After the Debate: Fact-Checking Hollywood Propaganda

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Armond White:

When film critic Hillary Clinton, in the October 9 debate, raved about having seen “the wonderful Steven Spielberg movie called ‘Lincoln,’” saying it was “a master class watching president Lincoln get the congress to approve the 13th amendment,” she confirmed a suspicion I’ve long had. Spielberg’s film always struck me as less than “wonderful.” Rather, it was a murky, visually dark glorification of political chicanery, deviously designed to be a celebration of Barack Obama as a political and cultural icon who is already placed on a pedestal (with just as much alacrity as he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize) alongside Abraham Lincoln.

For National Review Online readers, here’s how I sussed out the first move by Spielberg (a big Hillary Clinton donor and fundraiser) into political propaganda (originally published inCity Arts, November 16, 2012).

*****

“You begin your second term with semi-divine status,” the 16th president of the United States is told in Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln. The evidence of that status is in the film’s mythifying visual style that presents Abraham Lincoln as an icon — silhouetted, spectral, sculptural. The people around him, such as white and negro Union soldiers relating their Civil War experiences of the 1865 Jenkins Ferry massacre during the film’s introduction, are also made into myth. (These weary men have already committed the Gettysburg Address to memory — a presentiment of the schoolboy’s homework in Minority Report.) Spielberg’s intention to line up with “the right side of history” turns the film into cult-of-personality deification. It’s on the side of power — which makes it one of the weirdest pieces of supposedly democratic Americana ever to come out of Hollywood.

The story in Lincoln dramatizes the president’s efforts to install a 13th Amendment to the Constitution that would abolish slavery. His struggle is more than politically correct; it is presumed inarguably correct, which takes the movie outside of history, outside of dramatic immediacy. Watching Lincoln is very much like observing a flesh-and-blood diorama. Everything is soon to be settled (within two and a half hours); there’s no emotional suspense.

The trick Spielberg needed to pull off was to make the characters’ moral choices dramatically compelling, analyzing ethics in politics (those pragmatic procedures that deemed the Emancipation Proclamation “a military exigent”). Yet that’s where the film becomes dodgy — open to accusations of merely being a civics lesson, or worse: Spielberg’s equivalent to Richard Attenborough’s still-born hagiography Gandhi, rather than a companion piece to his thrilling, brilliantly analytical masterpiece Amistad.

In Amistad, Spielberg cannily transformed the issue of slavery into the intricacy of law; human endeavor and spiritual struggle were historically modified into argument and principle. TheAmistad characters Cinque the African (Djimon Hounsou) and John Adams the political forebear (Anthony Hopkins) grappled with the fact of slavery. This time, slavery is anthropomorphized. The introduction’s two docile and truculent black soldiers patronizingly prophesy modern attitudes; Lincoln himself (played by Daniel Day-Lewis) describes slavery as a “disease” that distances it into abstraction. Lincoln attempts to dramatize mere rhetoric. Despite high-flown language, it turns the experience of human lives into platitudes, homilies, and predetermined theorems.

For a lesser filmmaker, the prevarications in Lincoln would be disastrous. But Spielberg’s innate filmmaking resources consistently provide rhythmed imagery that is by turns conventional (as when Lincoln’s aides race to get his disingenuous communiqué) and daring (as when Lincoln dreams of his forthcoming struggle as an eerie ship voyage). The film is always something to look at. Congressional arguments are composed to show the vitality of faces and individuals — the elite body politic — like period versions of Francesco Rosi’s courtroom scenes inHands Across the City and Salvatore Giuliano yet without Rosi’s worry about literal political corruption. Spielberg’s vibrant style just barely offsets the mundanity of parliamentary debate. The fact that Lincoln’s drama comes from predictable dialectic, rather than an in-the-moment philosophical conundrum such as Amistad, reveals its insufficiency. Lincoln tilts toward magniloquence, using important-sounding words and an exaggeratedly solemn and dignified style.

Spielberg shrewdly chose the histrionic Day-Lewis to impersonate Lincoln, with twinkling eyes and a wily, high-pitched voice that humanize the icon. Day-Lewis’s long face is given built-in hollows and shadows that match the Lincoln Memorial and postage-stamp figures while also suggesting mysterious depths. His every close-up suggests historical reverence. But this immortality contrasts with the fascinating, mortal portrayals by Sally Fields as Mary Todd Lincoln, Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, and James Spader as W. N. Bilbo — all three of whom act through their flesh, courtesy of Janusz Kaminski’s portraitist lighting that suggests the grain of historical painting animated by fluid camerawork. At one point (“It’s too hard”), Fields’s transition from agony to aggrieved diplomacy is as much the director’s triumph as the actress’s. Spader’s grungy agitator feels lived-in, while Jones enlivens the cliché of a congressional hack — his toupéed role reaches back to a key idiosyncratic characterization in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.

With Lincoln, Spielberg assumes his place in the descent of American cinematic mythmakers, following Griffith and John Ford, a fact already evident — and earned — in Amistad. Here it’s done self-consciously. Not because it’s impossible to portray Abraham Lincoln any way other than worshipfully but because Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner (adapting a book by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin) manipulate Lincoln into becoming a contemporary political paradigm.

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Hollywoods fast becoming a leftists propeagda style bunch just like Joseph Gobbels did fir the nazis I never ever borthred to se the movie ET

what did you expect from a fat, narcissistic, gay hypocrite. Joseph Gobbels was a propaganda genius. “There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the **er, and this will always be “the man in the street.” Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.”
Joseph Goebbels

Enjoy the genius of great propaganda presented by Joseph Gebbels:

A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth
If you tell the same lie enough times, people will believe it; and the bigger the lie, the better

The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over

Not every item of news should be published. Rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.

If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth

The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous

The truth is the greatest enemy of the State

Every age that has historical status is governed by aristocracies. Aristocracy with the meaning – the best are ruling. Peoples do never govern themselves. That lunacy was concocted by liberalism. Behind its people’s sovereignty the slyest cheaters are hiding, who don’t want to be recognized