En god anmeldelse fra Daily Telegraph av Hollywoods seneste
historieforfalsknings-
prosjekt: filmen "The Patriot" om den amerikanske revolusjon i 1776 (som helt
sikkert får terningkast seks i VG). Følgende sitat er een av mange perler:
"This is what happens now: people get their version of history
from cynical cranks in Hollywood, and all you can do is count your small
change and wish you'd never been born."
Det verste er at folk som Øgrim nå ligger på nivå med Hollywoodhistorie (og
Grethe Knudsen) i sine "teknologiske" "framtidsvisjoner".
Som Andrew O'Hagan skriver på slutten:
"Must we allow
the self-cleansing political psychobabble of the present day to snuff out
the ambiguities of history? Must everything be a national anthem these days?"
Et sentralt spørsmål i en protofascistisk og tenkefientlig tid, en tid hvor
alt blir kvasireligiøse lementog mot havet.
Karsten Johansen
Fra dagens Daily Telegraph:
History turned into porn
The Patriot's crude disinformation, cliché and sentimentality make a mockery
of a complex war, says Andrew O'Hagan
I WAS once trying to buy a newspaper in New York when I was accosted by an
old lady wearing binoculars. "Are you Scottish?" she asked. "I am," I said,
"but I can't help it." "Oh my," she went on, "did you see Braveheart? You
must be so proud." Of course, I smiled politely, and cursed Mel Gibson under
my breath. This is what happens now: people get their version of history
from cynical cranks in Hollywood, and all you can do is count your small
change and wish you'd never been born.
I can tell from the letters you're sending that this business of
movie-makers playing fast and loose with the facts is upsetting. Many are
still angry at the submarine drama U-571, a gripping film based on the bogus
idea that the Americans found the Enigma machine.
Every film-making nation is at times jingoistic. British war films favour a
very British sort of pluck, and it's worth remembering that the British once
made a movie, starring Ralph Richardson, called Breaking the Sound Barrier,
which made out that an Englishman was the first to do what the title says,
when in fact it was an American.
Only the French show consistency in making films that contain a measure of
national self-disgust. The Americans tend to come out rather well from their
own productions, and so do the British from theirs; increasingly, though, in
a sharp affront to any notion of a special relationship, they tend to come
out badly from each other's.
The Patriot is the kind of film that could only make sense to a confederacy
of dunces, and it has taken great pains to be so stupid. Mel Gibson, that
force of nature - or that excess of dullness outside of Nature, as Samuel
Johnson once said of Thomas Sheridan - is once again out to show what a bit
of greasepaint and a swinging tomahawk can do to enrich one's sense of
national identity.
Instead of Gibson galloping up and down the Highland line with a face of
blue woad, shouting "Hold, hold" in broad Adelaide, here we have Gibson
galloping up and down the line at Charleston with a face smeared in the
blood of redcoats, shouting, "Hold it, hold it" in broad Adelaide. And he
gets the girl, and he only did it to protect his family, and the English are
bastards anyway, and here's another speech about the Rights of Man, or
whatever they're called.
Hey presto! Here's to another few generations of children made thick and
vulgar by the pugnacious simplicity of a movie starring Gibson. Director
Roland Emmerich couldn't have made himself plainer on these pages yesterday:
"It's a good thing to do because otherwise these movies become history
lessons and nobody will watch them at all. Especially in America."
History lesson. In 1775 the American colonies did not want to pay George
III's Stamp tax - it was repealed. They didn't want to pay taxes under the
Quartering Act - it was repealed. The colonies didn't want anything to do
with what they saw as the English monarch's corruption, and they unloaded
his tea into Boston harbour. It looked like war. The Earl of Sandwich, First
Lord of the Admiralty, asserted that the Americans were raw and
undisciplined, and that "the very sound of the cannon would carry them off".
The British radical John Wilkes said the opposite, and he was prophetic: he
saw a day when the Americans would think of their revolution in much the
same way that the English thought of their own Glorious Revolution of 1688.
The champions of American liberty were the first to appeal to violence;
scalpings and hatchetings, tarrings and featherings, were commonplace. (The
best ever short story by an American - Nathaniel Hawthorne's My Kinsman,
Major Molineaux - details the violence.) The American patriots had right on
their side - the British had to go - but they were vile in their methods and
myopic in their vision. The Declaration of Independence preceding the worst
of the fighting did not condemn or abolish the slave trade - it would take a
Civil War to do that, and a Civil Rights movement to make that plausible.
Film. The Patriot follows the war from the point of view of Benjamin Martin,
a man who wants to make chairs and bring up his children, but who is drawn
into the war when the British, fronted by a serial killer called Colonel
Tavington (Jason Isaacs), shoot his son and his black friends.
Indeed, the redcoats in The Patriot are worse than the Nazis in any recent
war picture: they hang old people from trees and burn people in their
churches; they contravene every rule of war in their effort to hold the
colonies for the monarchy. Martin is the kind of hero that Mel Gibson loves
to play: whiter than white, rising above history with his love of liberty
and his fellow man.
But there's a good enough American word for all this stuff: bullshit. The
one black guy in the film is a cliché beyond endurance. He decides to fight
on the American side in order to be free, and, at the end of the film, we
see him and his brothers working bucolically (for free, and for freedom) on
Benjamin's new house, as if the revolution had made a paradise, as if the
eloquence of the Constitution had been brought instantly to life.
For children who know nothing of history this makes an absolute mockery of
the struggles that were to follow. Don't even get me started on the Indians,
on the native Americans - they don't even get a look-in. This is an example
of the history movie as whitewash. It is fuelled by merciless platitudes
about liberty, by sentimentality, and by crude disinformation about the
superior nature of white America. It's sickly, stars-and-stripes
pornography, for people who like their appalling lies sewn up with sequins.
The film is very bloody and, at nearly three hours, very long. In all of
this we might forget that the American War of Independence was an honest war
and a complex one, one that unleashed devils just as it vanquished them, one
that inscribed intolerance just as it inscribed brotherhood. Must we allow
the self-cleansing political psychobabble of the present day to snuff out
the ambiguities of history? Must everything be a national anthem these days?
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