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Unpatriotic Gibson's patriot is Sonny Corleone, not Sgt. York.

By Michael LindPosted Friday, July 28, 2000, at 3:00 AM ET

OK, here's the pitch: A remake of Gary Cooper's 1941 Sergeant York. In the new version, York's this Tennessee farmer who refuses to fight in World War I because of his religious convictions, see? Then some of the kaiser's commandos on a secret mission in the South molest his nephews and nieces and burn down his church. Now it's personal. Cut to Sgt. York kick-boxing the kaiser and a couple of field marshals …

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Such a Hollywood mutilation of the Sgt. York story couldn't be any sillier than Roland Emmerich's and Mel Gibson's Revolutionary War movie, The Patriot. Let's pass over the historical howlers—black slaves are "employees," only one person in the entire South has a Southern accent, the British burn churches as though they were Nazis burning synagogues—and concentrate on the key point: This movie is deeply subversive of patriotism. Indeed, patriotism is a concept that neither the screenwriter (Robert Rodat, who wrote Saving Private Ryan) nor the director (Emmerich, Godzilla and Independence Day) seems to understand.

Related in Slate

Slate's film critic David Edelstein called The Patriot "a blazing success on its own rancid terms" (and loathed Gladiator). Read Tim Noah's "Chatterbox" series on silent film director Robert Goldstein, jailed in 1917 for depicting the Revolutionary War-era war crimes of our then-allies, the British, against colonial women and children in The Spirit of '76. When The Patriot opened, Couper Samuelson explained that atrocities were committed on both sides of the American Revolution.

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Here is a 1996 Atlantic Monthly piece on Edward Banfield's theory of "amoral familism" as applied to Italy's struggle to create local governments while maintaining a national imagination. Read veteran New York Times columnist Tom Wicker's account of the colonials' "vicious guerrilla tactics" in the months leading up to the Battle of Yorktown (the final scene in The Patriot).

Modeled loosely on American guerrilla leader Francis "Swamp Fox" Marion, Mel Gibson's Benjamin Martin is a South Carolina planter, a widower, and a famous soldier traumatized by his experiences in Vietnam—oops, I mean the French and Indian War. He sits out the American Revolution, until a sadistic Nazi—oops, I mean British commander—kills one of his sons, whereupon he spends the next two days—oops, I mean two hours—avenging himself.

The plot of The Patriot is more or less the same as that of a much better movie, Gladiator. If the story lines of these two films are based on a good sense of the market, then it appears that today's audiences can't imagine any cause that could justify political violence other than injury to a child or wife (your own, not your neighbor's—that's their problem). Even the parochial patriotism of colonial elites is incomprehensible to today's audiences, to judge by their silent reaction when Gibson's Benjamin Martin tells his fellow South Carolina gentlemen that unfortunately his duties as a house-husband prevent him from taking part in the War of Independence (in the showing I attended, only one person laughed).

The message of The Patriot is that country is an abstraction, family is everything. It should have been called The Family Man.

The same message is found in The Godfather movies, and it is no coincidence that the late Edward Banfield, an eminent sociologist, used the Sicily from which the Corleones came to illustrate the primitive ethic of "amoral familism."

A morality in which your duties do not extend beyond your clan is the oldest and most universal human ethic. The rivals of amoral familism have been universal religion and patriotism. Patriotism has come in two kinds: city-state or provincial patriotism, which dates back to antiquity, and national patriotism, a phenomenon of the past two or three hundred years. Until the development of modern systems of communication, transport, and public education, it was never possible to establish patriotism on a scale larger than that of the city-state. When an empire founded by a city-state became a monarchy, as the Roman Empire did, citizenship could be extended, but loyalty seldom was. Emperor-worship and the personal loyalty of soldiers to their commanders held the Roman Empire together, not any sense of imperial patriotism (which, plausibly, is lacking in Gladiator).

The difference between pre-patriotic ethics and patriotism is clear in Greek and Roman epics. In Homer's Iliad, the great warrior Achilles, denied a slave girl as a prize, goes off to sulk in a tent while the rest of the Greeks suffer military disaster at the hands of the Trojans. Virgil's Aeneid evokes the Homeric epics in many ways, but the Trojan warrior Aeneas is a dutiful soldier who sacrifices his love life (with Dido) in order to carry out his historic mission of founding Rome. He is allowed to exact revenge on his enemy—but only after his civic mission has been fulfilled.

For the American Founding Fathers, as for the French revolutionaries, the Roman republic provided better examples of patriotic duty than did the Greek city-states. The patriotic decision of Socrates not to flee Athens but to accept the unjust death penalty imposed on him was unusual; philosophers like Aristotle and politicians like Alcibiades were more likely to move to another city or royal court in Greece or even the Persian Empire, often switching sides several times (Aristotle, fleeing persecution in Athens for the court of Philip of Macedon, where he tutored the not-yet-great Alexander, quipped that he did not want Athens to sin twice against philosophy).

Roman patriotism by contrast was exclusive and severe. The need to sacrifice family loyalty to civic duty, in cases of conflict, is a recurrent theme in Roman literature. One of the founders of the Roman republic, Brutus (not the one who generations later killed Caesar), is said to have ordered the execution of his sons when they plotted against the republic. Another famous story, retold by Livy, described how a consul with the appropriate name of Manlius Torquatus ordered his son Titus Manlius not to attack the enemy. When an enemy soldier dissed him, the young man killed him and returned to camp to brag about his personal victory. In today's Hollywood, the father, played by Mel Gibson, would pat his son on the back: "Like father, like son!" According to Livy, however, Manlius Torquatus said: "Titus Manlius, you have respected neither consular imperium nor your father's maiestas, you have left your position to fight the enemy in defiance of my order, and, as far as was in your power, have subverted [military discipline], on which the fortune of Rome has rested up to this day. … I believe that you yourself, if you have a drop of my blood in you, would agree that the military discipline, which you undermined by your error, must be restored by your punishment." Whereupon the father had the son beheaded in front of the troops.

This kind of rigor was the exception, not the rule. During the millenniums in which the only republics were city-states, civic patriotism was constantly in danger of giving way to family feuds. (Thus the plot of Romeo and Juliet.) Persuading people to think of themselves not as members of the Alcmeonid clan or the Capulets, but as citizens of Athens or Verona was uphill work, but it was nothing compared to the problem of trying to transfer loyalties to immense and diverse nation-states. The American Civil War could be seen as a conflict between the old local patriotism that put South Carolina or Georgia first and a national patriotism that was then relatively new.

Is it obsolete today? If The Patriot really does evoke the Zeitgeist in the United States in A.D. 2000, then American national patriotism is giving way not to a resurgence of Confederate-style local patriotism (something that is unlikely to happen, given the geographic mobility of Americans), but rather to the perennial rival of patriotism at all levels: amoral familism. A few years ago, Edward Luttwak suggested that the wealthy, aging nations of North America and Western Europe are "post-heroic" societies. Because most couples have only one or two children, the loss of any in warfare becomes intolerable, and conscription becomes unthinkable. If Luttwak is right, then child-centered Americans (and Europeans and Japanese) will be forced to rely in the future on allies, mercenaries, and maybe robots to fight on their behalf.

Unless, of course, the enemy should be foolish enough to mess with their kids on their property, as in The Patriot. Then, by God, it's personal.

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Michael Lind is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

COMMENTS

Reader Response from The Fray:

Most people who are not totally ignorant--sadly most of America is--know that all wars, including the revolutionary war for America, are fought for the benefit of competing elites. Today patriotism is used as a shield to hide personal agendas. The wealthy elite like to proselytize patriotism so they can get idiots to go fight wars for them. Those common folk who do get so hysterical over such gimmicks as burning flags are usually veterans who need to justify their stupidity and murderous behavior. You say familial amoralism is primitive. It is no more primitive to love one's nation and murder everyone else than it is to love ones family and murder everyone else. Just because you include more people doesn't make it less evil or amoral.

--"Thomas Paine"

(To reply, click here.)

Actually, the script of The Patriot accurately reflects the modern view of the founders' opinions, as filtered through later attitudes, which both obscure and magnify certain aspects of their world. In particular, the revolt against the king and Parliament has been romanticized as a revolution against central authority in general. The popular belief is that in a spontaneous and amateur way, the colonists fought as individuals united by love of hearth and locality, not by external discipline. Though some political co-ordination was needed, it was provided by ad hoc committees of correpondence, in which ordinary citizens served for a time, taking turns at positions of trust, not forming a permanent class of rulers. The national government set up after the war was meant to be just an extension of this kind of citizen activity, first under the Articles of Confederation, then under a Constitution drawn up by another ad hoc committee of men making a recommendation to the states and then dissolving itself. Thus were born the complementary myths of the amateur soldier and the amateur politician, the Minuteman and the Short-term man.

--Mickey Finn

(To reply, click here.)

After the Nazis, it became impossible for thinking people to remain blindly patriotic to their nations. We realized that to prevent such a tragedy form happening again, we had to outgrow allegiances to race or nationality and concentrate on the important relationships in life--the personal bonds between family, friends and lovers. It isn't right to label a philosophy based on such devotions "amoral" just because it makes war and forced military service a hard sell. I mean, given that war is bad and that forced military service is bad, this seems like a pretty moral philosophy to me. That parents won't tolerate their kids dying in another Viet Nam strikes me as rather healthy.

--Michael Maiello

(To reply, click here.)

Hollywood almost always has propped up narratives about abstract morality onto dramas of interpersonal relationships, ie romance or family. A classic example would be Casablanca, in which the subplot of Rick's aid to the Resistance is inseparable from the romance subplot between Rick, Ilsa and Victor Laszlo. Advancement in one subplot brings about advancement in the other. One could conclude then, that Americans in 1941 didn't really care about any issue of international involvement or the War, but only were concerned with romance and nostalgia. But I think a fairer assessment would be that Americans in 1941 went to the cinema primarily to see personal dramas, and that the serious issues of the film provided primarily the fodder for interesting variations on those narratives.

--PC

(To reply, click here.)

Mr Lind's chief complaint is that Gibson's character places care for family over loyalty to the nation. This criticism is unfair, because the film agrees with Mr Lind. While sympathetically presenting the pacificism of Benjamin Martin (Gibson's pseudo- Francis Marion), the movie made clear that the result of this pacificm was both the ostracism that Martin faced from the rebels and the chasm between himself and his own sons. That Martin later regrets his earlier reluctance, at least in some measure, and accepts as righteous the patriotism of his sons, is made clear in his lines at Tarleton's death.

Moreover, what is wrong with showing the ambiguous problems of patriotism created in a war of rebellion. To whom did Martin owe patriotism? Washington? Green? Carolina? South Carolina? North America? British North America? I think the technical answer would have been King George. It is a complex and miraculous accident that the colonists banded together at all, and that one rebel is portrayed as having reservations before doing so seems pretty fair story-telling to me.

--Steve Sheppard

(To reply, click here.)

America has gone beyond patriotism to a sense that we are the real world and the rest are peripheral. We know more about the royal families of the UK and Monaco than the names of the rulers of India and China. Even in our own country, the sense of communal responsibility and common good is almost non-existant. People argue the value of giving their money to public schools or putting funds into Social Security when they could invest/spend it better. Why support other people? Let everyone fend for themselves.

The need for patriotism is usually a grouping against a common outside threat. At this time, the US really has no impending threat. Politicians struggle to create foes. With no physical threat, people tend to focus on themselves. We look at others as strangers to fear or markets to be exploited. Serious problems are being overlooked--population explosion, pollution, depletion of resources, rising expectations, epidemics. After WWII, the US realized the threat of disease and poverty and invested in the world. It was our greatest moment, and we and the world have reaped immeasurably from it. Today, we ignore the rest of the world. We cannot forever hold the hungry of the world away from our borders. We cannot build high enough walls. So much potential to stave off future catastophes lies in own hands. We need to start now.

--Thomas Miller

(To reply, click here.)

[Notes from the Fray Editor: this article provoked an enormous response in The Fray discussing everything from Hollywood's way with history to whether or not the Clintons, or Republicans, or some other group, are amoral familists. Several readers said that the "patriot" of the film's title was not meant to be the Mel Gibson character, but his son. Edward Furey gives examples of what he calls "patriotism and self-indulgence" from the Second World War. City state patriotism in ancient Greece was the subject of this post by Costas Malamas.

And in the best Fray line of the week, Tim Mann said "Posting guidelines prohibit me from further comment"--now doesn't that beat mindless abuse and offensive language as a way of making your feelings clear?]

(7/31)

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