When I discovered that Showtime had scheduled a series devoted to John
Brown, my first reaction was positive. With so much of public opinion
moving against white supremacy, it was about time that the abolitionist
got a favorable fictional treatment, especially since he had been
treated as a destructive fanatic by Hollywood. The 1940 “Santa Fe Trail”
was typical. Inmy 2012 review
<https://louisproyect.org/2012/04/10/santa-fe-trail/>, I noted:
/Blacks are portrayed in the film in the same way as they are
portrayed in “Gone with the Wind”, as bamboozled victims of Northern
do-gooders. John Brown is depicted as a manipulative fanatic who
cares little about their fate, once he has freed them from their
owners. At one point, a male ex-slave tells Stuart that all he wants
is to go back to Texas and live a normal life once again. That, of
course, can only mean a return to slavery./
After watching a trailer for the Showtime series titled “The Good Lord
Bird”, I felt cheated once again. Unlike the 1940 film in which Brown is
depicted as a fanatical terrorist, this time he is much more of a
tragicomic buffoon. Watch the trailer and you’ll see Ethan Hawke chewing
the scenery.
To my dismay, I saw that Jacobin’s film critic Eileen Jones described it
as “good as you hoped”. Despite being a Berkeley professor (or maybe
because of), I find her judgements questionable at best. In this case,
it was wretched. This is how she saw it:
/The series seems to have been designed for me personally, so of
course I love it — from the spaghetti Western–style animated opening
credit sequence to the gospel music-filled score to every last
spittle fleck flying out of John Brown’s mouth as he calls upon the
might of the Lord to help him smite the slavers. But I’m not sure
where that leaves the rest of you./
I don’t know about the rest of you, but it leaves me sick to my stomach.
Totally enraged by the left consensus on this trash, I resolved to read
the novel it was based on and a newish biography by David S. Reynolds
titled “John Brown: Abolitionist”. The novel was written by an
African-American named James McBride that won a National Book Award in
2013. I’ll have much more to say about it later on but suffice it to say
that it depicts Frederick Douglass as a drunken pedophile.
I am now reading Reynolds’s biography and can recommend it highly. He
describes it as a “cultural biography”, which is a term he coined to
describe a methodology in which the subject is placed in a historical
context. To get an idea of the richness of his understanding of John
Brown and his cultural context, let me cite the first few pages of
chapter two, which deals with Brown’s roots in Puritanism.
full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/11/28/john-browns-puritanical-roots/
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