Martial Culture, Silver Screen

War Movies and the Construction of American Identity

Matthew Christopher Hulbert, Matthew E. Stanley, Matthew Christopher Hulbert, Matthew E. Stanley

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780807174715
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Martial Culture, Silver Screen analyzes war movies, one of the most popular genres in American cinema, for what they reveal about the narratives and ideologies that shape U.S. national identity. Edited by Matthew Christopher Hulbert and Matthew E. Stanley, this volume explores the extent to which the motion picture industry, particularly Hollywood, has played an outsized role in the construction and evolution of American self-definition.Moving chronologically, eleven essays highlight cinematic versions of military and cultural conflicts spanning from the American Revolution to the War on Terror. Each focuses on a selection of films about a specific war or historical period, often foregrounding recent productions that remain understudied in the critical literature on cinema, history, and cultural memory. Scrutinizing cinema through the lens of nationalism and its "invention of tradition, " Martial Culture, Silver Screen considers how movies possess the power to frame ideologies, provide social coherence, betray collective neuroses and fears, construct narratives of victimhood or heroism, forge communities of remembrance, and cement tradition and convention. Hollywood war films routinely present broad, identifiable narratives—such as that of the rugged pioneer or the "good war"—through which filmmakers invent representations of the past, establishing narratives that advance discrete social and political functions in the present. As a result, cinematic versions of wartime conflicts condition and reinforce popular understandings of American national character as it relates to violence, individualism, democracy, militarism, capitalism, masculinity, race, class, and empire.Approaching war movies as identity-forging apparatuses and tools of social power, Martial Culture, Silver Screen lays bare how cinematic versions of warfare have helped define for audiences what it means to be American.

Manifest Mythology

Cinematic Distortions of Antebellum American Imperialism and Manhood

JAMES HILL “TRAE” WELBORN III

In 1854 the United States of America stood squarely amid the tumult and throes of geographic expansion. Having only recently extended its national boundaries “from sea to shining sea” following the 1848 Mexican Cession that followed US victory in the Mexican War, the nation had grown roughly 60 percent in geographic size in an instant. Intensifying domestic disputes between antislavery “free state” and proslavery “slave state” interests in national politics somewhat tempered expansionist enthusiasm and its seemingly boundless prospects, however. Much of this dissension centered upon the future of slavery in western territories, and that already troubling question became even more pernicious with the most recent territorial gains from Mexico. The competing proslavery and antislavery visions for America’s future managed to strike a contentious compromise in 1850 regarding the territory added from Mexico, but tension and conflict persisted as older territories gained in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase began to apply for statehood, Kansas first and foremost among them. The tumult over the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, in which each state’s slave status would be determined by “popular sovereignty” opened the door for already contentious sectional compromises to give way to overt sectional conflicts in the last half of the decade and, infamously, into the next as southern secession fomented national civil war.1

But as much as these tempests occupied the nation in the mid-1850s, so too did furthering that nation’s expansionist designs, especially among proslavery southerners who, though they recognized the threat of a shifting balance of domestic political power toward an antislavery agenda, maintained considerable clout regarding the nation’s foreign policy, which they wielded in decidedly proslavery and imperialistic ways. While these official political contests unfolded, other quasi-political expansionary endeavors emerged alongside in the form of American “filibusters” in the Caribbean and Central America. These efforts, most avidly supported by proslavery southerners but tacitly sanctioned more broadly by the still nationally dominant though southern-centric Democratic Party, touted the benefits of extending the scope and scale of the nation’s “manifest destiny” beyond its current reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Filibuster schemes looking northward into Canada had gained national support in the decade prior to the Mexican War but had largely subsided by the mid-1840s due to repeated failures and a southward shift in priorities among expansionist visionaries. Latin America assumed primacy for filibusters from the mid-1840s through the 1850s, and proslavery southerners constituted the dominant voice endorsing them. Collectively these expansionist schemes, whether privately funded and directed expeditions or formal national military invasions, exposed the overtly imperialistic agenda as well as the proslavery undertones and white supremacist overtones of the nation’s alleged “manifest destiny.”2

One prominent proslavery southerner, William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, commenced a national lecture tour amidst these trends in 1854, resulting in three lectures collectively entitled Poetry and the Practical that took up this theme and considered its reverberation throughout antebellum American society and culture in its increasingly expansive yet vulnerable state. Simms openly doubted whether his words would be heard over the din of Americans clamoring for commercial expansion, whether they would be heeded by those so “eagerly listening for the roll of those mighty engines which are to bring you the treasures of Ophir from the shores of the Pacific!” In his view this pursuit of the nation’s manifest destiny constituted undeniable progress—for the white “Anglo-Norman” race, American manhood, and, through the exploits of both, the very nation itself: “We have gone fearlessly forth upon the high seas, declaring them our common; and have passed with the flight of an eagle, from the little spots along the Atlantic shores, first dotted by our infant settlements, to the far waters of the Great Pacific. . . . we have achieved wondrously, if not always well, and the very fact of our successes in the single field of progress, would seem to be held a sufficient argument against our exercise in any other.” As an unapologetic apostle of the American gospel of progress through expansion, Simms, like many of his fellow white southerners, joined in antebellum America’s faithful adherence to the doctrine of manifest destiny, tinged as it was by a prevailing belief in an American exceptionalism still rooted in white supremacy.3

But Simms’s faith mirrored that of many across the sectional divide as well in that it did not preclude a critical concern over imperial excess as the corruptive, corrosive agent portending this ideal America’s potential demise: “The result of all this achievement . . . is to exaggerate in the national estimate. . . . we thus learn to confound possessions with power; accumulations with developments; enjoyments with endowments; and to place the very faculties which conduct us to the conquest, in subordinate relation to the spoils which they acquire.” Simms questioned both the means and the ends of such conquests and warned that they could just as well prove destructively all-consuming: “Indulging but a single great appetite, it swallows up the rest. Sworn only to the acquisition of material things, we ignore all the endowments of the soul. In just that degree in which the one passion prevails, will be the absorption of all other attributes.” “Is this to be the unvarying record of the great nation?” Simms then rhetorically pondered: “Is it to be nothing but a convulsive progress of storm, and blood and fire, shouts and exultation—then, loathsome, pitiable ruin?” Neither he nor by extension the nation’s leaders would or could reconcile themselves to this ultimate demise in the midst of their striving, however fraught with peril it might be. “I do not believe this to be the destiny,” Simms asserted hopefully before concluding, “I find it written neither in the book of God, nor in the volumes writ by man. I believe that these contain the secret of our securities, which, properly read, received in faith, rendered strong and confident by loving sympathies, will confer upon us safety, continued growth and youth, duration to the end.”4

By voicing his misgivings in the same long-winded breath in which he celebrated the exploits from whence they had been born, William Gilmore Simms placed a finger on the ever-quickening pulse of antebellum Americans as they simultaneously exalted the most promising hopes and confronted the most portentous fears attending their fervent pursuit and alleged fulfillment of manifest destiny. Such duality of mind pervaded the era, as tensions between North and South, free and slave, white and black intensified amidst the ongoing contests with American Indians, European powers, and neighboring countries. By the end of the 1850s, the productive and destructive potential of this perpetual combat had plagued Simms’s mind and the national psyche for decades, despite every conscious attempt to justify themselves to themselves, to the world, and to memory.5

The martial ardor with which many an American (white) man had mustered into service of the nation’s manifest destiny during the antebellum era and the overtly patriotic remembrance of their efforts in American historical memory since have obscured the often-brutal means by which they fulfilled that destiny and perpetuated that memory to posterity. Nowhere do the silver linings surrounding the darkest moments of this history appear brighter than when depicted on the silver screen. The cinematic distortions of antebellum American imperialism and manhood in The Alamo (1960), The Alamo (2004), Ravenous (1999), and Walker (1987) at once reveal the tendency of American popu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: American War Films—An Archive of Us Imagining Ourselves
• History, Sir, Will Tell Lies as Usual: Founders, Patriots, and the War for Independence on Film
• Attacking Antebellum Slavery on Screen: Hollywood Portrayals of Militant Emancipation, 1937–2016
• No, Will, He Just Died: The Abandonment of Triumphalism in Recent Civil War Films
• The Indian Wars for the American West: Custer, Costner, and Colonialism
• Manifest Mythology: Cinematic Distortions of Antebellum American: Imperialism and Manhood
• To End War and Bring Peace: World War I, Peace, and Antiwar Films
• Heroes and Superheroes: The Twenty-First-Century World War II Film
• The Forgotten War in American Film: The Evolving Portrayal of the Korean Conflict
• We Have Seen the Enemy and He Is Us: Hollywood, the Cold War, and Battling the Enemy Within
• Survivors of Natural Disaster: American Identity in Vietnam War Films
• Virtually There: The War on Terror
• List of Contributors
• Index