With The Patriot, director Roland Emmerich took a break from his usual directing fare (lackluster special-effects-laden action films, such as Independence Day and Godzilla), to try his hand at a new genre: the historical epic. In the resulting film, released in 2000, the underdog human race must band together to save the world from invasion – by the British [1]. The Patriot portrays the Revolutionary War not as a political rebellion, in which people of common origins chose sides, but as a war for survival. Emmerich’s version of history bypasses historical fact in order to force history into the mold of consumable entertainment, turning the war into a good versus evil conflict, thrust upon unwilling victims (the colonists) by the cruelty and aggression of “invaders” (native British).
The Patriot begins with historical omission, simplifying the conflict between British homeland and North American colonies by sidestepping the political issues over which the war began. The protagonist, Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson), dismisses taxation issues in one sentence at a town meeting early in the film; after that, legal and political grievances with Britain disappear from the narrative. The rebel characters say they fight for freedom, for revenge, for God, for family – but none of them mentions violations of natural rights, taxation, historical events such as the Boston Massacre, the exhortations of historical figures such as Thomas Paine, or any other non-abstract reasons for taking up arms. In the film, the rebels fight for Good; fighting for a cause driven by the historical context of the war would muddy the black-and-white lines with which The Patriot streamlines itself as an easily-consumed action movie.
The film goes further in its attempt to do away with ambiguities and buy the audience’s easy sympathy for “their” American side: it whitewashes slavery in colonial history. The opening scenes of The Patriot show very happy-looking black men and women working on Benjamin Martin’s farm; the film neglects the question of slavery (are these people slaves, as a viewer with some historical knowledge would likely assume them to be?) for long minutes, finally revealing that these workers are “free men” only when the British arrive and attempt to usher them into conscription. Guilt of slavery falls thus not on Benjamin Martin, the South Carolina farmer, but on the British. The film also never shows a scene of confirmed slaves working or any suggestions of abuse of slaves. The token slave soldier character enters the army of his own free will (he signs the enlistment document voluntarily); gains his freedom, the audience is told, while fighting; and continues to fight of his own free will. His master, shown once, does not show up to protest the loss of his slave to freedom, nor does the film consider what will happen to the ex-slave after the war – will a slaveholding society recognize his freedom? What will his quality of life be? Similarly, Benjamin Martin hides his refugee family from the British in a small village of black men, women, and children; but the film chooses not to explain who these people are and why they accept the white soldiers so easily. Are these people runaway slaves? Are they a community of slaves serving a slaveholder nearby? In the first case, they would be fugitives from white male landowners; in the other, they would be owned by them – yet no tension rises up between the soldiers and the villagers. For all intents and purposes, all the slaves appear to have been freed in The Patriot’s colonies; audiences can cheer for the rebels without worrying about what it means for slaveholders to fight for freedom.
These two omissions – that of politics and that of slavery – illustrate the view of American history which Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot seeks to seduce viewers into sharing: One in which blameless “Americans,” free of selfish motive or moral flaw, defended themselves against the “foreign” British. In such a world, the Revolutionary War becomes inevitable; and an audience may indulge in the violence and nationalism of the film without being held back by complicated questions of hypocrisy or relativity. The British can then be shot down by the underdogs, just as are the aliens in Emmerich’s Independence Day, without any justification offered.
[1] “Roland Emmerich.” The Internet Movie Database. 2007. Amazon.com. 22 Sept. 2007 http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000386/.
[2] The Patriot. Dir. Roland Emmerich. Perf. Mel Gibson, Heath Ledger, Joely Richardson, Jason Isaacs, and Chris Cooper. DVD. Columbia, 2000.
