Well, yesterday I published a blog entry on controversy swirling around a movie that I did not see. So, it seems fitting to follow that up with another blog entry on a controversy over another movie that I have yet to see.
This time, the movie is Selma.
The controversy is over the interpretation of Lyndon B. Johnson, and his alleged reluctance (according to the movie, anyway) to the protests led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and even of being skeptical and dragging his feet in regards to the entire civil rights movement in general. This portrayal, some say, is greatly exaggerated, historically inaccurate, and unfair. Here is what Joseph Califano of the Washington Post says:
The makers of the new movie “Selma” apparently just couldn’t resist taking dramatic, trumped-up license with a true story that didn’t need any embellishment to work as a big-screen historical drama. As a result, the film falsely portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson as being at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and even using the FBI to discredit him, as only reluctantly behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and as opposed to the Selma march itself.
This is a running theme with the movie, according to Califano, and the historical inaccuracy makes the movie now worth seeing:
Contrary to the portrait painted by “Selma,” Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. were partners in this effort. Johnson was enthusiastic about voting rights and the president urged King to find a place like Selma and lead a major demonstration...The movie should be ruled out this Christmas and during the ensuing awards season.
Wow! So, he is dismissing the entire movie out of hand for the historical inaccuracies that he sees in it.
He is far from alone in criticizing the movie, and it's apparently unfair portrayal of President Johnson's role in the civil rights movement. There have been numerous criticisms of the movie, and specifically, much of this criticism focuses on how Johnson is shown in it.
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times also seems less than impressed by Ava DuVernay's version of President Lyndon Johnson in the movie.
DuVernay sets the tone for her portrayal of Lyndon Johnson as patronizing and skittish on civil rights in the first scene between the president and Dr. King. L.B.J. stands above a seated M.L.K., pats him on the shoulder, and tells him “this voting thing is just going to have to wait” while he works on “the eradication of poverty.”
This scene of a patronizing Johnson essentially dismissing King will now be seen by many young people as historically true, and that, Dowd says, is the tragedy of the movie - a movie that she otherwise really enjoyed and felt delved into a very important topic.
Many of the teenagers by me bristled at the power dynamic between the men. It was clear that a generation of young moviegoers would now see L.B.J.’s role in civil rights through DuVernay’s lens.
And that’s a shame. I loved the movie and find the Oscar snub of its dazzling actors repugnant. But the director’s talent makes her distortion of L.B.J. more egregious. Artful falsehood is more dangerous than artless falsehood, because fewer people see through it.
Okay, so we once again get the sense that DuVernay essentially missed a golden opportunity at perhaps a defining film regarding the civil rights era by creating a fictional Lyndon B. Johnson that takes an almost villainous role regarding greater fairness and equality in American history.
Yet, the best way to truly determine ho fair or unfair Johnson was portrayed would be to get the assessment from someone who knew Johnson, and worked with him. Unfortunately, since these events transpired half a century ago, most of Johnson's aides and such have passed away since. Yet, there are people who knew President Johnson, and even worked with him, who are still alive from that era. One of them is the very respected and distinguished journalist Bill Moyers, who reviewed the film and wrote his own piece on it, and particularly how the movie portrays Johnson. Here is what he said about it:
As for how the film portrays Lyndon B. Johnson: There’s one egregious and outrageous portrayal that is the worst kind of creative license because it suggests the very opposite of the truth, in this case, that the president was behind J. Edgar Hoover’s sending the “sex tape” to Coretta King. Some of our most scrupulous historians have denounced that one. And even if you want to think of Lyndon B. Johnson as vile enough to want to do that, he was way too smart to hand Hoover the means of blackmailing him.
Then, casting the president as opposed to the Selma march, which the film does, is an exaggeration and misleading. He was concerned that coming less than a year after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there was little political will in Congress to deal with voting rights. As he said to Martin Luther King Jr., “You’re an activist; I’m a politician,” and politicians read the tide of events better than most of us read the hands on our watch. The president knew he needed public sentiment to gather momentum before he could introduce and quickly pass a voting rights bill. So he asked King to give him more time to bring Southern “moderates” and the rest of the country over to the cause, but once King made the case that blacks had waited too long for too little, Johnson told him: “Then go out there and make it possible for me to do the right thing.”
Moyers goes further. He talks about President Johnson's own speech echoing the Civil Rights mantra of We Shall Overcome? Moyers felt that the film was very inaccurate on that score. He should know. He was there. Here is what Moyers said about the interpretation of the speech shown in Selma:
Here the film is very disappointing. The director has a limpid president speaking in the Senate chamber to a normal number of senators as if it were a “ho hum” event. In fact, he made that speech where State of the Union addresses are delivered – in a packed House of Representatives. I was standing very near him, off to his right, and he was more emotionally and bodily into that speech than I had seen him in months. The nation was electrified. Watching on television, Martin Luther King Jr. wept. This is the moment when the film blows the possibility for true drama — of history happening right before our eyes.
So, given the inaccuracies in the film as seen by Moyers, is he dismissive of it?
Actually, no. He recommends that you go see it anyway. Here is what he says, specifically:
So it’s a powerful but flawed film. Go see it, though – it’s good to be reminded of a time when courage on the street is met by a moral response from power.
Having known Johnson personally, then, how did Moyers see him?
Moyers felt that Johnson's enormous ego got in his way entirely too much, yet there was a certain element of the man that prevented him from ever being comfortable with himself in the process. He was very adept at taking well-placed shots at political opponents, yet he got in his own way surprisingly frequently.
As for his legacy, and what he did for the country? I have heard some people suggest that, if not for the Vietnam War, Johnson's "Great Society" programs, which included major civil rights legislation, as well as the war on poverty and the beginnings of what seem, in retrospect, to be a focus on environmental policies, he likely would be considered one of the truly great presidents in history. However, Vietnam is not something easily overlooked when examining that era, and Johnson's constant and relentless emphasis on increasing the war effort there is a major stain on an otherwise highly successful presidency.
Here is what Moyers says:
He could absolutely do the right thing at the right time — the reassuring grace, if you will, when he was thrust into the White House after Kennedy’s assassination; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But when he did the wrong thing — escalating the Vietnam war — the damage was irreparable.
To the extent that I understand the history of the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, and that whole very divisive era, I think this quote by Moyers sums up President Johnson as perfectly as any that I have heard before.
Johnson deserves to be criticized for certain things, and most especially for his role in the Vietnam War.
However, it should be remembered that he also did some great things for the country domestically, and that was particularly true of making things more fair and equitable in general. That was the basis of his whole "Great Society" platform to begin with, and there were successes that should be seen as undeniable. It is unfortunate, then, that Selma seems to go to such extraordinary lengths to change the interpretation of history and portray Johnson as a bad guy through and through. The film has been seen as powerful and moving, yet it's albatross will likely then be that it cannot be relied upon as a truly balanced picture about the movement, because it demonstrably strays so far from what actually happened. DuVerney had a rare chance to make a movie that could have truly captured much of the spirit and history of a very important and moving chapter in American history. Yet in the end, according to quite a few experts in the field, she missed the boat because of her own personal prejudices getting in the way of an objective, fair, and unbiased look at these very important events by relying on historical accuracy. DuVerney simply took too many liberties in altering history and, perhaps tragically, she seems to have altered history by relying on stereotypes based on race, which is exactly the opposite of the vision that Martin Luther King, Jr. had for a better country. There is then an element in the film that, if anything, sadly detracts rather than adds to a better understanding of the reality of what happened during this crucial era in our nation's history.
In the end, DuVerney herself detracts from her own credibility. She understandably did not want to make a patronizing movie with a white person stepping into the heroic role and saving the day, as some other films have done. In her article, Dowd quotes DuVernay as saying “I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie.”
Yet, that really does not give her the right to change history, and to completely flip the role that the prominent white guy in the movie gets. DuVernay jumps out of the frying pan and into the fire by turning away from certain divisive racial stereotypes only to then buttress other divisive racial stereotypes. She could have made a brilliant and historically accurate movie but, in the end, got in her own way.
Dowd, who otherwise loved the film, makes a brilliant argument for why this took away so much from an otherwise exceptional film:
There was no need for DuVernay to diminish L.B.J., given that the Civil Rights Movement would not have advanced without him. Vietnam is enough of a pox on his legacy.
Indeed, Johnson's limitations as president are enough as they stand, without adding an entirely fictitious and inaccurate version of who the man was, and what his presidency was all about. In an era when there was no shortage of fundamental unfairness, hatred, and racial prejudice in the United States, turning Johnson into a very stereotypical racist serves as an injustice to the reality of history. Whether DuVernay likes that reality in history is immaterial.
DuVernay had plenty of vile white villains — including one who kicks a minister to death in the street — and they were no doubt shocking to the D.C. school kids. There was no need to create a faux one.
Indeed, there was no shortage of white people of that time to portray in a villainous manner, in order to stress that privileged whites were the ones oppressing blacks. By turning one of the few true powerful white allies of the civil rights movement, DuVernay flips everything around and effectively relies on a dumbed down and falsified version of history into an overly simplified view where oppressed blacks were all good and whites were all bad and trying to keep blacks down. Obviously, this would be a polarizing stance to take and, very importantly, an inaccurate one. There were plenty of white that not only sympathized with the civil rights movement, but were activists for the cause, and even endangered themselves to advance civil rights. After signing the Civil Rights Act, Johnson admitted that this action would cause the Democratic Party that he belonged to for a very long time to come. Still, he went ahead with it, because he felt it was the right thing to do. That was how it shook out in reality and, if anything, Johnson underestimated the long-term political impact of his actions, since the Democrats still cannot consistently win in the new "Solid South" that turned Republican after Johnson. But you would never know that from DuVernay's version of history, where slimy and untrustworthy WASP President Johnson actively patronizes blacks and serves as an obstacle to equality and civil rights.
Yet, DuVernay hardly apologizes for this, however. Again, a quote used by Down in her article (see link below):
“This is art; this is a movie; this is a film,” DuVernay said. “I’m not a historian. I’m not a documentarian.”
True. Still, in making the movie, she undeniably had to act as a historian to get some of the facts right. In fact, some would argue that she has a responsibility to do so. Too bad that, in the process, she did not stay more true to the spirit of what actually happened in history, and instead relied on what amounts to a false interpretation of history that will forever detract from the credibility of an otherwise moving and true portrayal of history.
In so doing, she relied on a more polarizing vision of history as her interpretation of Martin Luther King's legacy of trying to unite all Americans regardless of race, which makes at least that aspect of the film more a part of the problem, than of the solution.
Here are the links to the two articles that I specifically used and quoted from for this blog entry, as well as another link to an article that has a relatively glowing review of Selma:
The movie ‘Selma’ has a glaring flaw By Joseph A. Califano Jr. December 26, 2014
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-movie-selma-has-a-glaring-historical-inaccuracy/2014/12/26/70ad3ea2-8aa4-11e4-a085-34e9b9f09a58_story.html
Bill Moyers on LBJ and ‘Selma’ January 15, 2015 by BillMoyers.com Staff:
http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/15/bill-moyers-selma-lbj/
Not Just a Movie by Maureen Dowd, January 17, 2015:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/opinion/sunday/not-just-a-movie.html?_r=0
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