Bad History and the Logics of Blockbuster Cinema: Titanic, Gangs of New York, Australia, Inglourious Basterds by Patrick Mcgec (review)

The title of Patrick McGee’s most recent book on cinema challenges the reader to decide between two possible interpretations of “bad” history. Does the adjective represent the common critique that commercial film appropriates the past primarily as an exotic backdrop rather than interpreting historical events? Or is the term ironic, signaling the appropriation of the disparaging label in order to flaunt historical film’s marginal status within historical studies? As it turns out, Bad History and the Logics of Blockbuster Cinema responds to both camps, for Mcgee intends to “show that even the most commercial popular cinema has a logic that can produce critical perspectives on history” (18) regardless of whether the director is consciously aware of communicating that logic. That said, what informs the project is “Badiouian” history as much as bad history, for from the introduction’s outset Mcgee foregrounds the influence of Alain Badiou’s political philosophy upon his own analysis. Transferring to the realm of history Badiou’s claims regarding the irreducibility of art to a mere formula, Mcgee argues that historical practice, much like other academic disciplines, presents itself as a coherent whole, an absolute order that tautologically accepts its field’s own constructed conventions as objective norms. By contrast, “truths represent exceptions or breaks in the field” (10) that interrogate accepted norms. Truth, then, in this context has less to do with an accurate rendering of the past than with provoking the spectator's reconsideration of how traditional ideas about historical truths are communicated.

Mcgee is very much aware that his approach is not fashionable within all academic disciplines, describing the reaction of his colleagues who dismiss the melodramas with which he engages as cheap entertainment. Nonetheless, drawing from Badiou’s three different approaches to cinema, Mcgee cautions against evaluating films on aesthetic grounds alone. Without directly referencing cultural studies, the author “refuses the assumption that the value of any work of art—popular, mass cultural, or autonomous—can ever be determined apart from the subjective practice of a truth procedure” (7). Indeed, Mcgee takes the logic of rupture seriously; despite joining the growing ranks of postmodern historians, he refuses to ally himself with other counterdisciplinary approaches to historical film. Thus, although he respects the pioneering work of Robert Rosenstone in rethinking the way academic historians have recognized only written history as legitimate, Mcgee dedicates several pages to a critique of Rosenstone’s methodology, arguing that the historian reproduces the same types of exclusions against which he campaigns when he proposes that only serious films merit study. Mcgee’s understanding of the above assertion to be tautological, since it presupposes that a particular history must already exist before it is cinematically viable, is an outgrowth of Badiou’s argument that the “truth of history is its inexistence” (9)—a narrative only constructed after the fact.

In contrast to the introduction’s polemical stance, the four chapters that follow, each dedicated to the logics that undergird one of the blockbusters listed in the book’s subtitle, are much less pointed in their provocation, focusing instead on the metaphorical dimensions of cinema. The first chapter seeks to demonstrate how the commodification of social relations in Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) acts as an allegory for commercial film’s own commodification of history. Mcgee showcases an impressive knowledge of American filmography, although initially he is more concerned with film history than with history on film. For example, in order to situate Titanic as a paradigmatic example of action film, a “symptom of social desire that expresses the cultural unconscious of capitalism” (23), Mcgee takes an unnecessarily long detour to trace a genealogy, including multiple action film summaries as well as overviews of Cameron’s own previous forays into the genre. Once the author initiates discussion of Cameron’s use of sepia-colored images in the opening credits to recreate the quality of old photographs, which presents history as...