History Died for Our Sins: Guilt and Responsibility in Hollywood Redemption Histories

I now recognized my invisibility. So I'd accept it, I'd explore it, rine and heart. I'd plunge into it with both feet and they'd gag. Oh, but wouldn't they gag ... Yes, I'd let them swoller me until they vomited or burst wide open. Let them gag on what they refused to see. (Invisible Man)1 It is our knowledge, and refusal to know, that we are ceding .... We lash ourselves to these ideas..in order that in the spasms of our fixed fury we do ourselves no injury, in order not to see the injury we have done, and do. (Stanley Cavell)2 Even as it has become commonplace to lament Americans' lack of historical knowledge, Hollywood continues to generate vast revenues from historical films. Titanic, which cleared over $1 billion, is just the latest in a series of historical dramas (Amistad, Schindler's List, Ghosts of Mississippi, Mississippi Burning) biopics (JFK, Nixon, Michael Collins, Malcom X, Hoffa, What's Love Got to Do With It?) and inumerable period pieces that go to great lengths to convincingly reproduce the past. Indeed, much has been made of the fact that Americans are reading less and relying on movies more for information about the past.' Arguably, it is just this demand for Hollywood history that leads historians to worry that collective memory of past events is beginning to blur into their dramatic, fictionalized, and commodified accounts. History is increasingly screened. Much contemporary analysis of filmed history thus tends to focus on the question of whether that medium accurately portrays the past rather than on how the past may come to mean differently when represented in visual rather than verbal format. From this vantage, criticisms of historical drama will focus on their distortions of the truth, while defenders will point to the imaginative ways in which drama makes history accessible or meaningful or emotionally present where traditional printed history has not. While there is much to learn from these debates, the question of historical accuracy should not elide other avenues of investigation. The question is not only how much we know of the past, but how we come to know it. Framing the question solely as one of historical accuracy or authenticity mistakenly assumes that the film is primarily about the historical period depicted on the screen rather than about the contemporary audience. As Thomas Cripps puts it: movies teach us about "the culture of the time in which they were released rather than of the era they were about" (Cripps 155).' This paper attempts to shift the focus away from whether historical dramas "get their history right" and toward the status of history as a set of narrative practices (with distinct rules and genre conventions) and the political implications of apprehending the past in such a fashion. Historical films ought to be historically responsible, but fleshing out what it could mean to be "responsible" to the past ought to be one of the central questions in any analysis of how movies mediate a new relationship to history and to the past. It is in this context that I present what I take to be an emerging genre of film, which I am calling the "Hollywood redemption history." Marking a self-conscious departure from Eurocentrist narratives, a new set of stories about the past is taking shape, explicitly intended as anti-racist narratives.' Marginalized groups are being given a chance to have "their story told." Yet in all the films of this genre, the point of identification character is a charismatic white man who fights (or comes to fight) against the oppression that is the central issue of the film. Or, rather, the central issue of the film turns out not to be the marginalized group's history, but the salvation of the lead character with whom the audience has identified. Films that illustrate the genre include Dances With Wolves,6 Schindler's List, Amistad, Glory, Mississippi Burning, Ghosts of Mississippi, Long Walk Home, and City of Joy. In the first section of this paper, I will try to situate my concerns about these historical films in terms of contemporary discussions of history, memory and trauma. …