As I have noted in the past, Mick LaSalle is currently my favorite film critic. In addition to his reviews, he has a Sunday column titled “Ask Mick LaSalle,” which I always look forward to reading. This week, in answer to a fan’s question: “Which Civil War movie would you recommend?”, Mick uncorked the following, which is pretty awesome, and which needed to be said:
Dear Mick LaSalle: Which Civil War movie would you recommend?
Martin Vesely, San Jose
Dear Martin Vesely: The treatment of the Civil War in our popular culture has been fairly peculiar. For reasons that are understandable, the North has felt it necessary to act the way you do when you win an argument with your spouse: "No, honey, you weren't completely wrong; you had a point." After all, if you win completely, it's always smart to make the other party feel as good as possible. And so our national culture has turned itself inside out ignoring that the Confederacy was a disgrace - that the leaders who brought it about were uncomfortably close to Nazis, willing to ruin the Earth's last best hope for the sake of perpetuating an absolutely evil institution, which they not only wanted to maintain but also to extend all the way to the Pacific and into Central and South America. For all their noble cavalier posturing, they were greedy, cruel, power-driven and yet somehow convinced of their own superior honor and virtue, and they came closer to obliterating this great country than Adolf Hitler ever did in his wildest dreams.
Honestly, I find it astounding that schoolchildren are still taught about the Civil War as though it were a misunderstanding between two equally worthy sides. Such misinformation helps to perpetuate and give sanction to much residual psychosis in American life. Anyway, for these reasons, I just like straight-up Civil War movies that give you the facts and are biased toward the North and sanity. "Gettysburg" is particularly good along this line.
1 comment:
Thanks for that bro. Totally agree. I watch a lot of old Hollywood golden era movies and so many Westerns depend upon the cliche of the Confederate "Johnny reb" being the honor bound gentleman and the "Yankee" being either evil incarnate, untrustworthy, greedy etc. or just boring in comparison. A lot of that came from the sympathies of Southerners in Hollywood to whom the Civil War wasn't so distant (their grandparents could have fought in it etc.) and the instinct to romanticize the losers and their cause as the old underdog trope etc. Interestingly, they did that much more rarely with the losers in the conflicts between "Indians" and "cowboys" etc.
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