Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition

Introduction

With questions of national, racial, and cultural identity emerging as a central topic of debate in the United States, the American past has become a contested domain in which narratives of people excluded from traditional accounts have begun to be articulated in a complex dialogue with the dominant tradition. One of the most visible manifestations of this changing narrative of nation, a change that is evident throughout the spectrum of contemporary life, can be found in the resurgence of films that take the American past as their subject. Recent films such as Glory, Thunderheart, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Malcolm X, Jefferson in Paris, and Forrest Gump bring into relief the striking degree to which the national narrative is currently being reshaped by stories that explore the meaning of nation “from below.” Although occasionally flawed by nostalgia and by a somewhat glancing relation to the historical record, these films illuminate what I think is a pervasive and growing tendency in contemporary American culture : the desire to remake what the sociologist Jacques Rancière has called the “dominant fiction,” the ideological reality or “image of social consensus” within which members of a society are asked to identify themselves.1 This impulse permeates present-day culture; even Disney’s plans for a theme park on American history, for example, emphasize the importance of representing the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities , including slavery and industrial exploitation, as central aspects of the American past. But the leading edge of this impulse, in my 1 Introduction view, is the cinematic rewriting of history currently taking shape, which stands as a particularly conspicuous attempt to rearticulate the cultural narratives that define the American nation. By interrogating the reserve of images and stories that constitute the dominant fiction, these films set forth a counternarrative of American history that ultimately attempts to reinforce social belief. In describing the concept of the dominant fiction, Rancière emphasizes the importance of narrative and pictorial forms, particularly films, in fostering a sense of national identity, arguing that they create an “image of society immediately readable by all classes.”2 In this regard , his discussion, dating from 1977, anticipates many of the most recent analyses of nationalism, which typically emphasize the importance of narrative forms in creating concepts of nation; as Timothy Brennan writes, the idea of nation depends on “an apparatus of cultural fictions.”3 The link between national identity and narrative is especially apparent in the American cinema, Rancière suggests, in which the dominant fiction of “the birth of the nation” is replayed in different ways: “whites versus Indians; North versus South; Law versus outlaw , etc.” In my view, however, what Rancière admiringly calls “the legend of the formation of the code” is in the process of being transformed . Rather than rehearsing the foundational narrative that Ranci ère summarizes as “this is where we come from,” contemporary historical films seek, on the whole, to recover a different message from the past, a message that will validate the increasingly hybrid and polycultural reality of American life and bind it to an image of nation that expresses a sense of “this is how we are.”4 In combining the viewpoints of dominant and nondominant peoples , however, these films also register another more difficult and disturbing theme, which I will call “identity from across.” The films I treat in this study insistently return to a certain hard kernel of historical truth—that social identities in the United States have largely been shaped by relations of opposition and antagonism, and that fear and hatred of the other have exerted just as powerful an influence on the molding of ethnic and racial identity as the positive and organic traits that supposedly distinguish one group from another. The stories of nation that these films unfold convey a strong sense of the way white identity, for example, has shaped itself in contrast to its perceptions of black identity, or the way American “civilization” has defined itself in contrast to conceptions of Indian “savagery”—an oppositional logic 2  Introduction that works against the idea that nationalism can be reconceived and reconfigured to express new forms of social coherence.5 I offer the concept of identity from across as a way of foregrounding the agonistic, contestatory character of this rewriting of the dominant fiction. Far from viewing national identity in terms of what theorists have described as a“deep, horizontal comradeship,” an...