American History Goes to the Movies: Hollywood and the American Experience

305 Pages·2010·1.24 MB·English

by  W. Bryan Rommel Ruiz

AMERICAN HISTORY
GOES TO THE MOVIES
Whether they prefer blockbusters, historical dramas, or documentaries, people
learn much of what they know about history from the movies. In American History
Goes to the Movies,W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz shows how popular representations
of historic events shape the way audiences understand the history of the United
States, including American representations of race and gender and stories of
immigration, especially the familiar narrative of the American Dream.
Using films from many different genres, American History Goes to the Movies
draws together movies that depict the Civil War, the Wild West, the assassination
of JFK, and the events of 9/11, from The Birth of a Nation andGone with the Wind
toThe Exorcist andUnited 93,to show how viewers use movies to make sense of
the past, addressing not only how we render history for popular enjoyment, but
also how Hollywood’s renderings of America influence the way Americans see
themselves and how they make sense of the world.
W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz is Associate Professor of History at the Colorado
College in Colorado Springs.

AMERICAN HISTORY
GOES TO THE MOVIES
Hollywood and the
American Experience
W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz
First published 2011
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX144RN
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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011.
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© 2011 Taylor & Francis
The right of W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Rommel-Ruiz, W. Bryan.
American history goes to the movies : Hollywood and the
American experience / W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz.
p. cm.
1. United States–In motion pictures. 2. National characteristics,
American–In motion pictures. 3. Motion pictures–United States–
History. 4. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)–History. I. Title.
PN1995.9.U64R66 2011
791.43'65873–dc22
2010028995
ISBN 0-203-83373-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 13: 978–0–415–80219–2 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–415–80220–8 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–203–83373–5 (ebk)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Exorcising the Demons Within:Gender,Race,and the
Problem of Evil in American History and Cinema 10
2 Redeeming the South,Redeeming the Nation:
Representations of Abraham Lincoln,the Civil War,
and Reconstruction in American Film,Television,and
Historical Scholarship 47
3 Envisioning and Re-visioning America:Hollywood
Westerns and Engaging the American Past 79
4 Historicizing Triumphs and Tragedies in the American
West:The Hollywood Western as Cultural Text in
Recent American History 105
5 Immigration,the American Dream,and the Problem of
the Irish American Experience 131
6 The European American and Mexican American
Immigration Experience:The Problem of Narrative in
American Social History 154
vi Contents
7 Beyond Dallas:History,Narrative,and the Struggle for
Meaning in the Kennedy Assassination 191
8 “We Are Alive in Hell”:Finding Historical Meaning and
Significance in 9/11 226
Notes 264
Index 290
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Iwas born in Hollywood, California, and raised in the shadow of the film industry.
As a child, I attended movie openings and screenings, watching countless hours of
film. My father worked as a cameraman at KWHY-TV, where I would spend
many weekends observing the technical side of television. Later, I fell in love with
the discipline of history as an undergraduate at the University of California,
Berkeley, so in many ways it was only a matter of time that I would write a book
about film and history. Still, there are many organizations and people whom I wish
to thank for helping me write this book. First, I wish to thank the Robert J.
Cosgrove Endowment, the Social Science Executive Committee, and Dean Susan
Ashley and Associate Dean Victor Nelson Cisneros of Colorado College for
providing funds that enabled me to purchase computer equipment, software, and
films for my research. My colleagues at Colorado College’s History Department
have been immensely supportive. In particular, I want to thank Dennis Showalter
for our conversations about Westerns, especially John Ford’s The Searchers. I am
grateful to Anne Hyde for last-minute bibliographic references on Native
American history and to David Torres-Rouff for our conversations about Western
films and Jeffersonian ideology. I want to extend special thanks to my colleague
John Williams. John and I taught a seminar entitled “Religion, Witchcraft, and
the Occult,” where he indulged my last-minute impulse to show The Exorcist, a
decision that not only provided an engaging class discussion but also encouraged
me to write the chapter on evil and the history of American religion. I am indebted
to the students in that class for provoking many ideas that I have incorporated in
Chapter 1, and to John for reading a draft of this chapter.
Portions of Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 were presented at Film and History League
conferences and the Southwest American Popular Culture conference. I appreciate
the comments and criticisms of commentators and fellow panelists, which helped
viii Acknowledgements
me refine ideas in these chapters. While I have been able to write American History
Goes to the Movies during the last couple of years, I began my research many
years ago when I first taught my “American History, American Cinema” course
at Colorado College. In many respects, this book could not have been written
without the engaging intellectual exchanges from my students in these classes.
Although there are too many students to acknowledge, I hope that any student
who took those courses knows how much I appreciate our invaluable class
discussions. It is to the students of Colorado College that I ultimately dedicate this
book. I especially want to thank David Shively, whose senior research paper about
the Kennedy assassination and Oliver Stone’s JFK I supervised. Many of our
conversations found their way into the JFK chapter in this book.
I am indebted to my wife Terri Lynn for her emotional support throughout
the writing process. Finally, I want to thank my children, Emma and Javier. One
of the fun things about writing this book has been sharing my ideas with my
children, who have shown a real interest in this work. My 13-year-old daughter
Emma and I spent hours watching Civil War films, and it has been rewarding to
see her become interested in American history and watch films critically. Likewise,
my 10-year-old son Javier learned to see that a movie like Batman Beginsis more
than a superhero film. He may still question the way I see connections between
the movie and September 11th, but that he can challenge his academic father and
critique the film himself rather than simply accept my conclusions makes all the
time I put into this project well worth it. While these have been fascinating
teaching moments with my children, it has been more gratifying as a parent to
watch their intellectual interests grow.
INTRODUCTION
At the end of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York,Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo
DiCaprio) stands in a cemetery across Manhattan Island with Jenny Everdeane
(Cameron Diaz), reflecting upon the violent devastation New York City just
endured following the notorious draft riots of 1863. Amsterdam has come to bury
his father Priest Vallon’s razor, a memento symbolizing the tribal wars between
American nativists and ethnic immigrants in nineteenth-century New York
history. Scorsese’s film began with Priest (Liam Neeson) using this razor to mark
his face as he prepared to battle his rival Bill “The Butcher” Cutting (Daniel
Day-Lewis), a street war intended to determine whether the nativists or immigrants
would control the Five Points district of Lower Manhattan. Later in the movie,
Amsterdam would similarly use his father’s razor to again fight Bill, who now
wielded enormous power in the city upon defeating Priest Vallon, having earned
areputation for unleashing violence upon the ethnic communities in Five Points
and notoriety among the city’s political leaders. During those epic days in 1863,
Amsterdam avenged his father’s death by killing Bill during another street battle,
and his headstone now lies next to Priest Vallon’s. As he buries his father’s razor,
Amsterdam also buries a volatile period in the city’s history, one defined by men
like Priest Vallon and Bill Cutting, who together represented a generation of
Americans torn by nativist and ethnic prejudices in the years before the American
Civil War. Recalling his father’s words as he observes a smoldering Manhattan,
Amsterdam ponders upon the ways New York City was transformed that day in
1863, a city now “born of blood and tribulation just as we are born into this
world.”1 Yet Amsterdam regretfully notes in the film’s final scenes how future
generations will forget about men such as Bill and his father, as well as this
contested period in mid-nineteenth-century American history when the young
republic stood at a cultural crossroads. Even though such pivotal moments