By Tony Palumbi

“Can’t change the past? Why, of course you can!”-Jay Gatsby

“What if you woke up and realized you didn’t like what you chose?” – Booker DeWitt

Bioshock Infinite starts and ends with water—the player pushed and held under water in two starkly different baptisms. One is a symbolic birth and the other a fairly literal death, but they bracket this phenomenal game with what I see as its overriding theme: changing the past. Whether we’re talking about fact or fiction, there’s nothing more distinctly American than a troubled relationship with your own history. Infinite is one of the most-discussed titles in years, but I’ve yet to see anyone tackle its approach to hagiography and classic American fiction.

Every culture paves over some terrible events, but the United States occupies a privileged position. We’re the land of second chances, our own immigrant history so close and personal we can’t help but embellish it. Ta-Nehisi Coates (among others) has written great pieces about our relationship to the Civil War: the convenience of believing that there were Black Confederates, or that the Confederacy was defending democratic principles rather than fighting to keep slaves. Believing in America’s fundamental goodness requires that we find a way around the always-messy Present. So we create a golden, perfect Past that’s always just past the western horizon, whether before Lincoln’s tyranny or before a pill divorced pregnancy from sex.

So when Bioshock Infinite’s protagonist is introduced in the year 1912 with a box inscribed “Booker DeWitt, 7th Cavalry, Wounded Knee,” we associate him first with one of America’s great crimes. Within minutes he’s rocketing into the air and being “reborn” in baptism as a condition to enter the sky-city of Columbia. He emerges from the water into a chapel garden built to honor Columbia’s religious idols: Jefferson, Franklin and Washington. Columbia isn’t so much a living city as a museum through which Booker makes his way, taking time out between effervescent gunfights to admire distant statuary through public coin-op binoculars. There’s even a lengthy sequence in a history museum, where Booker is fed “revised” accounts of Wounded Knee along with the Boxer Rebellion.
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I’ve joked at various points this year that 2012 is the year of Walton Goggins, the intense-eyed actor who made a name for himself on corrupt cop drama The Shield, and who’s found an equally juicy role as Kentucky white supremacist Boyd Crowder on FX’s U.S. Marshal show Justified. First, there was his year on that show, where his character found new depths caring for his bitter enemy’s father, and as a political advocate for the residents of Kentucky coal-mining country. Then there was his bravura cameo on Sons of Anarchy as a very funny, sexy transgender prostitute named Venus Van Dam that shook up the conception of what Goggins is capable of. And now he is the common human element of two very disparate movies about the South, racial violence, and the tensions that cracked our country in half, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. It’s not just that Goggins has had what could be a career-making year. He’s done so in roles that could have stereotyped him as a googly-eyed, slack-jawed redneck, but that instead work together to explore a common idea, the lingering ghosts of the Confederacy and the struggles of poorer white men to define their identities, 150 years after the Civil War.

In Primary Colors, Joe Klein’s main character, Henry Burton reflects on the rise of white Southern, Civil Rights-supportive Democratic public officials that “Those pale, bland Southern Democrats seemed a down payment on the family dream. It was a whisper of a revolution: there wasn’t much blood or lust to it, just the promise of Northern money—new factories, new branch offices—in return for the appearance of racial harmony.” Tony Horowitz put a different spin on that phenomenon, twenty years after the seventies, in his reported journey through the South he chronicled in Confederates In The Attic. “First, it was the loss of the War and antebellum wealth,” he wrote of the South’s construction of its identity around loss. “Later, as millions of Southerners migrated to cities, it was the loss of a close-knit agrarian society. Now, with the region’s new prosperity and clout, Southerners wondered if they were losing the dignity and distinctiveness they’d clung to through generations of poverty and isolation.”

Goggins tends to play characters who never had access to that antebellum wealth. On Justified, Boyd Crowder is the descendant of multiple generations of poor white criminals. His own father deals drugs. He worked as a coal miner as a teenager, and found a temporary escape from Harlan County through service in the Army. In Lincoln, he plays Clay Hutchins, a Congressman of modest means and power—when considering bribing him to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment, Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) says of his asking price “A first-term Congressman who couldn’t earn reelection…I deemed it unseemly and bargained him down to Postmaster.” And in Django Unchained, he plays Billy Crash, a minor member of the entourage of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a sadistic plantation owner—his access to plantation prosperity comes from his role relatively low down on that economic ladder, rather than his position as the predator at the top of it.
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The thing that strikes me most about the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is how quiet the President is for much of it. There’s a kindness, almost, to the delivery of the Gettysburg Address, a tentativeness to the question, “Shall we stop this blood?”

In a way, watching this reminded me of Michael Lewis’s profile of President Obama in Vanity Fair, which emphasizes both the essential aloneness of the presidency even as the person who occupies it faces constant emotional demands. Obama told Lewis:

“You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. “You can’t wander around,” he said. “It’s much harder to be surprised. You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you don’t get used to it—at least I don’t.”

In the profile, as in the trailer, the president is surrounded by competing voices, but ultimately required to decide alone. The wars are different. The job—and the federal government—have gotten bigger, in part because of what the war Lincoln oversaw taught the country about what it needed, particularly in a time of conflict. But the essential nature of the role remains very much the same.

John Carter, Disney’s hugely expensive Mars epic and the live-action directing debut from Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, arrives in theaters today burdened with huge expectations. The movie is overstuffed with everything from gothic inheritance tales, to alien corporate raiders, to scientific breakthroughs, to Civil War PTSD. But it says a great deal about John Carter that the movie’s at its best when most of those elements are off-screen, and when our titular hero’s doing an awkward ballet as he learns to walk in Martian gravity, or as he reckons with the dog-like alien who’s decided to adopt him.

While it isn’t a major part of the movie, a clear symptom of John Carter‘s larger problems is the way in handles the trope, of the sympathetic—and innocent—Confederate. Carter was a Confederate in the original source material, and he’s presented here through a common narrative: a man comes home from a war in which he was a disinterested participant to find his home destroyed and his wife and child dead. It’s true that there were non-slave holding whites who fought for the Confederacy (and on the Union side, the response to the law that allowed wealthy men to pay substitutes to fight for them gave rise to the saying “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.”). But there’s something unattractive about a narrative that paints men who fought to uphold slavery and white supremacy, even if they were only doing it for the paycheck, as victims without any sort of engagement of the cause for which they fought.

On Mars, Carter’s decision to become a different man largely consists of deciding it’s all right for him to love Martian princess Dejah Thoris. His championing of the Tharks, the aliens who first find him and adopt him into their tribe, who aren’t exactly an analogue for American slaves (the humans on Mars seem to ignore them or form loose alliances with them, rather than oppressing them) is less a matter of political awakening than the most convenient way for him to stop Dejah’s wedding the evil Sab Than, who has been attacking her city. Early in his acquaintance with them, Sola, a female Thark, takes the brand that ought to have been meant for Carter. Even in space, white men get off easy. It would be nice if someone could acknowledge that the biggest moral reckoning for a man who fought for the Confederacy ought to be making amends for the cause he served rather than moving on after he was widowed. John Carter has a lot of serious themes on the table, but it can’t prioritize between them, and ends up doing well by almost none of them.

It’s too bad that there’s so much human (and Thern) sturm und drang in John Carter, because the Tharks are far and away the most charming part of the movie. As Tars Tarkas, Willem Defoe is a combination of world-weary and very funny. “Your spirit annoys me,” he tells Carter, who refuses to give up when the two are sent into an arena to fight some nasty beasties. When Carter leads the Tharks on a bold invasion of Sab Than’s capitol city, only to find out his forces are besieging Dejah’s home city of Helium, Tars Tarkas smacks him upside the head. Watching the Tharks try new things as necessity forces them forward, whether it’s flying, adopting an irritating Earthman into their ranks, or slowly embracing more sentimental parent-child ties.

It’s too bad that the originality of the Tharks is undercut by the fact that many of the action sequences involving them are pillaged directly from the Star Wars movies. When Carter’s first imprisoned prior to the arena fight, the shots of his prison are cribbed from Luke Skywalker’s imprisonment in Jabba’s palace. Carter’s fight against a nasty pair of white apes is set in a sand-colored arena much like the one in Attack of the Clones, and the mechanics of his win suggest he’s seen Skywalker successfully fight a Rancor. And a series of fights on hovercrafts are borrowed, both in their dynamics and the way they’re shot, from the Endor chases in Return of the Jedi.

And it’s also too bad that, despite the fact that Thark society’s one of the only things in the movie that feels specifically Martian and as such, is much more interesting to watch than the rather pointless bickering between two human societies, director Andrew Stanton spends so much time on his insufficiently developed human characters. He does best with Dejah Thoris, who is promising is promising in concept—she’s introduced to us first as a scientist, second as a princess, and third, as a competent fighter—but less so in execution. She’s saddled with ponderous lines like “If you have the means to save others, would you not take every action possible to make it so?” that sound more like the starting point for philosophical debates and less actual conversation. If her romance with Carter is meant to be a ring-of-fire transplanetary love, there just isn’t enough time for Stanton to plausibly develop it. And the movie brings up and then drops the fact that Dejah’s supposed to be on the breakthrough of a major scientific discovery. Battle sequences, apparently, are more fun than lab work, even lab work that opens up the universe.

Similarly, Stanton utterly wastes Dominc West’s sly, sexy charm on Sab Than, making him a retread of the evil rapist he played in 300. The Therns—ostensibly representations of Mars’ goddess protector, but actually rapacious devastators of worlds—are constantly talking about how stupid and violent Sab Than is. The only moment he gets to be a person with motivations or a brain is when he shows up to woo Dejah, explaining “I feared you’d been tortured by Tharks and condemened to die in their arena. I couldn’t have that on my conscience. I do have one, Princess.” But there’s no room in this movie for a genuine romantic competition between John Carter and Sab Than, or for any really serious—in a fun way—thinking about Mars’ future. We’ve got a dog in this fight—the excellent Woola—but this marvelous monster’s more entertaining than the contest he’s a part of.

Hendrick Hertzberg joins my call for more Revolutionary War movies, saying in particular that we should have a definitive Alexander Hamilton biopic. I agree, though I might recommend an adaptation of David Liss’s The Whiskey Rebels instead of a more straightforward approach. But I also think this points to a larger problem: we need a more creative approach to biopics that’s oriented towards truly great stories instead of just the most famous people who a talented actor would enjoy impersonating. To wit, ten suggestions from American history.

1. Harriet Tubman: The Underground Railroad is one of the coolest things to happen in American history, and it’s only part of what makes Harriet Tubman awesome. Tubman made 13 runs on the Underground Railroad, an act of outrageous courage given the fate that would have awaited her as a conductor were she ever caught. She was the first woman to head up a Union military expedition—which involved guiding ships past a river Confederate forces had mined—during which she helped free more than 700 slaves. And she did all of this despite having seizures and headaches. And it might be fun to see Viola Davis cut loose a little bit post The Help, or to see C.C.H. Pounder deploy her glorious steeliness on an iconic portrayal of Tubman.

2. Ida Tarbell, Ida Wells and Nellie Bly: I’m a sucker for movies about journalists, and these three women are best in class. From Tarbell’s investigation of Standard Oil, which set the standard for document-based investigative journalism going forward; to Wells’ reporting on lynching in America; to Bly’s expose of the state of mental health treatment for the poor, all three were absolutely fearless, telling stories about bureaucracies and norms and prompting reform or efforts at reform. Too often, journalism movies and television shows have to gin up absolutely ridiculous plots to up the stakes—sorry, State of Play, I love you, but it’s true. But sometimes journalists go where the government won’t, even within our own country, at considerable risk to themselves. All three roles would be juicy, but I’d particularly like to see Kerry Washington, so wonderful in The Last King of Scotland, play Wells, who was just a few years younger than Washington is now when she gave her seminal speech on lynching.
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I feel sort of guilty comparing Hell on Wheels, AMC’s new Western about the construction of the Trans-Continental Railroad, to Deadwood, but it’s sort of hard not to do when the show is trying as hard as it possibly can to ape as many Deadwood elements as it can transfer to a railroad camp. As I wrote in my review at the Atlantic:

The minister who’s set himself up in Hell on Wheels is a straightforward prairie minister (though one with a dark secret that ultimately reinforces the show’s sympathy for former slave-owners and advocates of slavery), rather than the tormented Union civil war veteran who ministered to Deadwood in its first season before succumbing to the brain tumor that was robbing him of his faith. And when the Hell on Wheels minister mildly asks “Haven’t we had our fill of war? Our fill of killing?” it’s no match for the anguished cries of Deadwood’s camp doctor raging at God: “What conceivable use was the screaming of those men? Did you need to hear them to know your omnipotence?”

Hell on Wheels doesn’t compete with Deadwood in the arts of cussing or whoring, either. Declaring of the Emancipation Proclamation, as Elam Ferguson does at one point, that “Ain’t nothing good coming from this either…Look what this got. I might as well wipe my ass with it,” or the sight of Doc Durant denouncing his own pitch to investors as “Twaddle and shite,” don’t remotely compare to Swearengen promising a crowd fired up by rumors of a massacre by Native Americans “I will offer a personal $50 bounty for every decapitated head of as many of these godless heathen cocksuckers as anyone can bring in. And God rest the souls of that poor family. And pussy’s half price, next 15 minutes.” Hell on Wheels’ prostitutes are hookers with hearts of gold—and in one case, tattoos from her time in Indian captivity—rather than full-fledged citizens in this rough new society, and their interactions with men are entirely predictable.

The one thing that Hell on Wheels has on Deadwood is the sight of Common in a jaunty hat, though of course that doesn’t make up for the show’s Confederate nostalgia. There’s a really interesting story to be told about the black experience in Westward expansion, or about the railroad and Manifest Destiny from the perspective of the Native Americans who are being displaced by it. But this isn’t it. Also, this is a reminder that I need to finish blogging Deadwood. That starts again tomorrow.

I’m all for big, expansive science fiction movies that put humans on other planets, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff in Meredith Woerner’s piece on Wall-E director Andrew Stanton’s hugely ambitious adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, now titled John Carter. But there’s one question that her set visit doesn’t answer. Is John Carter going to be a former Confederate soldier like he is in Burroughs’ original?

The Disney summary of the plot suggests he’s mustered out of an unnamed military conflict, and I wonder if they just might leave it vague. There’s obviously a strong connection between the Civil War and Westerns — the frontier gives folks a chance to refight lost wars. And while it could be convenient, from a plot perspective, to explain that a human who has ended up on a strange planet would be good at organizing an alien insurgency because he developed his skills in a specific, analogous conflict. But it’s probably better to make it almost any other conflict than the Civil War. The Confederacy doesn’t get retroactive points just because fighting in it helps someone achieve justice for another species down the road.