Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln Is a Racist Mess

I’m returning to familiar territory here because I’m fascinated by the idea that something can be racist completely apart from its creator’s intentions or its explicit aims. I first encountered the idea during a brief look at deconstructionism in a college course in Hispanic literature, but I see it everywhere now in online critiques of pop culture.

I ran across a startling example on YouTube in a clip of philosopher Slavoj Zizek. In it, Zizek explains why The Sound of Music, which would appear to be anything but anti-Semitic, is indeed just that:

 

This is why it is possible to cast Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln as a “racist mess” (a phrase I picked up here while working on a previous post), and we don’t even have to dig as deep as Zizek does with The Sound of Music.

Lincoln, based on the book A Team of Rivals: The Political Genius ofAbraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns, focuses on Lincoln’s efforts to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution while also trying to end the Civil War and cope with family stress. The film spends a great deal of time portraying Lincoln’s hatred of slavery and his dedication to ending it, so it would seem to be another installment in a venerable Hollywood tradition extolling the dignity and equality of all peoples regardless of skin color, much like Steven Spielberg’s own Amistad.

But that is only the movie’s manifest content.

Look again and here we have the same old story of a white hero saving an oppressed non-white people. Despite a large cast of characters both historical and fictional, there are only a few minor, token black characters, characters generally trotted on to fawn over how noble Lincoln is in his efforts to save them, because apparently they can’t save themselves. The film’s weak attempts to hit all the politically correct notes only have the effect of showing the movie for the sanitized, self-satisfied hagiography of a white man that it is.

 

You object. After all, barring a few minor historical inaccuracies, doesn’t the film portray what actually happened? Surely a movie named Lincoln is allowed to focus on the man himself! The Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the congress that passed it, and heroes like Ulysses S. Grant aren’t fictions, you know! We cannot rewrite historical fact to satisfy the social aesthetics of our own time. Should we not, rather, praise the movie for its clear message of racial equality? Should we not commend it for showing us black soldiers in Union uniforms and courageous souls from various walks of life risking all for a just cause?

But that doesn’t matter, some say. The movie, the work of art, is still another version of that old staple the white savior. Short of not making the film at all, it can’t be avoided or erased.

The death of the author, the irrelevance of authorial intentionality, is a concept I circle a lot these days, and Lincoln makes a good example precisely because it would seem so beyond reproach. Indeed, I could just as easily have written that blog post: a post lauding the film’s apparent message. Even though Spielberg’s post-Schindler’s List films are often too innocuous for my taste, as I watched Lincoln I found myself moved by what men and women of character could accomplish in 1865 when equivalent moral courage seems so scarce today.

Using Lincoln as an example also nicely illustrates how ridiculous the outrage factory can be. I don’t know if there was any outrage over Lincoln, but those prone to shooting beams of moral rectitude from their eyes are not above using the most tenuous of pretexts to attack people who are  on their side broadly speaking but not with them down to every last dogmatic dot, tittle and strained interpretation. These people love taking a stand so much they’ll even take a stand against their own cause.

I mainly watched Lincoln because I try not to miss anything starring Daniel Day-Lewis, and indeed he proved once again that he is one of the greatest actors, not just of our time, but in the history of film. If there was a flaw to his performance, it was that it captured the ideal of his subject so perfectly that at times I itched for something imperfect to tarnish the icon. The film may not be edgy, but it does entertain and provide food for thought.