By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — As the film Lincoln nets twelve Oscar nominations, it’s time to examine Hollywood’s growing power in our national political life—and its celluloid skewing of history. From Congressional hearings over Zero Dark Thirty to President Obama’s private screening of 1600 Penn to politicians calling for Obama to be a leader like Lincoln, the question becomes, is Hollywood becoming the new library of history?
Aside from its obvious repugnance for slavery, and its stunning romance with gun violence, there are very few elements of truth in Quentin Tarantino’s entertaining Django Unchained. I liked it because it was fun, and it did express (via a preposterous account) the suppressed anger and possibilities of black manhood. I didn’t like it as history though, in fairness, I was nibbling on both popcorn and pulp fiction.
We live in a gossip culture; Hollywood and the media morphed long ago, driven by the Great Vacuum: the public’s growing immersion in cyber-data that equals its lack of literacy. We have information but we lack knowledge. There is an opportunity here even as there is the danger that Hollywood will increasingly replace history with its own consumer-oriented sequence of events.
Lincoln gives us an image, a sense, a notion of a man and a moment in our history. Since we are for the most part watching and hearing rather than seeing and listening, the entertainment nation co-opts historical narrative and pits real leaders, such as President Obama, in potential moral and professional comparison.
The reality is we can only speculate how the postmodern Barack Obama would have handled or timed or calibrated the Emancipation Proclamation (which was as much a symbolic gesture to keep Britain out of the war as it was an ethical plank) and how Abraham Lincoln, trapped in his awkward body and steeped in melancholy, might have handled the media fest that is now the presidential primary perennial.
So, while Hollywood is helping by making Lincoln and the complexities of 1865 known to us, it is hurting by giving us a packaged version that appeals to the senses but not to the facts.
A similar problem occurred in 1991 when Oliver Stone brought out his hyperbolic JFK—an irresistible and glossy myth of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The melding of actual historic footage with simulated scenes was as effective as it was cynical. People left the theater declaring “So that’s how they killed Kennedy—six shooters and a CIA conspiracy!” We don’t know that any more than we know what Lincoln really thought about black people.
And we are not equipped anymore, or even energetic enough, to ask questions about our nation’s use of torture (Zero Dark Thirty) out of a feeling of moral outrage rather than because an engrossing movie with an appealing female lead showered us with production values instead of a desire to read further.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com