Stories Hollywood Never Tells
Howard Zinn, Artists in Time of War
When I began reading history and studying history and teaching history and writing history, I kept coming across incidents and events and people that led me to think, "Wow, what a movie this would make." However hateful they may have been sometimes, I have always loved the movies. When I would read about things in history, I would then look to see if a movie had been made about it. But it was never there. It took me a while to realize that Hollywood isn't going to make movies like the one I'd been thinking about. Hollywood isn't going to make movies that have the effect of making people more class conscious, or more antiwar, or more conscious of the need for racial equality or sexual equality. No, they're not going to make movies like this.
I wondered about this. It seemed to me that it wasn't really an accident. You could say it was just an oversight on the part of Hollywood that they have not made a film about the Ludlow massacre in Colorado--just an accident, like the accidents you hear about if you turn on the television, as I turned it on this morning. They were explaining the "accident" that happened when NATO forces bombed a column of refugees from Kosovo. These things are always accidents. Now you might say, "They're not really deliberate. They did not really mean to do this." But they are rarely accidents.
That is, the people in Hollywood didn't all get together in a room and decide, "We're going to do just this kind of film and not the other kind of film." Nobody in NATO headquarters or the U.S. government had to get together and say, "We are going to bomb civilians." They don't have to do that, and yet it's
not and accident. Somebody at one point used an expression to describe events that are not accidents, not planned deliberately, but something in between. He called it "the natural selection of accidents," in which, if there's a certain structure to a situation, then these things will inevitably happen, whether anyone plans them or not. The structure of war is such that innocent people are going to get killed. I heard President Clinton say, "Well we didn't mean this, but civilian casualties are inevitable when you carry on war." He was absolutely right, which then leads you to two conclusions: either you just have to accept civilian casualties, or you have to do away with way. Of course, you know, the second is unthinkable.
It seems that the structure of war is such, and the structure of Hollywood is such, that it will not produce the kinds of films that I imagined when I read and began to write history. There is a structure that you can describe simply as "based on the need to make lots of money"; a structure where money and profit are absolutely the first consideration before art, before aesthetics, before human values. When I was invited to this film festival I thought, "Well, here's my chance. Here are filmmakers. I'll tell them about things I've wanted to see done on film, so they can all immediately go out and do it."
I think about making films that will make war abhorrent to people. When you consider the films about war that have come out of Hollywood--and there have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands, of films about war--they are almost always films that glorify military heroism. There are occasional departures from that, but mostly it's military heroes, military heroism, and the kind of films that will not persuade young audiences that they should not immediately go to war and embrace war. I began to think about telling the story of wars from a different perspective; when you look at war from a different perspective, you come up with all sorts of scenarios.
I'll take one of the best of our wars to begin with: the Revolutionary War. How can you speak against the Revolutionary war, right? To tell the story of the revolution, not from the standpoint of the Founding Fathers, but from the standpoint of war as a complex phenomenon intertwined with moral issues, we must see that Americans were oppressed by the English--and we must also see that some Americans were also oppressed by other Americans. The Revolutionary War was not simple. For instance, American Indians did not rush in exultation to celebrate the victory of the colonists over England, because for them it meant that the line that the British had set against westward expansion int he Proclamation of 1763 would now be obliterated. The colonists would be free to move west into Indian territory. American Indians did not celebrate the American Revolution. Black slaves did not celebrate the American Revolution.
It was estimated that maybe on-third of the colonists supported the American Revolution, one-third were opposed, and one-third were neutral. This is the estimate of John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers and one of the revolutionary leaders. I thought it would be interesting to tell the story of the American Revolution from the standpoint of an ordinary working man who hears the Declaration of Independence read to him from a balcony in Boston, promising freedom and equality and so on, and immediately is told that rich people can get out of service by paying several hundred dollars. This man then joins the army, despite his misgivings, despite his own feelings of being oppressed--not just by the British, but by the leaders of the colonial world in which he is having such a hard time surviving--because he is promised some land. But as the war progresses and he sees mutilations and killings, he becomes increasingly disaffected. There's no place in society where class divisions are more clear cut than in the military, and he sees that the officers of the Revolutionary army are living in high splendor while the ordinary enlisted men don't have any clothes or shoes, aren't being paid, and are being fed slop. So he joins the mutineers.
In the Revolutionary War, there were mutinies against Washington's army: the mutiny of the Pennsylvania Line, the mutiny of the New Jersey Line. I thought it would be interesting to tell the story of a working man who joins the Revolutionary army and fights in battles and is wounded, but who then joins the Pennsylvania Line, and they mutiny. They march on the Continental Congress but finally they are surrounded by Washington's army, and several of their comrades are forced to shoot several of the mutineers. Then this soldier, embittered by what he's seen, gets out of the army and gets some land in western Massachusetts. After the war is over, he becomes part of the rebellion.
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I have never seen Hollywood tell this kind of story. I talked to someone who really knows a lot about film like this to be made, and then somebody will say, "You know, I think that probably at some point I am going to say I'm waiting for a film like this to be made, and then somebody will say, 'Yes, it was made.'" But I don't think that film I just described was made. And if I describe a film that I think should be made, and you know that it has already been made--I wish you'd let me know so we can have a celebration of that rare event.
Wars can be described in such a way that complicate the simple "good versus evil" scenario presented to us in our history books and in our culture. Wars are not simply wars of one people against another; wars always involve class differences within each side, where victory is very often not shared by everybody, but only by a few. The people who fight the wars are not the people that benefit from the wars.
War needs to be presented on film in such a way as to create a new population of people who will simply say "no" to war. We need to see that more and more. We need a film about those heroic Americans who protested against World War I. There are socialists, there were pacifists, there were people who just way the stupidity of the war that was taking the lives of 10 million people in Europe and that now the United States was entering. We look for people who can be really interesting as characters in films. Look at some of the people who, at that important point during World War I, opposed the war. You see Emma Goldman, the feminist and anarchist, who goes to prison for opposing the draft and the war. You see Helen Keller; I haven't seen Helen Keller in any film other than the kind of film that concentrates on the fact that she was a disabled person. I've never seen a film in which Helen Keller is presented as what she was: a radical, a socialist, an antiwar agitator. She was somebody who would refuse to cross a picket line set up against a play that was about her. What a remarkable subject for a film. I think also of Kate Richards O'Hare, the socialist who was put to jail for opposing World War I. There could be a great scene she's in the prison, where they are stifling for lack of air. She takes a book that she's been reading, reaches through the bars, and hurls the book through a skylight above a prison corridor to let the air in. All the prisoners applaud and cheer because finally they're getting some fresh air.
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Of course, good movies and wonderful documentaries have been made. I'm talking about what Hollywood hasn't made. But we've never had so many wonderful documentaries as we've had in the last ten or fifteen years. These are documentaries that have to struggle to raise the money and then struggle, struggle tobe distributed and to be seen by people. There are amazing successes. I think that Michael Moor's film
Roger and Me, which ash been seen by tens of millions of people, is remarkable. So the possibilities do exist to play a kind of guerrilla warfare with the system and make films and show films outside of the Hollywood establishment. Sometimes you might sneak something in there--and so you always try and see if you can make then forget for a moment who they are and what they stand for.
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There's alot of historical work to be done, a lot of films that need to be made. If such films are made and reach the public, about war, class conclict, and who controls what, and about the history of governmental lies, broken treaties, and official violence, if those stories are told, we might really produce a new generation. As a teacher and a writer, that's what I'm interested in. I'm not interested in just producing books, and I'm not interested in just reproducing class after class of people who will get out, become successful, and take their obedient places in the slots that society has prepared for them. What most of us much be involved in--whether we teach or write, make films, write films, direct films, play music, act, whatever se do--has to not only make people feel good and inspired and at one with other people around them, but also has to educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world.
