Tag: Declaration of Independence

Madeira Mondays: National Treasure (Film Review)

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‘I’m gonna steal the Declaration of Independence.’ – Nicolas Cage as Benjamin Franklin Gates in National Treasure

National Treasure (2004) is a deeply silly movie.

It’s a movie that I vividly recall watching at the cinema in my hometown of Austin, Texas. I was around thirteen at the time, and, even at that age, I knew it was silly. It’s the story of American history buff/treasure hunter Benjamin Franklin Gates (Nicolas Cage) who figures out that there is an invisible map on the back of the Declaration of Independence and decides to steal it before it falls in the hands of some baddies. What follows is a race against time as the FBI, and the baddies, try to track down Cage before he can decode the map and find the treasure of the Knights Templar (?), which has been hidden by the Freemasons (???). It’s a very Dan Brown-esque story (conspiracy theories, hidden ‘clues’, secret societies etc.).

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So when I decided to rewatch this for ‘Madeira Mondays’ (as part of my 4th of July inspired series of posts), I had one question in mind: Is this a fun enough watch that I would recommend it? Is it ‘good bad’ (i.e. so bad it’s actually funny to watch)? Or is it genuinely ‘good’ (i.e. works on the intended levels, as a satisfying action/adventure story?). Sadly, it falls somewhere in the middle and was, overall, pretty dull and too long. Which is disappointing, considering that it’s a story about a treasure hunt and I like most of the actors in it.

One of the things that keeps it from being ‘good bad’ is that the actors are actually too talented for it to really suck. Nicolas Cage is incredibly deadpan throughout the whole thing, and he has such a bizarre and unique charisma that it kind of works somehow. His love interest, Dr Abigail Chase (Diana Kruger) also works as a somewhat cerebral archivist who is both annoyed and intrigued by Gate’s treasure hunting antics (I also liked the choice to make her a German character – the actress is from Germany. There’s a good line when Gates notices her slight accent and asks: ‘You’re not American?’ And she says: ‘I am an American, I just wasn’t born here.’ Nice). And how could Sean Bean not work as the baddie (I’ve already forgotten his character’s name) obsessed with finding the treasure (guess he gave up trying to get The One Ring. Sorry! I had to make a Lord of the Rings joke!). These people are too talented for the film to really and truly stink.

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Dr. Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), Benjamin Gates (Nicholas Cage) and Justin Bartha (Riley Poole) defacing the Declaration of Independence in order to find a hidden treasure map on the back, Image accessed via IMDB

Also, I enjoyed that even the names in this are silly and on-the-nose. Mr. Gates is a treasure hunter, alongside Dr. Chase.

I also enjoyed the film’s fairly bonkers thesis statement, which is basically that extralegal things are totally okay sometimes, if you do them for the right reasons. Gates draws a hilarious parallel between himself and the men who signed the Declaration of Independence (which he correctly identifies as ‘high treason’ at the time), by saying that both he and they are doing something that is against the law, but they are doing it for the right reasons. The movie isn’t self-important enough to take this thesis very seriously, or to really interrogate this concept of when it is ‘okay’ to break the law, if you believe the laws are unjust. That’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to see Sean Bean blowing up a 300 year old pirate ship (which is something that happens in this movie).

I’m not even going to touch on the ‘historical accuracy’ of this movie, because the movie clearly doesn’t care about that. But I don’t think you’ll come away with it having learned anything ‘accurate’ about early America (except maybe that the founders, by signing the Declaration, were doing something illegal at the time and would very much have been executed if they had lost the rebellion, as Gates points out).

So, sadly, I’d say don’t bother with National Treasure. Unless you are a particular fan of Dan Brown type stuff, or you love Indianan Jones and you want a somewhat crappier version of that. But, all in all, if you want a ridiculous movie about early America, I’d actually direct you to Beyond the Mask (which I reviewed earlier this year), which is an independent ‘Christian’ movie about an outlaw during the Revolutionary War (think: budget Zorro) and is much sillier, stranger, and ultimately a funnier watch than National Treasure.

PS Today’s Featured Image is ‘A British Man of War before the Rock of Gibraltar’ by Thomas Whitcombe, created in the late 18th/early 19th century, accessed via Wikimedia

‘Madeira Mondays’ is a series of blog posts exploring Early American history and historical fiction. I’m not a historian, but an author and poet who is endlessly fascinated by this time period. I am also currently writing/researching a novel set during the American Revolution and recently finished a Doctorate of Fine Art looking at how creative writers access America’s eighteenth-century past. 

Follow the blog for a new post every Monday and thanks for reading!

 

 

Madeira Mondays: An analysis of Tracy K. Smith’s ‘Declaration’

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To mark the 4th of July, I’ll be spending the next couple of ‘Madeira Mondays’ looking at various artistic responses to the Declaration of Independence. Some incredibly powerful and serious artworks, some quite lighthearted and silly.

For international readers, the 4th of July is an annual American holiday celebrated to mark the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was a document signed by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776, in which the 13 American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. “(T)hese United Colonies are, and of right ought to be Free and Independent States,” the document reads. It also explains why they are declaring their independence, listing out the colonists’ grievances with King George III (they list his ‘abuses and usurpations’ in a basically bullet point list format: ‘He has done THIS wrong and also THIS and, oh wait, THIS too!’). This document was mailed to the King who was, understandably, not happy about it and the Revolutionary War kicked off in earnest (there had already been some smaller battles). If the Americans had lost the war for independence, those that signed the Declaration would certainly have been executed for treason. But, as you know, history went another way!

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The famous painting ‘Declaration of Independence’ (1819) by John Trumbull, accessed via Wikipedia

It’s a beautifully written document (you can read a transcription of it here) and is widely viewed as a sort of mission statement for American democracy. Its author, Thomas Jefferson, wrote some famous and enduring phrases in it such as:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It’s a powerful declaration of not just American rights but also human rights. Yet, whose rights were we talking about here? The 18th century was a time when women had few rights. They were basically, legally, their husband’s property (they obviously couldn’t do things like vote but they also had no control over their finances, their bodies, their children etc.). It was also a time when Africans – women, men and children – were forcibly being kidnapped and sold into bondage to labor on the American continent. I’m talking of course about American slavery, the institution with effects and impact that we can see throughout American history (from the American Civil War, through to segregation and Jim Crow) and are still seeing today (through mass incarceration and urgent calls for criminal justice system reform).

But slavery was an issue on the American founders’ minds too and contrary to popular belief, many of them did know that it was wrong. Thomas Jefferson, writer of the Declaration, called slavery a ‘moral depravity’ and a ‘hideous blot’, while also benefiting from the institution and enslaving more than 600 people over the course of his life. Others, like my personal favorite of America’s founders (for various reasons) John Adams from Massachusetts, was vehemently anti-slavery and never kept any enslaved servants on principal. Yet it would take a civil war the following century, as well as the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, to officially end it.

Slavery was (and is) part of the American story and it remains a great irony that the men who wrote so eloquently about liberty and freedom in the Declaration were, themselves, keeping other people enslaved. It’s this topic which is taken up in former U.S Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith‘s poem ‘Declaration’.

You can read and listen to the poem here.

‘Declaration’ is an erasure poem. An erasure poem takes a preexisting text and makes a poem by erasing or removing words from it. In this case, Smith takes the Declaration of Independence as her starting point and erases words until a new poem is left. As you read her poem, you can quite clearly see what it is evoking: slavery.

There are several reasons why ‘Declaration’ works so well. Firstly, the form itself. Erasure poetry is by its nature a bit radical and iconoclastic because you’re hacking away at an existing document and making something new. It’s rebellious, just like the Declaration itself. Yet it’s also about erasing things, removing them from sight, which is exactly what the founders did with slavery, which is never mentioned in the Declaration. Jefferson had written a passage about it, basically blaming the institution on the King, but it was struck out, Jefferson claimed, at the insistence of other southern colonies. So it isn’t there. Smith’s poem inverts this original erasure, turning Jefferson’s words against themselves so that the poem now focuses on slavery and the original intent of the document (about the white male colonists’ grievances with the King) has been erased.

The poem also changes the meaning of the pronoun ‘he’. In the original document, this ‘he’ referred to King George III (e.g ‘He has obstructed the Administration of Justice…’). But now this ‘he’ is more nebulous and tough to pin down: he could now be white slavers, but also America, generally, or the institution of slavery personified.

Another reason it’s so powerful is the use of frequent ’em’ dashes (those are the longer dashes), which is the only punctuation that Smith seems to have added (although you could think about all the white space as a kind of punctuation). The em dashes seem to indicate where the phrase continues in the original document but words have been removed e.g. ‘He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.’ from the original becomes ‘he has plundered our-/ravaged our-/destroyed the lives of our-‘ in Smith’s poem. In addition to reminding us that this is an erasure poem and words have been removed, all those dashes, also suggest, to me, that in some ways these crimes remain unspeakable. The phrase: ‘Taken away our’, followed by an em dash, is an example of this. Taken away our…what? Our lives? Our spirits? Our humanity? The reader is forced to fill in that awful blank.

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Photo I took in December 2017 at Magnolia Plantation, South Carolina, of a slave cabin on the site

The poem ends on one of these dashes and it’s quite significant, I think, that the final two words are: ‘to bear’. This suggests to me several meanings. Firstly, enslaved people forced to bear (or carry or pick up) tools, but also to bear children, perhaps (sexual violence against enslaved women was pervasive). Yet it also suggests that people are still ‘bear(ing)’ the legacy of slavery now. The poem isn’t finished (there is no end stop), which suggests that the effects of slavery aren’t finished either. It is something that we as a nation must ‘bear’ too.

Smith’s poem cleverly subverts a document which, by its very nature, erased the lives of many. Her words, instead, foreground and express their suffering, while at the time time suggesting that this suffering is inexpressible. It’s a powerful poem and one that reminds me how poetry can change the way that we look at our history and our world.

Let me know what you thought of the poem. Had you read it before? What did you notice about it? Next week, we’re looking a very different artistic response to the Declaration of Independence. Hint: It’s a movie. Any guesses?

Recommended Further Reading:

PS Today’s Featured Image is of an 1823 facsimile of the Declaration, and accessed via Wikipedia

‘Madeira Mondays’ is a series of blog posts exploring Early American history and historical fiction. I’m not a historian, but an author and poet who is endlessly fascinated by this time period. I am also currently writing/researching a novel set during the American Revolution and recently finished a Doctorate of Fine Art looking at how creative writers access America’s eighteenth-century past. 

Follow the blog for a new post every Monday and thanks for reading!

 

Madeira Mondays: The John Adams Miniseries (Part II)

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Last week, I delved into my reasons (#1-3) why you should watch HBO’s John Adams. I touched on the acting, the cinematography and why I liked the somewhat gruesome depictions of small pox.

This week I’ve listed reasons #4-6 of why I think it’s worth a watch. I’ll talk about how they use primary sources and why now would be the perfect time to pour yourself a pint of cider (John Adams’ favorite), or a glass of Madeira, and watch this show.

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John (Paul Giamatti) and Abigail Adams (Laura Linney)

#4 The show incorporates historical documents in interesting ways

A lot of lines from John and Abigail’s letters to one another are woven into the show. As a side note: these letters are well worth a read and, in my opinion, a lot more vivid, engaging and romantic than some fiction that I have read, simply because John and Abigail were both such excellent writers living through such interesting and turbulent times! It’s a shame for them that they had to spend so much time apart, but it’s a good thing for us because we have all these letters! And quotes from their letters are woven into the dialogue in this show in fairly naturalistic ways.

One of my favorite quotes that they use comes from an exasperated letter John sent to Abigail from Philadelphia on October 9, 1774. He bemoans the slow moving Continental Congress, which he thinks is all talk and no action. He writes:

‘I believe if it was moved and seconded that We should come to a Resolution that Three and two make five We should be entertained with Logick and Rhetorick Law, History, Politicks and Mathematicks, concerning the subject for two whole Days, and then We should pass the Resolution in the Affirmative.’

It’s a funny quote (Adams was funny) and I’m glad they figured out a fun way to incorporate it into the show about his life. In John Adams, the character of John says something very similar when he is lamenting Congress’ inaction at a dinner one evening. I was delighted to see that they’d managed to weave in lots of other lines as well from their letters. It gives you a clearer sense of their real personalities, their sense of humor, and the way people spoke back then.

#5 It showcases a different kind of leading man

I enjoy the fact that neither Adams (nor Paul Giamatti) is classically attractive or charming in an obvious way. Giamatti’s Adams is short, grumpy, belligerent, vain, but also principled, decent, honest and loving. Most big budget film and television shows, not just about the Revolution but more generally, feature much more conventionally attractive leads, both in temperament and in appearance, and I personally enjoyed seeing this harsh, grumpy little man as our main character. There’s something that feels fresh about it.

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John Adams being grumpy as he defends the British soldiers accused of itentionally murdering civilians during the Boston Massacre. Adams really did this in life. He believed everyone should get a fair trial and successfully got them acquitted. When reflecting on his life, he considered it ‘one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.’

And this series is about Abigail almost as much as John, which is also really cool to see and their relationship (in real life and in this series) is/was incredibly loving and supportive and dynamic and endlessly interesting to learn about.

Also we see that while John was away practicing politics, Abigail was living out the consequences of those political decisions, as she tries to keep her family safe and alive throughout the war – fighting off diseases, dealing with food shortages. The real Abigail was deeply invested and informed about politics, but she often had to focus on her family. She wrote to John on Sep 8, 1775:

‘As to politicks I know nothing about them. The distresses of my own family are so great that I have not thought about them.’

#6 It conveys the chaos and uncertainty of this time period

One of the things that truly makes me giggle when I hear people talking about the founders in glowing and overly idealized ways is that these dudes were questioning themselves at every turn and were making it all up as they went along. Declaring Independence (and the war that followed) was chaotic, fraught, messy and the outcome was uncertain. The real Adams was full of self-doubt. He wrote in his diary in 1774, as war loomed:

‘We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in genius, education, in travel, fortune – in everything. I feel unutterable anxiety.’

‘Unutterable anxiety’! That quote gives me a lot of hope when I think about the turbulent political times we’re in now (as I write this, we’re in the middle of an impeachment inquiry of President Trump). There has always been animosity and upheaval in American politics and these fellows, the founders, were just doing the best that they could. We never have individuals ‘fit for the times’. We just have people who do the best they can. But America’s founders were full of questions, worries and self-doubt – as smart people usually are. I love how the show captures this and even includes Adams saying a very similar line to the one I quoted above, about not feeling adequate enough for what this historical moment requires.

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Adams and some of his fellow Continental Congress members walking down the street in Philadelphia

And it’s probably worth mentioning here that one of the reasons I think this time period is so fascinating to learn about is that these are the men who wrote the U.S constitution, who created the political system that Americans are still living under right now. In this way, their lives touch our own every day.

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Like I said above, I could go on about the series and Adams himself, but I think I’ll leave it there for now! I hope that you will consider giving the series a try if you’re looking for a unique and well-acted piece of historical fiction, or a sort of companion piece to Hamilton.

Have you see the John Adams miniseries? Or do you have another favorite film or TV show about this period or about the American Revolution?

If you want to hear more about any of this and happen to live in Dublin, do come along to my talk at Trinity College in November. It’s an academic conference, but geared towards the public and all the presentations will be very accessible. My presentation is titled: ‘Obnoxious and Disliked’: John Adams’ Legacy in Popular Media, from 1776 to Hamilton.

Til then I remain your humble and obedient servant,

C. Brown

‘Madeira Mondays’ is a series of blog posts exploring Early American history and historical fiction. I’m not a historian, but an author and poet who is endlessly fascinated by this time period. I am also currently writing/researching a novel set during the American Revolution and recently finished a Doctorate of Fine Art looking at how creative writers access America’s eighteenth-century past. Follow the blog for a new post each week and any questions or suggestions feel free to get in touch.