Revisioning the Past:
Film, History, and Politics in The Post World War II United States
Daphne Tung
Department of English, National Central University
History is the present. That’s why every generation
writes it anew. But what most people think of as history
is its end product, myth.
E. L. Doctorow
Societies are forever changing. Films also change, and they do so in close
relation to social and economic change, even when their subject matter remains the
same. The nature of these relations has been a matter of some debate.
I want to
offer ways to watch films which acknowledge the historical contexts of films, and
then to go further by examining the cultural significance of change that occurs
between different films.
The subject of the first chapter will be how labor films
reflect changing attitudes toward the union movement in the post 60sUnited States.
Like mirrors, films reflect the social and economic conditions of a time, and between
the 1970s (Norma Rae), 1980s (Matewan), and 1990s (October Sky), Hollywood films
reflected social and economic conditions of labor in the United States. Chapter two
will analyze the representation of President Richard M. Nixon between the 1970s,
immediately after the fall of his administration due to the Watergate Scandal, and the
1990s, when he died and Americans began to reconsider his political legacy.
I will
argue that Oliver Stone’s film Nixon (1995) takes an active position in trying to sway
popular perceptions of the disgraced president, perceptions formed in Alan J. Pakula’s
1976 All the President’s Men
And, in the last chapter, I will examine professional
women in selected films from the postwar to the 1990s as objects of ambivalence and
pleasure. People may have mixed feelings about things, and directors take subjects
Tung 2
and show us the ambivalence towards these subjects through film.
Here, I will use
three films from the 1940s (Mildred Pierce), the 1970s (McCabe and Mrs. Miller), and
the 1990s (Independence Day) to argue that a similarity in the ambivalent
representation of professional women runs through different decades.
Once again, in
each case, I will read the films in question as artifacts of specific historical moments,
tracking their changes over time.
History and Film
Many people learn what they know of history through watching films. This,
does not mean that films tell the truth about history.
Films such as Gone With the
Wind and Bonnie and Clyde give highly inaccurate accounts of the past distorted by
the demands of genre, technology, and the marketplace.
have no historical value.
This is not to say that film
Historian, Robert A. Rosenstone observes that, “film, the
contemporary medium … [is] capable of both dealing with the past and holding a
large audience … Can we not suspect that this is the medium to use to create narrative
histories that will touch large numbers of people?” (24)
Rosenstone identifies the nature of historical knowledge as one area of
postmodern debate.
He comments that historians have been preoccupied in recent
decades, with the relationship between film and historical knowledge. The words
“dealing with the past” help to justify the role films play.
Films deal with history,
but are not history, they are not trying to change “what we mean by history.” They
are productions of cultures and history.
To historian
R. J. Raack, the true value of
history in films is to “[gain] personal knowledge,” while to Ian Jarvie, a philosopher,
history comes from “debates between historians about just what exactly did happen,
why it happened, and what would be an adequate account of its significance”
Tung 3
(Rosenstone 26). Rosenstone responds to these two different points of view by
saying, “we all can think of works which represent the past without ever pointing to
the field of debates in which they are situate,” thus allowing the two contradictory
views to both be right (Rosenstone 29).
He continues by pointing out that “we all
know many excellent narrative histories and biographies that mute debates by
ignoring them … or burying them deep within the storyline … [and] an inability to
‘debate’ issues cannot rule out the possibilities of history on film”.
As important as these debates are, they will play little part in this thesis. Rather,
I will emphasize how to understand films in relation to their historical production.
Here I pose two ways of using film as history, the first, as an artifact of the moment
and the second, as a reflection on the past.
In the same way, artifacts help
archeologists to piece together the past, films in this thesis help us understand how at
a particular moment in time audiences felt and thought about a given topic.
Films
are also the product of the interpretation of the film maker, a sort of “debate” film
makers make on what happened. When films rewrite history they add to the making
of history as an ongoing product.
In Jane Tompkin’s words, films perform “cultural
work” because “they provide a basis for remaking the social and political order in
which events take place” (xvii). In this way, we can view films as mirror images of
certain pasts.
Watching and analyzing these artifacts from a present perspective
show how culture changes from period to period.
The truth of these changes as a
mere reflection of history, is beside the point.
.
Politics and Film
Films are engines of social and cultural change.
Like historians who are
concerned with how films construct history, cultural critics find films useful for
Tung 4
exploring political issues.1 One of the ways we do this is to examine the influence
films have on people’s behavior and attitudes. The power of films can create
“stimuli so strong that [the audience] eventuate in actual movement or physiological
response,” thus suggesting the possibility that films serve as a force for good and bad
affects on society (Vogel 194).
Films function as a form of “enculturation,” the
source of socialization and citizenship (Kellner 128). Films are able to do this in the
way they represent classes, poverty, and social struggle.
desires” (Kellner 129).
They also “mobilize
The cultural affects of films suggest they do not passively
reflect the world around them. Nor are these affects out of control or waste of time.
Jane Tompkins theorizes how cultural texts operate in the wider world of their
production and use.
Tompkins coins the term “cultural work” to describe the way in
which films provides ways for a culture thinks about itself and to give solutions “for
the problems that shape a particular historic moment” (xi).
Films do not subjugate
their audiences, but allow them to take part in processes of cultural self-reflection.
Another way we treat film’s relationships to political life is by way of pleasure.
The cultural themes that shape culture are the focus of discussion.
The views
portrayed in movies, not only reflect the influence of the social surroundings, but
they draw on the audiences’ ambivalences.
It is not only the audiences’ emotions
that are affected, but their way of thinking is also affected. We have mixed feelings
about what we see in the movies.
Through film viewing, audiences may experience
things that in real life, they are unable to, things they want, and things they may not
want. Either way, these are feelings which in real life the audience experience only
in their seats in a dark movie theatre. The ambivalence in experiencing something
in a contained area and not out in the real world provides an important way of
See, for example Freeland and Wartenberg: “Social and cultural issues concerning family structures,
urban violence, teenage rebellion … or religious taboos” (1).
1
Tung 5
talking about film.
Through ambivalence, movies play a part on influencing culture.
All approaches discussed pertain to the study of film in this thesis; but in the
chapters I will foreground the representation of films and their relationship to history
and politics.
Chapter Summaries
Chapter One: Labor Films and The New Right
In the post World War II period, labor unions became increasingly powerful.
This was a result of the booming economy produced by post war conditions. By the
1970s, the economy was no longer booming, thus eroding the leverage of labor in
American society.
When President Reagan was elected in 1980, he implemented
laws that took power away from labor unions and conditions for working Americans
deteriorated.
More importantly, a shift began to occur in how Americans viewed and
felt about labor, especially when it was organized.
This chapter examines the films Norma Rae (1979), Matewan (1987), and
October Sky (1999), arguing that depictions of working-class struggle between the
1970s and 1990s reflect changing views of labor in America associated with New
Right political ideology.
The New Right in the United States refers to a conservative
movement that emerged in the 1950s, but did not achieve the highpoint of its success
until 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.
The film Norma Rae,
appears at the highpoint of organized labor, where success in numbers was enough to
fight corporations.
By 1987, near the end of Regan’s presidency, labor is struggling,
a condition reflected in John Sayle’s Matewan in which labor fails for organized West
Virginia coal fields in the 1920s.
In October Sky, union activity serves as little more
Tung 6
than a backdrop for a film about individual achievement in a market economy that has
little room for the aspirations of organized labor.
For American working people in
the 1990s, the only future lay in their own (individual) hands.
Chapter Two: Citizen Nixon
In 1972, Richard M. Nixon was elected by a landslide. But, charisma that won
him votes in 1972 did not help him after the Watergate Scandal broke out.
A. J.
Pakula’s 1976 film, All the President’s Men, helped to produce a view of Nixon in the
as a political villain, whose personal appeal was not only negative, but hollow, a mere
media mask. By the 1990s, however, Americans were looking for a more
conciliatory view of the man long taken to personify as all that was corrupt in the Post
WWII United States. Oliver Stone, in 1995, makes a film of Nixon’s life that seeks
to create a very different view of its subject.
acknowledges his contributions to his country.
based on Oliver Stone’s interpretation.
Nixon admits Nixon’s faults; but it also
It gives him a personality as well
Stone tells us in an interview with Mark
Carnes, “we’ve tried to relate Watergate to Nixon’s mother and father and the deaths
of his brother. We’ve tried to relate his brothers’ deaths and the survivor’s guilt he
felt to the two Kennedys … we may be dead wrong on this, but we’re groping for the
elusive thread that brings to Nixon’s life some sort of order” (308).
I will explain these shifts in Nixon’s film treatment by suggesting that American
views of the period also shifted.
By the 1990s baby boomers began feeling
differently about the depraved heroes and heroines of WWII who had become “the
great generation.” Similarly, Americans began to change their views on President
Nixon.
The inner life of Nixon provided Stone’s film was meant to affect viewers
who become vulnerable to sympathize with a man who on the outside was vicious,
Tung 7
but powerless on the inside. The film Nixon does not re-create a new identity for
Richard Nixon, but adds to the hole which was the non-existence of Nixon’s inner life
in the 1970.
Chapter Three: No Way Out
Women have always taken a backseat in American working life, at least when
that work is performed publically in the traditional male sphere. Even though the
Second World War served to propel women into the labor force, public perceptions
have been slow to change.
Women in public have been key objects in films that
have exploited this ambivalence for pleasure and entertainment.
This chapter
analyzes films that allow women to become professionals only to recontain them
within the home and family.
Various films document the transformation of women
from the passive housewife into the independent, working woman; and how these
representations of women as subjects in film are ambivalent.
People on the one hand
take pleasure in the changes in which films provided, while experiencing anxiety at
the spectacle of women acting outside their traditional sphere.
The film Mildred Pierce (1945) reflects the anxiety of World War II American
society as women filled jobs vacated by men who served the war effort.
Mildred
Pierce shows the life of a woman who plays the bread earner, the father and mother
figure, only to at the end of the film, be put back in her place, a place where women
belong.
Later in the 70s, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) presents a reversal of the
role of control in a male-female relationship. Mrs. Miller, a whorehouse madame,
maintains her status by making her relationship with McCabe strictly economical.
will argue that this representation of a woman in command of her rights enacts the
second wave feminist movement in the 1960s where women were concerned with
I
Tung 8
social and economic equality.
The last film, Independence Day (1996), centers on
two male heroes, one black, and the other Jewish, who save the world.
also play an important role in the film.
Yet, women
And, by the 1990s, women have already
made it far up the social ladder, more and more women made their way into the public
arena.
In the film, we are shown women in political life – the Clinton
administration – Hilary as first lady; Dee Dee Myers as president secretary, and the
black woman who is representative of any woman frowned upon by society because
of her profession.
Women play important roles and are successful, professional
women in their own right.
But like the previous films, these powerful women too,
are brought down by the end of the film.
Tung 9
Bibliography
Freeland, Cynthia A., and Thomas E. Wartenberg. Introduction to Philosophy and
Film. Ed. Freeland, Cynthia A., and Thomas E. Wartenberg. (New York,
Routledge, 1995). 1-10.
Kellner, Douglas. “Hollywood Film and Society.” American Cinema and Hollywood.
Ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000). 128-137.
Rosenstone, Robert A. “History in Images, History in Words: Reflections on the
Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film.” In Visions of the Past, The
Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. London: Harvard University Press,
1995) 19-44.
Stone, Oliver. “A Conversation Between Mark Carnes and Oliver Stone.”
Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies. Ed. Carnes, Mark C. (New
York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995). 296-308
Vogel, Amos. Film as a Subversive Art. (New York: Random House, 1974).
Filmography
Altman, Robert, dir. 1971. McCabe and Mrs. Miller.With Warren Beatty and Julie
Christie. Warner Brothers.
Curtiz, Michael, dir. 1945. Mildred Pierce. With Joan Crawford. Warner Brothers.
Emmerich, Roland, dir. 1996. Independence Day. With Jeff Goldblum and Will
Smith. 20th Century Fox.
Johnston, Joe, dir. 1999. October Sky. With Chris Cooper and Jake Gallenhaal.
Universal Studios.
Pakula, Alan. J, dir. 1976. All The President’s Men. With Dustin Hoffman and Robert
Redford. Warner Brothers.
Ritt, Martin, dir. 1979. Norma Rae. With Sally Fields. 20th Century Fox.
Tung 10
Sayles, John, dir. 1987. Matewan. With Chris Cooper. Hallmark.
Stone, Oliver, dir. 1995. Nixon. With Anthony Hopkins and Joan Allen. Buena Vista
Pictures.