Hollywood's American Revolution

Gregory L. Kaster

History News Service

"Everything will change," a stunned General Charles Cornwallis

announces toward the end of "The Patriot," the Revolutionary War epic

starring Mel Gibson which opened in theaters just in time for the July

Fourth holiday.

Cornwallis (played by Tom Wilkinson) utters this prophetic remark

as he watches his British regulars being routed by American Continental

soldiers and a band of South Carolina militiamen led by Gibson's fictional

character, the middle-aged patriot-hunk Benjamin Martin. It is one of the

film's better lines, encapsulating the revolutionary scope and implications=

of the overthrow in America of the old monarchical, aristocratic imperial

order embodied in Cornwallis and defended by the Redcoats.

Not without good reason did the real Cornwallis order his troops

to play an English folk tune "The World Turned Upside Down" when he

surrendered to Washington at Yorktown in 1781. Like the United States in

Vietnam two centuries later, Britain, the superpower of its day, was

humiliated by what the on-screen Cornwallis disparages as "an army of

rabble, peasants,"aided, of course, by the French.

For the makers of "The Patriot," as perhaps for most viewers, the

Revolution is synonymous with the War of Independence. We witness repeated

bloody clashes between Martin's grassroots guerrilla militia and

Cornwallis's professional British soldiers in and around the swamps of

South Carolina where the film is set. We see as well the British, led by a

made-for-Hollywood sadistic colonel (played by Jason Isaacs and modeled on

the notorious Colonel Banastre Tarleton), bring the war to the civilian

population.

And in the superbly choreographed climactic battle scene, which

prompts Cornwallis's prediction, we watch slaughter on an epic scale,

eighteenth-century style, with the opposing armies marching toward one

another until half a football field apart, and then opening fire until

ranks are broken and desperate hand-to-hand combat ensues. These scenes,

realistic and at times surreal, have a powerful and salutary cumulative

effect. They remind us that our independence as a nation was won on the

battlefield in a long and hard war marked by terror, refugees, courage,

and sacrifice.

But the film's relentless focus on the war obscures what arguably

was most revolutionary about the American Revolution.

As John Adams shrewdly noted, a revolution had occurred "in the

minds of the people" even before a shot was fired. In the course of a

decade of resistance to British imperial measures, beginning with the

hated Stamp Act of 1765, the Patriots elaborated a potent ideology that

depicted American liberty in danger of being extinguished by corrupt

and aggressive British power exercised by Parliament and, the Patriots

ultimately concluded, the King himself. The colonists, this ideology warned,

were on the verge of becoming "slaves" that is, subject to absolute and

arbitrary power. By 1776 the Patriots had added the radical ideas of equality

 and republican government to this ideological mix.

To the film's hero, however, ideology matters hardly at all. A

widower and parent haunted by his guerrilla exploits during the French and

Indian War, Martin tells the Charleston Assembly, "I haven't got the

luxury of principles," a strange pronouncement given the critical importance of

principles to the Revolution. Martin takes up arms (including his hatchet)

only after the British arrive at his farm and kill one of his sons before

his very eyes. Not ideology but the simple desire for revenge fires his

outrage. Only near the film's end, when he gallops with the Stars and

Stripes in hand, does Martin symbolically make his personal and the larger

cause one.

If the filmmakers give us a hero untainted by ideology, they also

ensure that he is unsullied by the Revolution's central contradiction,

chattel slavery. Martin's black workers, we learn, are not slaves, which

is so unlikely as to be preposterous. This detail is in keeping with the

film's failure to engage with any subtlety the experiences of blacks (not

to mention white women) in the Revolution, or the fascinating irony of

white men who owned slaves fearing their own "enslavement" and proclaiming

the equality of all men.

A mostly silent slave in Martin's militia is made to stand for all

slaves fighting for their (literal) freedom. Viewers learn nothing of the

slaves who fought with the British in return for the promise of

emancipation. Nor do they learn of the slaves who boldly appropriated the

rhetoric of the Revolution in petitioning for an end to slavery, or who by

the thousands took advantage of wartime conditions to liberate themselves

by running away.

Contrary to what some have written, "The Patriot" is most

definitely not to the Revolution what the movie "Glory" is to the Civil

War. Where the latter film put race and the struggle of black men for

freedom, dignity, and manhood at its center in a complex way, "The

Patriot" treats the story of blacks and the Revolution in a way that feels obvious

and tacked on.

In the end, "The Patriot" presents a flattened story of the Revolution. Still, it is a

welcome respite from the usual summer celluloid fare, especially if it prompts

Americans to pause this Fourth of July and ponder the revolutionary origins of the

United States and the ways in which the Revolution, as the cinematic and

historical Cornwallis understood, changed everything.

Gregory L. Kaster teaches history at Gustavus Adolphus College in

St. Peter, Minn., and is a writer for the History News Service.