wave of New York City during Trump's formative years with clips to Death Wish, Taxi Driver, and Serpico. I believe this to be one of the proper uses of film for historical purposes, to give atmosphere or big picture perspective to the past in a comparatively easy medium but not for real detail. Another way is to tell timeless tales of human struggle as allegories or even idealized notions of what our national character is. An example is our concept of chivalry. Chivalry in the Middle Ages was an ideology certainly, one that was almost universally impossible to live up to, but an idealized standard to strive for. Google defines the word as "the combination of qualities expected of an ideal knight, especially courage, honor, courtesy, justice, and a readiness to help the weak." 

So what is the American interpretation of Chivalry? My wife and I recently watched Trumbo and Bridge of Spies, and I believe we can extract from these two films some combination of qualities expected of an ideal American. At least from a liberal point of view. While I do not always buy into the notion of Hollywood being peopled exclusively with bleeding hearts, see the above films that Perlstein cited to support his idea of avenging angel conservatism, the unthinking, reflexive brand of conservatism that I often deride as authoritarianism is rightfully cast as the bad guy in Trumbo. While in Bridge of Spies the Cold War is a character in itself, with characters and institutions reacting to the boogieman. This film also, to its credit, really helps recast the confrontation between East and West as the nuanced exercise in statecraft that it was.

Americans have an ideal vision of our republic as the home of freedom, where we have the right to say and believe what we choose. We have often fallen from that ideal state of being. Only a few short years after the passage of the Bill of Rights, the government was passing laws abridging the freedom of expression and most aspects of the first amendment in the Alien and Sedition Acts. Antebellum Southern politicians passed all sorts of laws restricting the postage of anti-slavery pamphlets through the mail. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and violated many civil liberties during the Civil War. And A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up and either jailed or deported thousands of aliens after World War I in the first Red Scare. These are just a few examples of what Schlesinger called "political delirium tremons" where the proverbial "we" acted rashly and felt bad about it afterwards. Well maybe not in the case of southern slave owners.

These are official violations of the first amendment, "congress shall pass no law", but how many popular movements in American history have also violated our ideals of freedom? We had all sorts of anti-Catholic, anti-masonry, know-nothing groups in our past who discriminated, intimidated, and blacklisted anyone who didn't fit their idea of Americanism. To say nothing of the dirty and often violent tactics of corporations against their own workers. 

In Trumbo, there was a combination of official and popular repression at work. Helen Mirran's witch-hunting columnist character, Hedda Hopper, was certainly vile and much of her vitriol seemed personal, as though she were simply jealous of Trumbo's success and talent. And then J. Parnell Thomas the poster child for the separation of powers. You can just pick an adjective for why people dislike politicians and he fits the bill. Grandstanding, pandering, self-righteous, vindictive, and corrupt Thomas really was the perfect warm up act for both Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. Whether apocryphal or not, Trumbo's snappy comeback upon seeing Thomas in prison was so perfect, "the difference between you and me is that you actually committed a crime."

I know that I am usually the first to get bent out of shape over the movies taking liberties when recounting an historical episode, but as chivalric tales of what America is meant to be I am willing to suspend my disbelief as it were. Now it will take a lot more research than that necessary for a movie review to examine the historical Trumbo's ideology, but I suspect the filmmakers softened his communism to make it more palatable for audiences and highlight both the injustice and Trumbo's triumph. The way he explains what he believes to his daughter sounds just like a run of the mill New Deal liberal. Louis C. K.'s character Arlen was a lot more believable as the humorless true believer constantly trying to insert digressions about the plight of workers into scripts that were so out of place even pig-headed Republicans could spot it. I'm not sure who's interest that angle of the story served. Perhaps just a reminder that there were communists who were serious, but just as Arlen was a pitiable and pathetic character, so were the actual American communists. In her account of the Red Scare titled Scoundrel Time, Lillian Hellman talked about how silly the communists she knew were and how they were about as dangerous to American liberty and democracy as the Greens are today. 

The point of it all was that McCarthyism was largely a partisan, grandstanding affair by Republicans, a half-assed attempt to smear Democrats and anyone on the left. The FBI, though fallible and not above political chicanery, was perfectly competent to weed out any actual Soviet agents and dangerous domestic communists. As Bridge of Spies showed. Though this film never made it plain what the spy Rudolf Abel was up to or if he was actually dangerous he was clearly working for the Soviets and was rightfully arrested. Now, nations have been spying on each other since the dawn of time. That is not really the issue of American chivalry addressed in the film, but how we behave in the great game of espionage. So, the next time your Trump supporting uncle goes off about the Muslims or whatever, ask him about this film. Do you want to behave like any other barbaric nation? Do you identify with the anonymous asshole drive by shooters trying to intimidate Tom Hanks? Or would you rather be the true American who believes in our laws and our rights, even when extended to people you don't like? That is basically what it comes down to.

All we are is what we want to be. Perhaps these two films can help some of us remember that fact. We want to be the best that we can be. We believe in justice and democracy. We believe in law. We believe in protecting the individual and we rejoice in our pluralism and tolerance for difference. That is our chivalry. That is our ideal. It's about time we start living up to it.