Image-Saturated Times

When Oliver Stone released JFK in 1991, he also unleashed a whirlwind of controversy. The film questions the “lone assassin theory” of the American president’s death, and claims instead that he was the victim of a conspiracy and a subsequent cover-up. Faced with Stone’s contentious thesis and his bravura, almost hysterical style, commentators hammered their keyboards in outrage. George Wills risked apoplexy: “JFK is execrable history. In this three-hour lie, Stone falsifies so much that he may be an intellectual sociopath, indifferent to truth.” The director was lambasted for focusing on Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney whose prosecution in the Kennedy assassination challenged the finding of the Warren Commission and who, for some, was a boggle-eyed conspiracy theorist with a very shaky case.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, JFK brought about a fundamental shift in public attitudes. As Robert Burgoyne notes, the film created the pressure that led to a new investigation in 1992 and the revelation that documents had indeed been suppressed. This dramatic consequence confirms the writer’s belief that Stone’s work is not just a historical film—that is, a fact-based fictional drama that offers viewers the sense of re-witnessing the past—but rather “a metahistorical film, a work that starts by questioning the dominant understanding of a particular event, and that challenges the way the history of that event has been written and disseminated.”

All this raises the question of how film, as a medium, can be a tool of historical analysis, rather than a mere evocation or re-enactment. In a sense, all the essays in this collection are an attempt to pin down the issue. Burgoyne ranges over a wide field. He covers epics, like Spartacus (1960) and Gladiator (2000); he examines war films (Saving Private Ryan, 1999), biographical dramas (Schindler’s List, 1995), and two films that investigate the events of 9/11, World Trade Center (2006) and United 93 (2006). By the end of this thoughtful and terrifyingly erudite book, the reader comes away with an understanding of how much our image-saturated times have blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction, and even history and myth, national myth in particular.

Take the ancient world. As Burgoyne observes, parallels between the might that was Rome and the might that is the United States have been drawn ever since the foundation of the republic; in consequence, cinematic tales of togas and sandals have been popular and effective ways of reflecting contemporary realities, especially during the Cold War years of the 1950s. Thus, Spartacus can be interpreted as a fight for freedom against totalitarian powers, as a Zionist fable, or as a metaphor for the creation of the United States itself. Forty years later, at the dawn of the Dubya era, Gladiator discovered different implications in what, on the surface, is a similar story of the enslaved fighter confronting, and defeating, the imperial machine. Whereas Kirk Douglas liberates himself—and his people—outside the gladiatorial arena (in the famous “I am Spartacus” scene), Russell Crowe fulfils the same function within the arena itself. In both cases, history is put at the service of a national myth concerning rebirth inspired by individual heroism.

Saving Private Ryan is a tale of heroism, too, but as a Second World War film it exists within a very different context. As Burgoyne shows in a detailed reading, its violence is far more graphic than earlier dramas would have dared to be; also, its emphasis on the war as a just cause is, in part, a response to the antiwar tradition that emerged in Hollywood after Vietnam. Burgoyne is a generous writer, so he does not go into great detail about why the film is sometimes as cloying as one of the more sentimental episodes of The Waltons, but he does show how Steven Spielberg uses subtle imagery and narrative juxtapositions to suggest that the conflict was justified by the Holocaust, even though the soldiers would not have been aware of it at the time, and it...