Some stories keep resurfacing, maybe because we want (need?) to hear them again and again. The rugged individualism of the heroic frontier is a foundational American myth, represented by Daniel Boone, the pulp fiction of the 19th century and the Hollywood western. But the stories change to reflect the changing concerns of their audience. For example, in movies, Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and The Revenant (2015) reinvented the “mountain man” from an environmentalist perspective. According to an essay included in Writing History With Lightning, those reinventions still obscured the complexity of reality even as they critiqued aspects of the old American tale.
Writing History With Lightning: Cinematic Representations of Nineteenth-Century America, sets out to show how Hollywood shaped memory of the country’s past. If the American Revolution is the origin story, the 19th century is the blockbuster sequel that engraved a national mythology into imaginations around the world. The book is written by academics but is blissfully free of the migraine-inducing jargon and torture-chamber prose of what passes for film theory. Lightning’s authors are historians interested in communicating with the public, weighing facts against fiction.
The format of a two-hour film necessitates trimming the past to size, editing the complexity in order to tell a story within the time frame. But some Hollywood “history” movies have deliberately ignored reality in favor of preconceptions and falsehoods. “One could be forgiven,” a contributor writes of John Wayne’s Alamo (1960), by thinking the Duke and company “were determined to avoid any factual relation to the actual past.” They even mislocated San Antonio and replaced real battles with fictitious ones. The 2004 Alamo made an effort to get the details down but ended up entirely pleasing no one—neither flag-waving Texans nor seekers of the real events behind the legend.
As illuminating as its title, Writing History With Lightning is edited by Matthew Christopher Hulbert and John C. Inscoe and published by Louisiana State University Press.
