By Emily Rosen
ERosen424@aol.com
www.emilyrosen424.com
I’m a sucker for movies with high emotional tension that dig into the human condition.
(I cry at parades, too.) And freedom lover that am, I’d be happy to see the movie Lincoln as a prerequisite for breathing in the United States.
Oh, how we have been conditioned to hate politics, and all the machinations, corruptions, hypocrisies and hatreds it engenders. But amidst the muck of all those negatives, we often lose sight of the gleaming glories that finally emerge as highminded, moral achievements. It takes years, decades, a century even, to be able to stand back and look at how some of our legislation became landmark triumphs. We owe so much to the diligence of historians who are able to dig through what, to the layman, can be intensely boring archives to come up with the lost lessons of our past. And how we apply any of that to the present is always a conundrum.
The movie progresses from the background of wartime killing fields to the passionate idealism of a president determined to achieve the goal of human equality as he swims with that passion in a sea of politics that make our current impending fiscal cliff look more like a bump in the road. The pandering, finagling, pretending, arm-twisting, pleading and lying to obtain enough votes to pass the constitutional amendment that freed the slaves are a metaphor for the gross messiness of democracy. And in the end, it comes down to that old philosophical cliché “Does the end justify the means?” and its disturbingly ambivalent evasion, “It depends.”
In this case, only the hardened racist is likely to want to undo that amendment, despite the shenanigans that brought it to fruition. “Shenanigans,” I might add, that might have eluded the historically-challenged, who are unfamiliar with that drama. If ever one needs to apply a magnifying glass to the elements of that “compromise,” that it is now. And given the timing of the distribution of this film, viewing our current (and probably eternal) crisis within its context might be helpful for anyone trying to figure out an answer to Washington’s intransigence. Having read of the many ways that legislation has become law in the past, one can envision an antcolony of activity currently going on in Washington – with people of all stripes offering and withholding bags full of goodies to produce an acceptable (compromised?) balance between revenue and expenditures.
David Brooks, (New York Times, Nov. 23) argues that “politics is noble because it involves personal compromise for the public good.” It’s hard to imagine the personal and emotional toll on Lincoln, having chosen between prolonging the final peace, thereby costing many lives, and achieving the end of slavery. In a way, he was blessed by not having lived long enough beyond that victory to suffer perpetual remorse over those lost lives. If one hadn’t been connected to a fallen soldier, he or she would surely argue that the greater good prevailed.
Much as we citizens revere transparency, it is probably for the better that we are not privy to many of the behind-the scenes skullduggery that produce final legislation that basically makes no one totally happy, but everyone somewhat relieved.
And oh, by the way, see the movie for Daniel Day Lewis’ acting tour de force and for seamless directing from that reliable perfectionist, Steven Spielberg.
