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Maybe to the top of that hill
I meant to post this earlier today, but somehow an unexpected quantity of my time went toward things like shoveling (and watching the men's figure skating, all right? It's one of the few Olympic sports I follow). It was not quite the snowpocalypse we were promised, but certainly a respectable late-winter storm. Fortunately, I also got around to making ginger cookies from a new recipe: molasses and black pepper.
On Monday, for President's Day, I went with my family to see John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) at the Harvard Film Archive. It's one of the most interesting biopics I have seen in either years or ever—it is a piece of pure mythmaking, but not hagiography. I do not mean that it's revisionist of Lincoln. As played by Henry Fonda (who I never knew could look so gawky and so indissolubly alone), the thirty-four-year-old Lincoln is honest, intellectual, profoundly moral and profoundly troubled by a world in which lynchings are the sport of righteous citizens and the veterans of old wars are merely an excuse to get blotto on moonshine and set some tar barrels afire. He moves within an atmosphere of silence, out of which he gathers simple words and speaks them directly. No extrovert, he looks most comfortable reading in various undignified positions, his long legs angled up a tree or propped out the window of his law office; he has a habit of settling, cranelike, on stairs or doorsills. But he's not a naïf. He's not a holy fool. He's not the second coming of John Brown. He is gangly and (famously by the standards of the 1830's) unhandsome, self-educated, an effortful fingernail up from dirt poor, and never unaware of his status as an outsider; his direct, folksy charm is genuine and it is also a learned behavior. It is very likely that he is frighteningly more intelligent than anyone who shares a floor with him, a fact which opponents overlook at their own risk—and yet they do, consistently, until the last moments of the trial reveal just how many steps ahead of the game this skinny self-deprecating lawyer always is. And he's no good at courtship behaviors. He waltzes like a paralytic yak.1 He gets out of a game of tug-of-war by cheating, unconcernedly wandering off with the leftovers of the pie-judging contest and another book. There is a line about slavery that is jawdropping if you are expecting the Great Emancipator. If the film is a portrait of a great man, it's a splintery one; and I thought it was wonderful.
Its only misstep, for me, came at the very end. I thought it was going to close, after a flash of summer lightning, on the image of the young Lincoln moving off right—into history—as the rain looses in a curtain around him, the eye of the storm that will encompass the Civil War and presently his own shattering death; but instead "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" rose up from the soundtrack and the rainy absence of a living man was replaced by the whited sepulchre of the Lincoln Memorial: the concrete legend, deified by his truth is marching on. And after ninety-eight minutes of a three-dimensional person, whatever resemblance he bore to the actual Abraham Lincoln, I really felt the last two had missed the point. But it was this abiding annoyance with the last scene which enabled me, hours later, to identify the aspect of the movie (aside from the fact that it was excellent: in a different year, Henry Fonda might have taken an Oscar for his performance) that made me respond so instinctively to it. Biographical films fictionalize their subjects all the time. But they usually do so within conventions: a love interest, a hard-knock hero's journey, a glossing of less sympathetic or more contradictory traits, etc. etc. and so forth. Young Mr. Lincoln does none of this. It creates a fictitious event in consonance with the historical character—an untried lawyer's against-the-odds defense of two brothers accused of murdering a deputy sheriff of Springfield, IL; the central legal trick is drawn from a case Lincoln defended in 1858, but the rest is straight out of Lamar Trotti's head—and the result is nothing like Amistad (1997) or Inherit the Wind (1960) so much as it is like The Sword in the Stone (1938). It's an entirely invented prologue to a narrative so well-known, it does not even need to be alluded to.2 And so what I think Ford is doing is actually engaging with Lincoln as an American myth: and as we all know from experience, a myth can be retold. Again, this is not the same as historical revisionism. The film doesn't mine back through deposits of tradition, it doesn't contradict the prevailing image; for all the humanity he and Fonda reflect into their subject, Ford isn't interested in discovering the "real" Lincoln. But that's not a failing, unless you're prepared to say the same against Mary Stewart for her Merlin of The Crystal Cave (1970). I'm not sure how often I've seen this approach to American history; or at least consciously, God knows there are enough myths freighted to this country. But here it works beautifully, and now I'm not surprised that no one has done a movie biography of Lincoln since. It would have to be something entirely different. And it might still be in the shadow of a jack-legged lawyer from Kentucky, walking to the top of that hill, out of this world.
1. He is told afterward by Marjorie Weaver's Mary Todd, "Mr. Lincoln, at least you're a man of honor. You said you wanted to dance with me in the worst way, and I must say that you've kept your word. That's the worst way I've ever seen."
2. Hence the real problem with the closing shot of Lincoln's statue: we don't need it. As our single presentiment of the future, the storm is enough.
On Monday, for President's Day, I went with my family to see John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) at the Harvard Film Archive. It's one of the most interesting biopics I have seen in either years or ever—it is a piece of pure mythmaking, but not hagiography. I do not mean that it's revisionist of Lincoln. As played by Henry Fonda (who I never knew could look so gawky and so indissolubly alone), the thirty-four-year-old Lincoln is honest, intellectual, profoundly moral and profoundly troubled by a world in which lynchings are the sport of righteous citizens and the veterans of old wars are merely an excuse to get blotto on moonshine and set some tar barrels afire. He moves within an atmosphere of silence, out of which he gathers simple words and speaks them directly. No extrovert, he looks most comfortable reading in various undignified positions, his long legs angled up a tree or propped out the window of his law office; he has a habit of settling, cranelike, on stairs or doorsills. But he's not a naïf. He's not a holy fool. He's not the second coming of John Brown. He is gangly and (famously by the standards of the 1830's) unhandsome, self-educated, an effortful fingernail up from dirt poor, and never unaware of his status as an outsider; his direct, folksy charm is genuine and it is also a learned behavior. It is very likely that he is frighteningly more intelligent than anyone who shares a floor with him, a fact which opponents overlook at their own risk—and yet they do, consistently, until the last moments of the trial reveal just how many steps ahead of the game this skinny self-deprecating lawyer always is. And he's no good at courtship behaviors. He waltzes like a paralytic yak.1 He gets out of a game of tug-of-war by cheating, unconcernedly wandering off with the leftovers of the pie-judging contest and another book. There is a line about slavery that is jawdropping if you are expecting the Great Emancipator. If the film is a portrait of a great man, it's a splintery one; and I thought it was wonderful.
Its only misstep, for me, came at the very end. I thought it was going to close, after a flash of summer lightning, on the image of the young Lincoln moving off right—into history—as the rain looses in a curtain around him, the eye of the storm that will encompass the Civil War and presently his own shattering death; but instead "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" rose up from the soundtrack and the rainy absence of a living man was replaced by the whited sepulchre of the Lincoln Memorial: the concrete legend, deified by his truth is marching on. And after ninety-eight minutes of a three-dimensional person, whatever resemblance he bore to the actual Abraham Lincoln, I really felt the last two had missed the point. But it was this abiding annoyance with the last scene which enabled me, hours later, to identify the aspect of the movie (aside from the fact that it was excellent: in a different year, Henry Fonda might have taken an Oscar for his performance) that made me respond so instinctively to it. Biographical films fictionalize their subjects all the time. But they usually do so within conventions: a love interest, a hard-knock hero's journey, a glossing of less sympathetic or more contradictory traits, etc. etc. and so forth. Young Mr. Lincoln does none of this. It creates a fictitious event in consonance with the historical character—an untried lawyer's against-the-odds defense of two brothers accused of murdering a deputy sheriff of Springfield, IL; the central legal trick is drawn from a case Lincoln defended in 1858, but the rest is straight out of Lamar Trotti's head—and the result is nothing like Amistad (1997) or Inherit the Wind (1960) so much as it is like The Sword in the Stone (1938). It's an entirely invented prologue to a narrative so well-known, it does not even need to be alluded to.2 And so what I think Ford is doing is actually engaging with Lincoln as an American myth: and as we all know from experience, a myth can be retold. Again, this is not the same as historical revisionism. The film doesn't mine back through deposits of tradition, it doesn't contradict the prevailing image; for all the humanity he and Fonda reflect into their subject, Ford isn't interested in discovering the "real" Lincoln. But that's not a failing, unless you're prepared to say the same against Mary Stewart for her Merlin of The Crystal Cave (1970). I'm not sure how often I've seen this approach to American history; or at least consciously, God knows there are enough myths freighted to this country. But here it works beautifully, and now I'm not surprised that no one has done a movie biography of Lincoln since. It would have to be something entirely different. And it might still be in the shadow of a jack-legged lawyer from Kentucky, walking to the top of that hill, out of this world.
1. He is told afterward by Marjorie Weaver's Mary Todd, "Mr. Lincoln, at least you're a man of honor. You said you wanted to dance with me in the worst way, and I must say that you've kept your word. That's the worst way I've ever seen."
2. Hence the real problem with the closing shot of Lincoln's statue: we don't need it. As our single presentiment of the future, the storm is enough.
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I have the Criterion edition of Young Mr. Lincoln, but like too much else in my collection, haven't seen it yet; it's queued up with the handful of other Ford films I have, biding. But during 2008 I read portions of three or four Lincoln biographies, and mean to return to and finish all of them. I was most moved and instructed by William Lee Miller's Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography (2002): Lincoln seems to have developed the uncanny gift at an early age to see himself and his fellows with abnormal clarity, to understand where he stood in relation to his own beliefs and perceptions and in relation to those of others and never to confuse the two, to truly keep his own counsel -- and what counsel! And having written the foregoing sentence I can only consider it woefully inadequate to capture the core and nuance of Lincoln's character or of Miller's portrait. But your description of Ford and Fonda's portrayal of Lincoln resonates perfectly with Miller's, or so it seems to me, variably removed, and if they were not seeking to portray the "real" Lincoln it may well be they manged to do so anyway, or nearly enough, at least at the ultimately crucial characterological level. As for the seemingly inappropriate ending, I was struck with the thought that the transition from three-dimensionality to two does accurately mimic the nature of the transition from Lincoln's actuality as a human being, as a soul, to the malleable, changeful, myth-inflated, myth-flattened character we are now forever (mostly but not entirely) left with. I am grateful for recent biographers, who do seem to be doing a fine job of carving away the layers of myth, or errant myth, that mires the man; but of course all those layers only and instantly re-accrue, in the larger public sphere as in most minds. Still the thoughtful can find something a little closer to briefly fill his irremediable absence.
And how did Fonda do with the voice? Did he pitch his higher, center it in his sinuses? Did it crack and squeak?
For me, speaking Lincoln's words aloud, and practicing them (with no attempt at imitating reports of how his voice sounded), was a revelatory experience. In the only video of me on YouTube, I read selections from two of Lincoln's speeches and the entirety of a third. (I have to admit, I've been pretty shy about sharing the link; though I've probably lost twenty pounds since that video was made, I'm still a big man in a culture that's often unkind to big men. Unlike Lincoln, I sometimes confuse my own beliefs and perceptions with those of others.)
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I've never seen this movie, but now that you've mentioned it I suppose it is surprising that there are aren't many film biographies of Lincoln, and I suspect that your hypothesis might well be correct.
I hope you've enjoyed the figure skating, and that you've not had more snow to shovel. (We had none last night nor today-so-far, for which I'm grateful as it allowed me to clear the snow from under and about the one car that lives in the driveway.)
The cookies sound delicious--I often use black pepper in things like pumpkin or sweet potato bread, and there's a recipe for olive oil cookies with black pepper, red wine, and rosemary which I ought to make again sometime soon.
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Our local NPR station did a series of interviews with biographers of Lincoln, and I caught a bit of one yesterday, with a guy who'd written a biography of, precisely, young Lincoln. I wonder if he was inspired by this film. In any case, it was fascinating: he said that Lincoln wrote very carefully and consideredly; he would spend long hours just thinking over things and jotting down notes to himself and then storing (famously) the notes in his hat (and one other place; I forget where). The biographer said that Lincoln didn't keep a diary, but that these notes were rather like a diary. He said you could see his thinking evolve over time. I'll have to go back and see what the book was...
In any case, though, the movie sounds excellent.
And your cookies with pepper sound great!
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