The Nazis, er, the Redcoats are coming!
The savage soldiers in "The Patriot" act more like the Waffen SS than actual
British troops. Does this movie have an ulterior motive?
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By Jonathan Foreman
July 03, 2000 | The week before "The Patriot" opened in the United States,
the British press lit up with furious headlines. "Truth is first casualty in
Hollywood's War," read one in the Daily Telegraph. Another story, about the
historical model for Mel Gibson's character was titled, "The Secret Shame of
Mel's New Hero." The accompanying articles complained that the new
Revolutionary War epic portrays British redcoats as "bloodthirsty and
unprincipled stormtroopers" and "bloodthirsty child-killers."
The prizewinning historian and biographer Andrew Roberts called the film
"racist" in the Daily Express, and pointed out that it was only the latest in
a series of films like "Titanic," "Michael Collins" and "The Jungle Book"
remake that have depicted the British as "treacherous, cowardly, evil [and]
sadistic." Roberts had a theory: "With their own record of killing 12 million
American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British
abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt onto someone
else."
I can only imagine how much angrier Fleet Street's pundits will be after they
have actually seen the movie. "The Patriot" will not open in England until
August, but when it does, Brits will see a supposedly authentic historical
epic that radically rewrites the known history of the Revolutionary War. It
does so by casting George III's redcoats as cartoonish paragons of evil who
commit one monstrous -- but wholly invented -- atrocity after another. In one
scene, the most harrowing of the film, redcoats round up a village of
screaming women and children and old men, lock them in a church and set the
whole chapel on fire. If you didn't know anything about the Revolution, you
might actually believe the British army in North America was made up of
astonishingly cruel, even demonic, sadists who really did do this kind of
thing -- as if they were the 18th century equivalent of the Nazi SS. Yet no
action of the sort ever happened during the war for independence, but an
eerily identical war crime -- one of the most notorious atrocities of World
War II -- was carried out by the Nazis in France in 1944.
As a film critic for the New York Post, I found "The Patriot" well made and
often exciting. But I also found it disturbing in a way that many weaker,
dumber films are not. It's not just that it willfully distorts history in a
manner that goes way beyond the traditional poetic license employed by
Hollywood, it's the strange, primitive politics that seem to underlie that
distortion.
"The Patriot" is a movie that doesn't "get" patriotism -- in either a modern
or the 18th century sense of the word. The only memorable, explicit political
sentiment voiced comes when Gibson's character makes the rather Tory comment
that he sees no advantage in replacing the tyranny of one man 3,000 miles
away for the tyranny of 3,000 men, one mile away. The deliberate lacuna
demonstrates a total lack of understanding of, or even a kind of hostility
to, the patriotic politics that motivated the founding fathers.
You could actually argue without too much exaggeration that "The Patriot" is
as fascist a film (and I use the term in its literal sense, not as a synonym
for "bad") as anything made in decades. It's even more fascist than "Fight
Club," that ode to violence, barely repressed homoeroticism and the rejection
of consumer capitalism.
"The Patriot" presents a deeply sentimental cult of the family, casts
unusually Aryan-looking heroes and avoids any democratic or political context
in its portrayal of the Revolutionary War. Instead of such context, it offers
a story in which the desire for blood vengeance -- for a son shot by a
British officer -- turns Gibson's character into a "patriot." Meanwhile, the
imagery piles up:
In one scene towheaded preteens are armed by their father and turned into the
equivalent of the Werwolf boy-soldiers that the Third Reich was thought to
have recruited from the Hitler Youth to carry out guerrilla attacks against
the invading Allies.
In the film's most exciting sequence, Gibson is provoked by the foreigner
into becoming one of those bloodied, ax-wielding forest supermen so beloved
in Nazi folk-iconography: an 18-century equivalent of the Goth leader
Arminius (aka Hermann the German) who annihilated two Roman Legions in the
Teutoburger Forest.
The black population of South Carolina -- where the film is set -- is
basically depicted as happy loyal slaves, or equally happy (and unlikely)
freedmen.
But the most disturbing thing about "The Patriot" is not just that German
director Roland Emmerich (director of the jingoistic "Independence Day") and
his screenwriter Robert Rodat (who was criticized for excluding British and
other Allied soldiers from his script for "Saving Private Ryan") depict
British troops as committing savage atrocities, but that those atrocities
bear such a close resemblance to war crimes carried out by German troops --
particularly the SS in World War II. It's hard not to wonder if the
filmmakers have some kind of subconscious agenda.
In one scene in "The Patriot," the British regulars murder wounded American
POWs. In another, they order the execution of an American soldier captured in
uniform. Both were common occurrences on the Eastern Front of World War II,
but such war crimes by regular troops "never happened" in the Revolutionary
War, says American Heritage magazine editor Richard Snow. (Of course,
irregular militias, terrorist bands allied to both sides and Indian proxies
did do some very nasty things.) And, sure, spies and traitors, such as Nathan
Hale (American) and Major John Andre (British), were hanged. But regular
troops on both sides observed the law of war that distinctions should be made
between the former categories and uniformed combatants. "['The Patriot'] is
inventing a context of atrocities when what really happened was much more
interesting," he says.
Snow says he understands the outrage in the British press. "I think that
[they] should be upset. I would be pretty sore if I saw a British production
of Shaw's 'Devil's Disciple' and it had Americans bayonetting the wounded
after the Battle of Bennington."
The most outrageous of "The Patriot's" many faults is the way Emmerich and
Rodat show the British troops committing a war crime that closely resembles
one of the most notorious Nazi war crimes of World War II -- the massacre of
642 people (including 205 children) in the French village of Oradour sur
Glane on June 10, 1944. The film mimics the horrible event with clear
accuracy and turns it into just another atrocity committed by redcoats in
1780.
At Oradour, the Waffen SS "Das Reich" division punished local resistance
activity by first shooting all the men and boys. Then they rounded up the
women and children, locked them in the town church and set it afire. (You can
see Oradour today exactly as it was just after the Nazis carried out the
ghastly mass-murder -- the French have left it to remain an empty memorial.)
There was one major case of British regulars burning a town during the
Revolution. It was Groton, Conn., and the troops were under the command of
Benedict Arnold. But the houses they burned were empty. Yet in "The Patriot"
fictional British dragoons do exactly the same as the real life SS did at
Oradour. They lock scores of civilians, most of them women and children, into
a church and set it afire. According to both historian Thomas Fleming and
Snow, no such incident took place during the Revolution. As Snow says, "Of
course it never happened -- if it had do you think Americans would have
forgotten it? It could have kept us out of World War I."
By transposing Oradour to South Carolina, and making 18th century Britons the
first moderns to commit this particular war crime, Emmerich and Rodat --
unwittingly or not -- have done something unpleasantly akin to Holocaust
revisionism. They have made a film that will have the effect of inoculating
audiences against the unique historical horror of Oradour -- and implicitly
rehabilitating the Nazis while making the British seem as evil as history's
worst monsters.
Of course, Emmerich and Rodat would probably counter that they're just trying
to show how nasty war can be. But the fact remains that in the real
Revolutionary War the regular armies of neither side behaved in this way --
even in South Carolina in 1780 -- and only the Brits are shown committing
unprovoked acts of bestial cruelty.
So it's no wonder that the British press sees this film as a kind of blood
libel against the British people. To understand the import, just imagine a
hugely successful foreign film (French, British, Chinese) about the Vietnam
War that depicted Americans using thousands of Vietnamese children for
medical and scientific experiments.
If the Nazis had won the war in Europe, and their propaganda ministry had
decided to make a film about the American Revolution, "The Patriot" is
exactly the movie you could expect to see -- minus the computer-generated
effects, of course. (Doubters should take a look at Goebbels' pre-Pearl
Harbor efforts at inflaming isolationist Anglophobia.)
It's just as well for Sony-Columbia that Emmerich, Rodat and Gibson didn't
make a film that painted the French, the Chinese or even the Arabs into ur-SS
war criminals. If they had there would probably be official government
protests, popular demonstrations and boycotts. But they have still told a big
lie about the war that brought the United States into existence, one that
feeds an even greater lie about the war and the enemy the U.S. and Britain
fought half a century ago. It's a shameful way to make money.
And it's particularly insidious when a film that goes to such lengths to
avoid anachronism in Revolutionary period clothing, weaponry and battle
tactics takes such license with the nature of the war. In the past, Hollywood
has played with historical details in order to make a narrative more
compelling or the look of a film more appealing. But it has been an unwritten
rule of the American film industry that you try to hew vaguely to the
generally accepted account of how things were in the past.
It's hard to define, but there is clearly a point where dramatic and poetic
license shade into something much more sinister. If you made a film in which
the slave trade was shown as two-sided with Africans shown as raiding Europe
for slaves to bring to America, or one in which Jews were shown provoking
pogroms by drinking the blood of gentile children, you would have passed that
point, even if such films were exciting, well acted and starred Gibson.
I don't blame Gibson so much; he's only an actor and it's no surprise when
actors either willfully or ignorantly overlook historical accuracy for a good
role. (Especially when they receive $25 million for their trouble, as Gibson
did for "The Patriot.") But I'd like to introduce Emmerich and Rodat to the
families of those massacred at Oradour.
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