Civil War Trash: Killing your Gods and Angels

The Phantom recently discovered the movie DVD section at the Hampton library and lit upon a promising item in the "G" section under "God."  

Popping the movie, "Gods and Generals" into his basement Blue Ray, he mounted his treadmill and prepared to trundle off into hours of Civil War action.

The opening credits raised expectations of glory to come with a montage of regimental flags, authentic, beautiful, colors gently undulating, stirring music in the background. 

All sorts of promise:  The movie is said to be based on Jeff Shaara's book which the Phantom has not read, but he has read "Killer Angels" which is a very good treatment of the war, and the pedigree of a director, Ron Maxwell, who did "Gettysburg" a movie which falls into the benign, suitable for the classroom, if windy and juiceless treatment of that great struggle. Made 10 years after Gettysburg, G&G uses the same actors to play Joshua Chamberlain and his brother. There is even a song specially written by Bob Dylan for the movie, "Cross the Green Mountain" so anticipation ran high.

 But then...

Faulkner once said the pain of good writing means you must often "kill your angels" and if you've ever tried writing, fiction especially, you know exactly what he means. When you find you're swept away and really flying as you sit at your desk or at your computer, the alarms ought to be going off...when you re write, you find the stuff you must kill is the stuff which so thrilled you but is really that white horse you should not ride into battle with your feather plume on your hat because it is death to your purpose and you will deserve the bullet of every marksman who sees you.

General Patton, in his dreams

Another clue: Ted Turner, who produced the movie gets to dress up as a Confederate officer, Patton (yes, a relative of that Patton) and die in Pickett's charge.

The movie opens with Robert E. Lee arriving to a chorus of angels singing in the choir, stepping out of his carriage resplendent in his spotless blue uniform with a colonel's epaulets and ushered into the pallor of Secretary Blair who offers him, in a mystifying Irish accented English, the command of the Union Army.  As the chorus swells behind him, General Lee, intones that Abraham Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers, to form an army to invade the South is the real offense, not the little matter of a Fort called Sumter, which Southern cannons have pounded into dust, killing American soldiers and over running its defenses in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina. 

Saint Robert E. Lee, slave driver

Besides, Lee notes, his own plantation is right across the Potomac River. He does not add, although the Phantom would have, had he been writing the script,   the Secretary could stick his head out the window of his office and see the 189 slaves working Lee's fields, slaves belonging to Lee's wife, but working for Lee, and slaves who Lee kept under control by ruthlessly pursuing them whenever two or three escaped, and after whipping them, "sold them South," a punishment feared worse than death, because those slave owners in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi knew how to really make life Hell for the chatell. 

Following this scene, we get Lee speaking to the Virginia legislature, again backed by a chorus of angels accompanied this time by piano, and we have tender scenes of a mother sending her two precious, fresh faced sons off to war from her Virginian home, and we see farmers and craftsmen putting up their plowshares and cleaning off their muskets and joining the throngs of volunteers, just as their ancestors had marched off with Washington to defend their homeland from invading British hordes.

But best of all, we have the first of many scenes of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, bringing his wife into his pallor and reciting a verse from the Bible which justifies making war and killing as only the Bible can do, and they recite it in unison as a prayer to the coming mayhem.  Later we have Jackson looking heavenward with a Bible in hand and reciting other verses, and rendering freestyle prayers before battle. 
And we get the point: This is a man called by God to defend Virginia, chattel slavery and aristocracy, not necessarily in that order.

There is some historical accuracy to this portrayal of Jackson as a Bible thumper--he was by all accounts a man who read and quoted the Bible relentlessly, a sort of 19th century Taliban who justified all sorts of murderous behavior by instruction from God. He even apologizes to God for preparing battle on the Sabbath, but as he remarks to his Heavenly Father, who can be just dimly seen in the clouds above Bull Run creek, listening attentively, if His will is for battle on Sunday, His will be done!


By the time we get to see Stonewall standing like one at Manassas, we understand who the good guys are, and all about the Lost Cause.

I Will Make Georgia Howl 

It's not until side B, after the intermission, we finally run into Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels, now 10 years old and 30 pounds fatter than when he played the role in "Gettysburg") with his brother, (who played the same role in "Gettysburg" but seems to have aged less perceptibly) discussing the Emancipation Proclamation, and reprising that line from the first movie, "Don't call me 'Lawrence' in front of the men," as if that were either the funniest or the most affectionate cinematic line ever written.

It seems the Emancipation Proclamation may pose problems for the Union officers because many of the Union soldiers did not sign up to free the "darkies"  as Chamberlain's brother notes. What exactly they did sign up for beyond the abstract notion of "union" is not clear, but Chamberlain-Daniels explains that the war may not have been about freeing the slaves in the beginning but "war changes things" and ending slavery is now the big casus belli.  Chamberlain also upbraids his brother from using the politically incorrect word "darkies" to describe "Negroes" in one of the first assertions of political correctness in American cinematic  history. 

Douglass

Frederick Douglass, the Phantom notes, is nowhere to be seen in "Gods and Angels" or at least in the parts the Phantom managed to choke his way through.

Nor is Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, in which he actually explains, carefully, objectively and systematically the way the war came to be about freeing slavery, and which, in the Phantom's humble opinion, is by far the best explanation ever offered and so the Phantom will show it now, humbly, for the reader's appraisal:

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it-- all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war-- seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came. One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other.

Having seen as much of this wreck of a movie as he could bare to watch before puking, the Phantom gathered up his dog and carried the DVD down to the Library and shoved it through the after hours slot for book and DVD returns, resisting the urge to throw it into the fireplace, which in the Phantom's case might cause an even worse conflagration, as it is a gas fire place. 

Would anyone out there like to see a Civil War film written from the perspective of "What Happened" from as many points of view as can be fit into a single movie--a sort of War and Peace of America, incorporating the bored New Hampshire farm boy looking for adventure, the Scarlet O'Hara princess of that radically white supremacist, Margaret Mitchell, Frederick Douglass, a failed leather tanner looking for advancement named Ulysess S. Grant, and all like that?