Director: Steven Spielberg
Talent: Daniel Day Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Release Date: 25th January 2013
The Irish cinema release schedule, unlike the USA’s, which saw both released over a month apart, has delivered Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained to our screens within a week of one another. The similarities between the two, however, go deeper than the caprices of distribution. Both films are about slavery, both maintain contrastingly tenuous relationships with history, and both, crucially, represent the agency and the freedom of their black characters as something gifted unto them by a white saviour. For Django, this saviour is Christoph Waltz’s Dr. King Schultz, while in Lincoln, Daniel Day Lewis’ titular President takes the reins of history, abolishing slavery, it seems, out of the kindness of his heart.
The role of black people in their own emancipation—well documented in the “canonical” history of Abolition and Reconstruction, not least by W.E.B. Du Bois—is reduced by Spielberg (and screenwriter Tony Kushner, of Spielberg’s Munich) to acting as inspiration for the folksy, stoical President and watching from balconies with appropriate worry, encouragement or pride as Republican Abolitionists debate the 13th Amendment in Congress. A paean to compromise-as-praxis, Lincoln and his allies batter out shady deals in smoky back-rooms to win votes for his Amendment, while Tommy Lee Jones’ Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Abolitionist, gazes to the balcony in slow motion to nod solemnly at various people before sinking the free-throw that is the betrayal of his personal belief that all men are created equal—as per the Declaration of Independence—in the interest of securing the legislative ration that is slavery’s abolition.
That such a middle-brow cinematic hagiography might maintain what is fundamentally a white supremacist historicity in discussing Abolition is no great surprise. By narrowing its focus to Congress and the 13thAmendment, it is able to make Lincoln the hero of Abolition, an insidious erasure of an entire race and, along with it, truth.
