Hollywood's Gatekeeper

The single greatest day in the history of American film criticism is August 14, 1967--the day that Bosley Crowther slammed Bonnie and Clyde in the New York Times.  You laugh!  That day film criticism became a full-intellectual-contact sport.  Crowther was nearly crucified in letters he received from outraged readers.  The "younger generation," it appeared, did not share Crowther's standards for movie violence nor his distaste for anti-heroes.  Crowther's colleagues excoriated him in print--Pauline Kael famously began her unusually long review of the film, "How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?"  Kael's influence rose dramatically, so much so that her friend Joe Morgenstern changed his review in Newsweek from negative to positive.  The upshot of the "Crowther Affair" was that the most influential movie critic in the country who wrote for the most respected newspaper in America's single largest movie market had been taken down.  The decade that followed this moment witnessed a tremendous outpouring of high-level critical debate about movies amidst one of the greatest periods of filmmaking in American history.

And then Steven Spielberg made Jaws.

Based on a best-selling novel by Peter Benchley, Jaws hit theaters in the summer of 1975 behind an advertising blitz that culminated in an opening weekend in over 400 theaters.  While such an opening was not totally unprecedented, this single movie has often been regarded as the one that changed an era.  As perhaps the first true blockbuster it recouped production costs in a few weeks and, just as important, it proved that film critics--with their ability to shape popular opinion--were growing irrelevant. The tradition of releasing a movie in New York and Los Angeles to build some buzz before sending the film across the nation, faded in the glow of Universal's success with Jaws.  Basking in that glow was 26-year old Steven Spielberg.

I am writing a long essay on Spielberg and film critics for a volume on the director that will include something on the order of twenty separate essays.  In short, academics find Hollywood's most successful director...interesting. This is so because, without a doubt, Spielberg is not only the most financially successful filmmaker in American history but also widely regarded as a very good filmmaker--not the greatest or the most innovative, but still a filmmaker that many talented people want to work with.  And while not impervious to critiques from film critics, Spielberg is a very good storyteller and excellent technical filmmaker.  In short, critics often don't have much to complain about.

We have confirmation of that last point with the overwhelmingly positive critical reception of his latest film Lincoln.  Generally Spielberg's movies appeal to two sides of the critical community in the United States--he makes both great action/adventure movies and thoughtful period pieces.  When critics sit down to write their review, it is no wonder that they thank the Hollywood gods that every so often Steven Spielberg makes a film that breaks up the schlock that comprises the vast majority of what they must watch.

And yet, there has been a chorus of discordant voices regarding Lincoln and the choices Spielberg and his team made when creating the film's narrative.  Ben Alpers has provided a great portal into the debate sparked by Lincoln.  We know that other Spielberg films--The Color Purple, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad--have likewise caused flare-ups over choices of whom to focus on.  Of course, when Spielberg focuses his lens on an event or historical actor, the effect is substantial and significant.  As America's most successful filmmaker, he generates a narrative that exists far beyond those in his films.

So what we often get with a Spielberg film is a general chorus of praise from film critics and a chorus of complaints from scholars.  The critics know that their voices cannot do much to affect the Spielberg aura--and frankly most have no reason to try.  Critics can write for public consumption of the film and for posterity, for people like me who attempt to take stock of what Spielberg has meant over the years to American film history.

For scholars of various stripes, though, Spielberg films create occasions of often intense and revealing debates.  Over the past two weeks, I have thought more about the role of different historical forces, actors, and events in the fall of slavery than I would have if Spielberg's movie hadn't appeared.  As a historian of the United States, I've profited a great deal from reading Eric Foner and James McPherson, David Goldfield and Dorris Kearns Goodwin, Ira Berlin and David Herbert Donald--but outside seminars in graduate school over a decade ago, I haven't been engaged with texts on this subject like I have after reading Corey Robin, Ira Chernus, Aaron Bady, Tim Lacy, etc. on the film.

All this discussion reminds me of how I have pined to be part of the era in which Bonnie and Clyde entered the American debate over movies and culture.  Except this time, rather than an establishment critic thundering on about the historical inaccuracy of a film and his critics screaming to shift his focus to the world revealed by that film, I read scholars thundering about the historical inaccuracy of Lincoln and their critics screaming that they, in effect, don't want their world intruding on the one in the film.  The debate sparked yet again by another Spielberg epic has been about the way we should remember the past as a people who use that past.  Bonnie and Clyde created a similar moment in film history--the point was to argue over what the film meant as a culture signpost; at that time, critics moderated the debate. In our time, the moderators have changed, they are not film critics, but those of us engaged in a vigorous debate over how to represent our collective past.

It seems to me that the gold standard for sparking that kind of debate is Oliver Stone's JFK.  I teach the film every semester I teach a course on historiography.  What better way to talk about and demonstrate the use of historical sources and argument than to witness one of the most manipulative and wrongheaded exercises in the historical method.  Stone's film is an utterly brilliant piece of filmmaking--if you want a good contemporary comparison to D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, JFK stands ready.  While movies don't "write history with lightening" (no matter what old Woodrow Wilson claimed), they do fire debates about how people can generate a broad, popular debate about our collective memory and the problems left unsettled.  Robert Rosenstone argued: "If it is part of the burden of the historical work to make us rethink how we got to where we are and to make us question values that we and our leaders live by, then whatever its flaws, JFK has to be among the most important works of American history ever to appear on screen."*

Indeed, for all it's faults, Lincoln poses a moment to debate whether this nation, or any nation, ever truly had a "new birth of freedom."  And while we debate that claim, we should pause to affirm that our movies of the people, for the people, and by the people will not perish from vigorous critical--and scholarly--debate.


* Quoted in Robert Brent Toplin's excellent treatment of debates over film and history, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (University of Kansas Press, 2002), p. 107.

Does Biography Trump Ideas?

I am plowing my way through Robert Caro's fourth volume of his projected five volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. I bought the book after reading an excerpt of it in a recent New Yorker in which Caro relates the moments that unfolded immediately before and after the assassination of John Kennedy.  Caro's writing is crisp and confident and his mastery of details is awe-inspiring.  I have ambitions to write a biography and find my intentions sorely challenged when considering the research that went into this book.

Very early on in his six-hundred page tome, Caro hammers out his organizing principle.  He writes:

"[The book] tries most particularly to focus on and examine a specific, determinative aspect of that era--political power; to explore, through the life of its protagonist, the acquisition and use of various forms of that power during that half century of American history, and to ascertain also the fundamental realities of that power; to learn what lay, beneath power's trappings, at power's core."

Caro contends that in a moment of "deep crisis" such as the transition of the presidency because of tragedy, the power of the presidency "can be observed in all its facets."  Thus, power acts as a character in the book.  Almost independent of Johnson and the Kennedy brothers, power circulates through the Senate chamber, it's out on the campaign trail in 1958 in advance of the 1960 primaries, and it resides in the families of these men.  To say that Johnson and the Kennedys had to contend with power would be to miss the relationship they appeared to have with a spectral force that made them into historical actors.

And yet, it stuck me as curious that Caro's depiction of power seems nearly devoid of ideology and even, in a way, of politics.  Power is psychological, familial; it is fear-inducing, and confidence-building; but it is not liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary.  So Caro does not identify a relationship between power and ideology, at least through the 1960s primaries.  Johnson commands the Senate, he wheels and deals within Texas's corrupt political machines, and he hates, cajoles, and flip-flops his way toward the Democratic convention in 1960.  Caro's characterizations of the Kennedy brothers is similar in the faintness of ideology and prominence of psychological traits.

Is ideology, then, a casualty of biography?  In the index, among the largest entries under Johnson is one for "physical appearance of."  The terms "liberal" and "liberalism" do not get mentioned either under Johnson, Kennedy, or as stand-alone entries.  Has Caro revealed something about biography, that the closer we draw a historical actor the less their ideas matter to us?

This disconnection between ideas and biography resonates with the results of the recent Indiana primary.  Richard Lugar, the longest serving senator in Washington today, lost to Richard Mourdock, a Tea Party backed insurgent who has won three state-wide elections in the last five years.  The one major difference in the run-up to the primary vote was that I knew Lugar as a person--his elder statesman persona preceded him--and knew Mourdock primarily through his ideology.  Even though Lugar obviously has ideas that define his politics, his biography had displaced the public's perception of his ideology.  Mourdock is all ideology to most of us who voted on Tuesday, and his biography pales in significance to the public perception of what we think he stands for.  We know Lugar, thus his ideology fades; we don't know Mourdock, and so his ideology radiates.

Does it then stand to reason that when intellectual historians focus on ideas we lose the people behind them; but the reverse happens when we chose to write a biography?  Do intellectual biographies achieve what they aim to create--a marriage of ideas and person?  And if so, how?

On Describing Today's Historical Ecosphere

We historians conventionally distinguish scholarly historical writing from popular historical writing.  The former is what those of us who write for this blog do professionally; the latter is what tends to appear on bestseller lists.  The very existence of popular historical writing distinguishes our field from many others in the humanities. These days, at least, there's precious little popular literary criticism for example (though popular cultural criticism certainly exists). And though bookstores are brimming with popular philosophy books, they bear virtually no resemblance to the work of academic philosophers.  In contrast, not only are there innumerable works of popular history, most academic historians (or, at least, the Americanists among us) like to think that our work is potentially of interest to a broader, non-academic audience.  Occasionally a handful of scholarly works, usually in the areas of military or political history, find a large (or at least largish) audience outside the Ivory Tower.  I'm thinking, for example, of Jim McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom or Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm. Pulitzer Prizes in History often go to such works.

But more often, works of history that find their way to the best seller list are considerably less scholarly.  Take, for example, Hardball host Chris Matthews' Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, currently #33 on the New York Times Hardcover Non-Fiction Best Sellers List and the subject of a take-down by the historian David Greenberg in TNR [h/t Erik Loomis at LGM].  Vanity projects by pundits about presidents past seem to have emerged as a genre unto themselves.  At least as described by Greenberg, Matthews book seems little more than a projection of his own two-dimensional political personality onto JFK.*  

But what I found most interesting about Matthews' book was the list of people who have blurbed it.

As Greenberg notes, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero is marketed with praise from Douglas Brinkley, Walter Isaacson, Brian Williams, Peggy Noonan, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.  This is an interesting mix of people.  Noonan and Williams are fellow media personalities, who don't have any particular historical credentials. But the other three figures inhabit an intermediate zone between scholarly and popular approaches to history: semi-serious historians whose reputations have been built as mainstream public intellectuals.  The only academic among the three is Brinkley, though I think his reputation as a scholar is even more slight than Isaacson's or Goodwin's (despite the accusations of plagiarism against the latter).  Along with the once ubiquitous Michael Beschloss, Brinkley and Goodwin for years formed a kind of triumvirate of semi-official historical opinion on relatively serious network newscasts.  Each is also more closely tied to the political and financial elite than your average historian (popular or scholarly):  Goodwin was an assistant to LBJ and married Richard Goodwin, a more senior assistant to both JFK and LBJ.  Brinkley is a member of the Century Club and the Council on Foreign Relations.  Beschloss is married to a former treasurer and chief investment officer of the World Bank who runs a Washington, DC-based hedge fund.  Isaacson emerged out of the media, starting his career as a journalist, rising to be CEO of CNN in 2001 and President and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003.

What I find fascinating about these figures is the very complicated role they play in today's historical ecosphere. If you had to place their work on one side or the other of the popular / scholarly divide, they'd certainly be considered popular.  Yet their books--especially Goodwin's and Isaacson's--are taken seriously by serious people. They are certainly not in the same category of "historians" as, say, Glenn Beck or Chris Matthews. But they are often called upon to validate the seriousness and even the expertise of people like Matthews (if not Beck).  Indeed, Goodwin's blurb for Matthew's JFK book seems to leave David Greenberg somewhat flummoxed; he notes that she "surely cannot regard this as a meritorious book."

What all of this suggests to me is that the old scholarly / popular divide is too crude to describe the ways in which history is produced and consumed in the U.S. today.  I'm not going to attempt a more precise taxonomy in this blogpost. But I think establishing one would help us make better sense of things like the Tea Party's use of history, which have been recurring themes on this blog.

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* I needed to add somewhere the cover of Glenn Beck's book on George Washington, since it so nicely captures the actual focus of many of these sorts of projects: