The biggest problem with Selma, as I argued in “Somnolent Selma,” is that it is a mediocre film. No one should let their esteem for the civil-rights movement, nor their best wishes for a film with a largely black cast and directed by a black woman, keep them from admitting this.
But there is also the problem that it is historically inaccurate, not on minor points, but on two very big ones, namely, 1) President’s Johnson’s role overall, and 2) whether he authorized the FBI’s most infamous operation against King, the sending of the “suicide package” which contained a tape recording of various extramarital sexual encounters of his.
For a quick review of these inaccuracy charges, this Richard Cohen piece will suffice. The best response to the charges I’ve read is this Amy Davis piece — while Davis introduces her analysis with the largely unilluminating angle of “Selma is being attacked because it ignores the white desire for sympathetic white characters in films dealing with racial injustice to blacks,” what she in the main provides is the best overview of the debate.
My essay here will begin by considering the problem of historical inaccuracy in cinema generally, and will then look at the two main charges. But I need to first make a correction to my initial post. Thanks especially to Sam Tanenhaus’s “Selma v. Selma,” it has become clear that director Ava DuVernay rewrote much of Paul Webb’s original screenplay, and in ways which indicate he is rather less guilty of a) its overall artistic failing, and of b) its inaccurate and defamatory presentation of Johnson, than she is. I had blamed Webb and her equally. Still, even though in what follows I always speak of DuVernay’s responsibility, one should keep in mind that Webb, and whoever helped her with the rewriting, probably bear some of the blame. And note that Webb exercised his technically legal option to get sole screenplay credit. Maybe there’s more to that story, but if he wanted to hog all the official credit for a final screenplay he thought would be praised, I’d say some justice is served by his getting part of the blame now that people are realizing it has serious problems.
In our era films that touch upon history often get subjected to barrages of questionable inaccuracy charges. In some cases, desires to attack a film’s main message without openly doing so lurk behind such charges. Flagg Taylor and I encountered this when we did our work on The Lives of Others, a fictional drama about Stasi oppression in East Germany. A number of persons made far too big a deal of alleged inaccuracies, particularly concerning the script having a Stasi officer secretly defend dissident artists. “There is no evidence of any such officer doing such!” they carped. Some did this out of commendable hatred of the Stasi, but some did it out of an evil desire to discredit the first major film drama that forced Germans to grapple with the legacy of their “second totalitarian state.” Our book shows that the director and writer, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, took great pains to be historically accurate, and that the objection against Captain Wiesler’s betrayal of the Stasi makes a basic mistake about the proper role of historical fiction.
I also encountered a festival of nit-picking when I dug into 12 Years a Slave. You not only had some academics lending their voices to pieces which criticized minor inaccuracies and which on those grounds declared that a “controversy” surrounded the film, but others penning ones which in a foolish post-modern vein questioned the accuracy of all slave narratives! Yes, the writers (screenwriter John Ridley, and to some disputed extent director Steve McQueen) made significant alterations to Solomon Northup’s slave narrative. In my judgment, their alterations made the story more cinematic and symbolically rich. Except that the not-even-nominated Mud was the film that truly deserved the prize, I had no objection to 12 Years being chosen for best picture of 2013, nor to Ridley winning his own Oscar.
I praised the writers for certain additions in particular, and offered the objections I felt Solomon Northup himself would make, and would not make, to the ten or so major cuts, additions, or changes. The most significant one is that Ridley and McQueen made Northup’s first master a much more ambiguous character, directly against the grain of Northup praising him for being “the most candid, noble, and Christian man” he ever knew. I pointed out the moral cost of making this change, but also the sort of defense Ridley and McQueen could offer for making it — namely, that the real topic at hand was not Northup’s particular story, but the nature of slavery itself, upon which grounds they might rightfully change a real-life character to make him more symbolically representative of the institution.
Now Selma has been subjected to some inaccuracy charges of a niggling and overdone character. I read a piece where the way in which SCLC leaders talk about SNCC activists was criticized as unlikely! (I listened for, but can’t say I heard this allegedly dismissive tone.) And as I said in my previous piece, no matter how you framed the Selma story, you were going to leave out aspects and characters deemed vital by some historian or participant.
But that, and the pattern in our day of overdone or misapplied sensitivity about historical accuracy in cinema should not deflect us from the seriousness of the Selma inaccuracies we are concerned with. Historically set dramas that intend to make political points, like The Lives of Others, are after all still fiction. Nonfictional accounts about minor figures in history, such as 12 Years a Slave, have a higher burden to meet for accuracy, but arguably can be altered for either dramatic or thematic purposes.
Selma, however, is neither portraying a fictional story nor a minor non-fictional one. In portraying King and Johnson, and their stances on civil-rights protests and legislative action, it is dealing with major figures and the basic record of our nation’s political history. The burden for accuracy here is pretty high. DuVernay was obliged to show that President Johnson worked more or less in tandem with King’s protests to advance the cause of voting rights. She instead, by magnifying certain aspects of Johnson’s unpredictability, distraction, and partial/temporary opposition to the SCLC’s timeline, supplied a fable of his basically opposing King’s agenda, and of only acting due to the movement’s forcing the issue. Worse, and here with no excuse whatsoever, she set things up so that it looks like Johnson had the FBI send the “suicide package,” out of his own frustration with King.
/quality/85/?url=/cmsmedia/f3/6de37375b7e0ecb4b035ebbb95027b/6871FE_DA_080917influential.jpg” />
The first of these two sins does not exactly leap out in the film. If you hadn’t read about it first and didn’t know the historical specifics, it might slip past you. Of course, the subtlety of the misrepresentation arguably makes it even worse.
One of the more rousing denunciations of this has come from a former aide to President Johnson, Joseph Califano. True, as Davis points out, he unfortunately goes so far as to suggest that Johnson is the one who recommended the Selma protest strategy. In my judgment the overall truth about Johnson’s stance is somewhere in between what Califano and Cohen say on one hand, against what Davis says on the other, albeit closer to the former side. If you compare their accounts, pay particular attention to Cohen’s report of Andrew Young’s characterization of the meetings. Tanenhaus’s comparisons of the two screenplays is also telling.
What those roused to defend Johnson have been saying, in essence, is that this film has the potential to set into our understanding of 1960s civil-rights history a false notion of his resistance to the movement. Moreover, the omission of the way he helped push forward the voting rights law could be seen as an omission of the help provided by white liberal politicians to the civil-rights movement generally. In the justification touted by DuVernay herself, and some of her defenders like Brittney Cooper, the film was deliberately made with a desire to buck a common Hollywood pattern of inserting “white rescuers” into civil-rights-oriented dramas. This is part of larger desire many have for films, especially if made by a black director like DuVernay, to provide stories seen through a “black lens,” or at least ones not so shaped by a “white gaze.” I don’t think anyone should object to that desire per se, but the charge is that it was not tempered here by the need for accuracy; thus, it wound up defaming Johnson, and in a broader sense, defaming liberalism generally. The worry, a legitimate one, is that DuVernay proceeded as if the authentically black story could only be told if the truth about the white president’s involvement was distorted, or at least, treated carelessly.
I don’t think the distortion of Johnson’s involvement was DuVernay’s goal, but something she fell into, as I’ll try to explain below. Also, I should say here that I cannot entirely join those conservatives, such as Mary Grabar, who are presenting this as a case where the racial-grievance politics liberals have irresponsibly fostered and employed turns to attack them, such that they display a sanctimonious hypocrisy in objecting to the attack. Unlike Grabar, I applaud the instinct white liberals Richard Cohen and Maureen Dowd are displaying here to defend one of their own.
Oh, and my fellow conservatives, I don’t want to hear the usual stuff about how racist the Democratic Party was due to its dominance by the Southern wing up through the early Sixties. Look, I know that shameful history well, and believe me, in a fantasy where I was sent back in time and turned into a black person living in the key 1930s-through-early-1960s period when black political affiliation was up for grabs, my voice would have been among those railing against the idea of switching over to the Democrats. But face it: The arguments for switching won the day, and lots of blacks who accepted them assumed that the strategy would involve putting up with short-term victories for the segregationist bloc, in exchange for gradually strengthening Northern liberal Democrats who really were for civil rights, and amenable New Deal Southerners like Johnson, particularly in the context of ever-increasing power given the federal government. So the phenomenon of powerful white Southerner politicians, such as Johnson, who seemed on the fence on civil rights and very good-old-boy culturally in the ’40s and ’50s, but who rose to the occasion at the key moment, was not so surprising to black Democrats, and not so revealing of black/liberal hypocrisy as conservative (and some leftist) denouncers of Johnson on racial matters try to make it in retrospect.
More generally, while I’m sure I would dislike Johnson personally the more I learned about him, something about the tendency among sophisticates of all shades of opinion and color to disrespect him politically rubs me the wrong way. Yes, he blew it on Vietnam. Yes, conservatives like me read books, say, these by Mark Levin and Tamar Jacoby, that show that most Great Society programs turned out pretty badly, some of them directly contributing to further poverty and racial polarization.
But towards those liberals who won’t defend LBJ in general against Oliver Stone-like or DuVernay-esque defamation, I cannot but feel disdain. He was your guy! He delivered the programs you defend! He loved FDR to his very core. Indeed, his life represents an effort by an American common man, the sort that (society-bred) FDR was all about helping, to raise himself up to become a second FDR! He was liberalism’s very baby, if admittedly not the prettiest of its offspring.
My favorite Democrat thinker ever, Wilson Carey McWilliams, defended LBJ’s basic honor on the Vietnam question in this volume, and maybe my second-favorite American thinker who consistently voted D, the writer Ralph Ellison, had this to say in 1968: “When all the returns are in, perhaps President Johnson will have to settle for being recognized as the greatest American President for the poor and for the Negroes, but that, as I see it, is a very great honor indeed.”
Well again, conservatives like me, aware of the bad policy outcomes, will have to reduce that “being for” to a matter of good intentions. But no-one aware of the disabused view Ellison had of American politics, and particularly regarding the Southern Democrat segregationist bloc–see the first part of Three Days before the Shooting especially – , can dismiss the weight of that statement.
It is obviously bitterly regrettable that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were even necessary, and that it took long as it did in our history for such to become law. With less craven leaders, such fundamental needs could have been settled in the 1940s or ’50s, or even put well on the road to resolution in the 1870s–80s. But you know, they could also have taken even longer. The fact is, Johnson was the man who delivered, legislatively speaking. And the fact is, it was Johnson who got the following classic progressive notion into a landmark American speech: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
Ellison honored such facts. And he knew that at the end of the day, there is no disentangling of black stories from the American one.
Now I think I know why DuVernay got herself into this mess. If history shows that Johnson would have pushed for the Voting Rights legislation, and within 1965, then anyone who knows this might wonder whether the Selma protests were necessary at all. Such a person would thus become a poor audience member for a film celebrating said protests. Back in 1965, if one was concerned that white racist violence likely to be provoked by a march through Alabama would in turn encourage violent reprisals from blacks, and thereby spiral things into outright race-war rioting, then one might oppose the idea of doing such a march. After all, Sheriff Clarke and like-minded local office-holders were likely to be voted out in the next election given the imminence of the Voting Rights legislation.
Since DuVernay wanted to maintain the dominant assumption that the Selma protests were unambiguously righteous and entirely necessary, I’m guessing she felt she had to prevent such questions from occurring to the viewer. The problem for her was that Johnson had to be in the film in a big way, as Webb’s original screenplay reflected, and not out any cloying need for “white rescuers,” but because by the time of Selma SCLC strategy had become more focused on national opinion and federal action. Her solution? Cut scenes with Johnson, and falsely magnify the ambiguous or resistant notes in his approach. Dramatically cast him as a half-villain, as the typical white establishment leader who doesn’t get black concerns. Play up the absolute necessity of the protests, and the centrality of black-directed political action.
Now a strong case for doing the Selma protests was still available: 1) the locals had called for King’s involvement, and their going through with the protests would be a necessary psychological capstone to their very personal struggle against local white power, 2) while LBJ was with the SCLC voting rights agenda, he needed a swell of public opinion at his back to pass strong legislation, and 3) LBJ was unpredictable enough that King and the SCLC had to protect against the possibility of his trying to back out — national outrage at likely Alabama-directed violence against their protestors would provide that protection.
DuVernay chose not to make any part of this more ambiguous and complicated case. The comparison here with Tony Kushner’s screenplay for Lincoln is quite damning, because Kushner faced a similar dilemma, and used sparkling, if daringly complicated, dialogue to solve it. The viewer of that film was not told a lie, namely, that Lincoln had to pursue passage of the 13th amendment in precisely the way he did, but was instead informed that a reasonable case existed for waiting until the newly elected Congress convened. The elements of risk and debatable-ness inherent to political action were admitted upfront. That is, Kushner took the trouble to explain the involved political reasons for not waiting, whereas DuVernay dodged such trouble, and did so by means of falsehood that dishonors LBJ’s legacy.
Moreover, the way that dishonor potentially pits blacks and whites against one another has been exacerbated by the angle DuVernay and her defenders have pushed about the need for a “black lens.” Perhaps the most convincing articulation of that defense was made by Amy Davis: “It is ahistorical to insist that a film show how civil-rights leaders ought to have experienced Johnson, given his fine intentions, and not how they did.” Well, okay, but what did the SCLC leaders think about LBJ’s intentions? Selma doesn’t bother to provide dialogue that would tell us. Even if they did errantly think he was a de facto enemy of voting rights legislation — which I’d bet the record shows they did not — that could not justify a film told from their perspective reporting this error as truth. Rather, to act responsibly, you’d have to at some point indicate their error, and LBJ’s responsibility for giving them the wrong impression. Not that Selma suggests that it is being told from their specific perspective or anyone else’s. What Davis defends about the use of perspective is not, in fact, what DuVernay has done.
DuVernay should admit that on this overall issue, her reworking of the screenplay fell short. Complicated dramatic decisions about complicated political ones had to be made, and she didn’t get them as right as she could have. Admitting that wouldn’t require her to gush enthusiastic about LBJ, or to recant of her desire to tell black stories free from a governing white gaze, although it would prod her to become a more wary of multicultural theory, race-grievance politics, and their being crudely applied to the arts.
But as for the “suicide package” issue, she simply needs to apologize. DuVernay smeared Johnson with a charge that has no support from reputable historians.
The “suicide package” came about because King was having quite a few extra-marital affairs. As much as I hate to link to the Daily Mail, it has a story that summarizes the current state of knowledge on and dispute about this. Since the FBI had been authorized by Robert Kennedy to conduct electronic surveillance on King due to (far more incorrect than not) charges of communists in his organization, they got a number of his sexual dalliances on tape. Director Edgar Hoover had long developed a grudge against King, and so he directed his agents to put some of these on a tape, and send it to King, along with a letter suggesting that since he would be exposed, he should commit suicide. According to Taylor Branch, the tape contained “bugged sex groans and party jokes,” i.e., whatever would most sully King’s image as a pious and intellectually refined black leader.
Incidentally, the most shameful fact about King here, is that seeing the danger of discredit his personal behavior had exposed the movement to, he promised to give up affairs, but didn’t keep this promise. Selma is, understandably, more than a bit coy about the whole story, while nonetheless admitting the fact of the affairs and exploring the suffering they inflicted upon Coretta Scott King.
But return to DuVernay’s injustice on this issue to LBJ. Early in the film there is a scene where Hoover tells Johnson, in reference to King, that “we can destroy people,” and Johnson changes the subject. Later, directly after a scene displaying the most contentious of Johnson’s disagreements with King, we get the scene showing Coretta discovering the suicide package in the mail. The inference is unmistakable: LBJ, pissed at King for not doing his bidding, told Hoover to send it.
It is a base calumny. There is no evidence that LBJ ordered, or knew of, the sending of the package. There is likewise no evidence that he conveyed vaguer instructions to Hoover to proceed with some kind of psychological harassment. We know that Johnson, and the Kennedys, had listened to tapes provided by the FBI, and had been by turns appalled and amused by King’s dalliances. But that indicates little, as very substantial freedom of agency action had been ceded by them to Hoover. Sure, that failure to control or remove Hoover was a real sin of both presidents, and in that sense, they both bear some of the blame for what he did to King.
But that, and the mere possibility of secret orders, cannot justify the calumny. With it, Ava DuVernay took her film into Oliver Stone JFK territory, and actually into worse territory, since everyone knew going into Stone’s film that he intended to give wild conspiracy theorizing maximum creative credence. Selma, by contrast, presents itself as sober history. And, as the authentic black view. Shame on her.