Issue 1: Truth v. Fiction

By Prof. Edward J. Gallagher's Reel American History class, August 2012

The charge: the film has many conscious distortions and fabrications, among them the threatened castration and the central role of the FBI. "Parker is a dangerous man," says Richard Cohen, "he doesn't care about the truth."

Parker: "It is a fiction. It's a movie. There have been a lot of documentaries on the subject. They run on PBS and nobody watches them. I have to reach a big audience, so hopefully the film is accessible to reach millions of people in 50 different countries. It's a fiction in the same way Platoon and Apocalypse Now are fictions of the Vietnam War. But the important thing is the heart of the truth, the spirit. I keep coming back to truth, but I defend the right to change it in order to reach an audience who knows nothing about the realities and certainly don't watch PBS documentaries. The proof will be how it reaches an audience."

Responses: Patrick O’Brien (1), Jaeyong Shim and Ed Gallagher, Edward Tabor (1), Harrison Lawrence, Patrick O’Brien (2), Edward Tabor (2)

Patrick O’Brien (1): Most, if not all, historians would agree that it is acceptable, perhaps even necessary, to alter history in a film, if it is not a gross distortion with significant implications for collective memory. Gerolmo and Parker claim that their movie is heavily fictionalized but gets the “spirit” of Mississippi in 1964 correct. On one level they are correct. The film does an excellent job of portraying the atmosphere of racial oppression wrought by many white supremacists. But the film is off the mark on so many other important levels that have implications for the collective memories of those moviegoers whom Parker claims do not know much about the period. To fail to include any agency on the part of the local black population, and to fail to include any presence of the Summer Freedom Project -- the very existence of which caused the murders -- while severely distorting the role of the FBI, is inexcusable. They are “lies,” for they get the spirit entirely wrong, and do not provide anything but a distorted collective memory.

Edward Tabor (1): No matter how much license the artist claims, he cannot escape the demands that history and society make upon his craft. Parker’s fictionalization -- whether he was cognizant of it -- rewrites a historical moment from a white male authoritarian perspective. The film amounts to what Ferdinand de Saussure would term a “dangerous supplement” to history. Parker defends his approach by relying on the belief that the mass of society will be better able to understand fiction than history, yet his fictional account of the historical is a diametric alteration that privileges his white male view of history and nearly ignores all others. Parker states that he “keep[s] coming back to the truth,” but his film only offers glimpses of the historical in scenes that appear as if they are in quotations or parentheses. These scenes distance the meaning of the actual history. Take, for example, the early scene in the film when Parker recreates the murder of the three activists. These young men, although quoted from the actual event, are nameless victims of white violence. The viewer isn’t given any motivation, back story, or event that leads up to this decisive moment. By making history the footnote to his film about the FBI, Parker is reversing the story of the Freedom Summer and the civil rights movement.

Jaeyong Shim and Ed Gallagher: Poet and novelist James Dickey once declared: “Art is a lie that makes us see the truth.” Parker lies when he shows the FBI using extra-legal violence to solve the murder case. What truth does that lie make us see? It is hard to see any. That lie, in fact, as Coretta Scott King exclaims, mocks the truth of the past: “Legitimating that idea traduces the principles for which so many sacrificed so much to advance civil rights." And that lie is downright dangerous in the future dimension as well, for as King also says, “it's disturbing to think that people will leave the theater believing that lawlessness is just if it serves a good cause.” That Parker will forge such a destructive lie for the purpose of reaching the large popular audience that doesn’t watch PBS is also extremely problematic. Is it manifestly better that such an audience be profoundly ill-informed rather than profoundly ignorant? I don’t think so. And in this fallen world it is plain contrary to good common sense to hope that such an audience will be so moved by the film to further educate themselves about the civil rights era and learn the truth. The lie will root and multiply. And to paraphrase the climactic “truth” of the film that Chris Gerolmo had in mind when he wrote the script: “When the lie becomes fact, print and keep on printing the lie.” This is indeed a dangerous film.

Harrison Lawrence: Richard Cohen’s term “dangerous” is the best word for this situation, for look at what Parker describes as his target audience: “I don't want to preach to the converted. I want to reach a large audience that's young and ignorant of that period. . . . I'm trying to reach an entire generation who knows nothing of that historical event. . . . And that's enough of a reason, a justification, for the fictionalizing.” What Parker fails to realize (or does and simply doesn’t care about) is that the combination of powerful film + young, impressionable blank-slate minds = a basically clueless generation. Reaching an audience is one thing, teaching them another. Parker reaches not teaches. If Parker’s real intent was to inform, he cheated all of those who paid to see his movie. Parker did anything he could to grab the attention of an uneducated audience, but his flash lacked substance. When it comes to the young and ignorant, the boundaries of artistic license are narrow. In the world of artistic boundaries, Alan Parker is an outlier.

Patrick O’Brien (2): And most, if not all, historians would agree that it is acceptable, perhaps even necessary, to alter history in a film if it provides the viewer with a greater truth. It’s revealing that Gerolmo was more upset about Parker altering the threatened castration scene than his own misleading omission of any significant black presence in the film. The castration scene was an effective and purposeful “lie” added by Parker. It was a rather large fabrication (there were no black agents in the FBI in 1964) to reveal a greater truth, namely, to expose the greatest “nightmare of a white Mississippi racist,” thereby reversing the power relationship, and allowing the black gaze, for one scene at least, to squeak in. On the other hand, Gerolmo’s “lie” -- his complete omission of any black agency -- did just the opposite. It served no greater purpose for the film or the filmmaker and did not reveal a greater truth. The same could be said for the fictionalized story that agent Anderson tells to explain his father’s racism. While the story is completely fictional, it exposes the audience to the intimacy of class and race and adds wonderful and historically accurate complexity to what the moviegoer may have otherwise dismissed as incomprehensible.

Edward Tabor (2): Parker’s claim to artistic license reminds me of D.W. Griffith’s defense of Birth of A Nation, in which Griffith ranked his own interpretation of history with Shakespeare and the Bible. The problem with such a claim is that no matter how much we want to view the film as fiction, it still has a connection to a powerful moment in history. "Mississippi 1964" the film boldly announces. Parker and Gerolmo may be just telling a compelling story, but they haven’t created the story in a vacuum. They are very careful to link it with the historical moment, thus committing themselves to rewriting history. Richard Corliss defends the film by calling it “a fable about 1964.” Corliss expresses exactly what Parker and Gerolmo are trying to say: a pure fable doesn’t have the same responsibility toward history and reality to which a regular piece of fiction (or film) must adhere. Yet instead of a fable they have made a film that gives an oversimplified and allegorical retelling of the events of Freedom Summer. The problem with this argument is simply that the film is not a pure fable or pure fiction because it contains history and it manipulates history to the filmmaker’s end.