The Patriot Acts

The cooperation between the society-transforming initiatives of governmental policymakers and the film scenarios through which they are naturalized has been frequently observed. Film's narrative emplotments and the characterization and stylized behavior of its heroes have been formalized into a system of visual representation that has acquired the power to dramatize fundamental shifts in the society's ideology. Because these collaborations produce the imaginary spaces through which alternative sociopolitical outcomes become imaginable, film scenarios have substituted for more politically elaborated rationalizations of policy. The screen's versions of the past have thereby been made to undergird the history of the present.

Throughout the cold war era, the cowboy western and the combat platoon film proved especially effective in their power to absorb political and social crises into the terms of an older consensus. Core metaphors and symbols such as the western frontier and the patriotic soldier that were embedded within these film genres supplied the interpretive grid through which to come to terms with contemporary political crises and to manage the public's response to them. But The Patriot, a Roland Emmerich film that was released during the southern phase of the 2000 presidential primaries, replaced these foundational metaphors with a series of substitutes—the revolutionary South for the cowboy West, the lost cause for the frontier, and paramilitary terrorism for British (or Soviet) tyranny—which signaled a major reconfiguration of the sociopolitical order as well as the cinematic formulas through which that reconfiguration was naturalized. The afterlife the film has enjoyed as a feature presentation on Home Box Office television and through its wide distribution at first as a video cassette and more recently a DVD has extended its popularity into the juridico-political domain organized out of the emergency measures spelled out in John Ashcroft's USA PATRIOT Act.

The time in which the film takes place mirrors the moment in which it was released—a historical moment when the political landscape was rapidly changing and the nature of domination was itself in ferment. This film appeared in the aftermath of the cold war, when U.S. nationalism no longer needed to be endowed with ideological substance out of opposition to a common enemy, when the private sector had become a replica of the market, and when the state had been reduced to its policing function. The Patriot's reconfiguration of central themes and agents organizing the national mythology is also indicative of a fundamental shift in governmental policy, which the film at once reflects and represents.

The proximate context for The Patriot's reception was shaped by an ongoing debate over the appropriate attitude to assume with regard to the nation's history—specifically, whether discussion of shameful political events should overshadow pride in the nation's achievements. The film deals with the crisis of values raised during this debate by resituating the conflict between shame and pride within the mythic terrain of the nation's founding. The film's stance toward these primordial national sentiments weirdly echoes Richard Rorty's admonition in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America that "as long as the American Left remains incapable of national pride, our country will only have a cultural left and not a political one." ¹

When Rorty criticizes the "antipatriotic" legacy of the New Left for being too concerned with culture, he intends to contrast it with the Old Left, which he characterizes as primarily concerned with real or electoral politics. We have a "spectatorial, disguised, mocking Left rather than a Left which dreams of achieving our country" (35), as Rorty elaborates on this insight. After explaining that an unpatriotic Left has never achieved anything, Rorty concludes that a Left that fails to take pride in our country cannot expect to have an impact on its politics, because it will soon become an object of contempt rather than a beacon of hope.

Rorty's cautionary remarks draw on the commonsense belief that just as too little self-respect makes it...