Intrusive Right-Wing Egregore Filmmaking

The Reactionary Subconscious of Edward Zwick

Death for a conviction is the highest accomplishment. It is proclamation, deed, fulfilment, faith, love, hope and goal; it is, in this imperfect world, a perfect thing, absolute perfection. In this the cause is nothing and the conviction everything. One can die stubbornly for an indubitable error: that is the greatest thing there is.

-Ernst Junger, War as Inner Experience

I thought I might expand a bit on some of the themes I explored with Predator and delve a bit more into some theories on aesthetics and their political and philosophical implications. This is in line with an essay I wrote some time ago called “All Great Art is Right Wing,” in which I argued for the inevitability of rightist themes in any work of art that stands the test of time and considered critical appraisal.  The art itself does not have to be- and generally is not- consciously political or ideologically rightist.  Nonetheless, as what is commonly called ‘right’ today is that which accords with transcendent human nature, against which liberalism is a rebellion, the imagination necessarily must fall back into enduring, mythic tropes to create anything of real and lasting value. Pride and Prejudice is read even by leftist women because it is so profoundly, timelessly feminine, and speaks to instincts and virtues that modernity can bury but never quite keep from crawling out of an unquiet grave.

So too it is with manly art, and of those who choose to make it.  Edward Zwick is a Jewish boomer liberal from meta-central casting, the creative force behind TV series Thirtysomething and Once and Again: navel-gazing, female-oriented, slice-of-life prime-time dramas that are largely forgotten today.  But he is somehow also the auteur behind some of the greatest period war films ever made.   While on the surface his movies can appear to be- and have been critiqued as- self-satisfied white-savior mythmaking, they are in fact profoundly subversive of liberal cultural values and offer an incisive critique of modernity, especially the stories it likes to tell of its origins.  In that regard, two in particular stand out, Glory (1989) and The Last Samurai (2003). 

He also gave us this. The ladies all remember it . . .

Glory tells the story of the 54^th Massachusetts Infantry, an all-black volunteer unit raised as part of the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War.  Matthew Broderick, then best known to the public from his role as Ferris Bueller a few years earlier, plays Robert Gould Shaw, the real-life scion of a Yankee abolitionist family from Boston.  The movie is hit-or-miss in its historicity; most of the other main characters, played masterfully by Denzel Washington (Trip), Andre Brauer (Searles), Morgan Freeman (Rawlins) and Cary Elwes (Maj. Forbes) are fictional.  Shaw goes off to war with high ideals and quickly discovers the grim reality of combat, the film itself opening up on the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history.  That the battle itself was indecisive despite the carnage sets the tone for the movie.  The Lincoln Administration, looking to mine some significance from yet another missed opportunity to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia in the field, issues the Emancipation Proclamation, and authorizes the creation of black military units. 

Shaw is scarred by his experiences, physically and psychically, but his idealism is fully intact.  He believes in freedom for black Americans and in the promise of the war to instantiate it, and jumps at the chance for a promotion to colonel as the head of one of the new black regiments, the 54^th (the real-life Shaw held racial views that were decidedly more nuanced, to say the least).  But there is more to it than a quest to end slavery.  It is implied even as he convalesces that Shaw, a rich kid from a sheltered background, still has something to prove to himself. 

Glory is a profoundly masculine film.  Much like Master and Commander, there are few scenes featuring women, and the subtext is one where insecurities around manhood are bound up with notions of freedom and agency.  One of Shaw’s first recruits is Searles, a free black man who had been his family secretary.  Searles , like Shaw, complicates the basic surface narrative of the film in that there are clearly unstated reasons for his wanting to join up beyond an ideological fight for abolition; he is a timid and bookish type who feels a need to show himself as a man. His counterpoint is Trip, an escaped slave who is deeply skeptical of any higher purpose in the fighting, merely wanting to strike back in some way against the people who tried to whip him into subjugation, an angry adolescent playing at being a grown man.   The men train in expectation of being sent into combat, but doubts emerge about this being likely to happen. 

One of the most interesting things about the film is that the ostensive villains, the Confederates, barely appear and are entirely faceless and abstract as antagonists.  Most of the conflict Shaw engages in is against his own side. Promoted to a high enough rank to understand the war from the perspective of its commanders, it becomes clear to Shaw that the whole enterprise is one great exercise in cynicism, corruption, and predation.  No one else among the whites, not even his own executive officer, actually believes that his black soldiers will fight, and they are used by the north just as the Confederates would, as free labor. 

If the film does have an individual villain, it is arguably Union COL James Montgomery.  Montgomery was an actual historic figure, accurately described in the movie as a ‘real Kansas Jayhawker.’  He is the anti-Shaw, an amoral, violent man whose liberalism and abolitionism are merely the pretext for his sadistic hatred of Southerners.  What for Shaw is a war for liberation is for Montgomery one of subjugation and destruction.  He too commands black troops, but his men are an undisciplined mob of contraband, given license to burn and plunder defenseless homes.  He cares nothing for them, calling them “monkey children” and personally shoots one of them for striking a white woman.   He is an archetype, the white liberal for whom blacks are pawns to be used to attack other whites seen as fearfully alien, retrograde, and inferior.  He did to Darien, Georgia what Tim Walz did to Minneapolis, and for the same reason.  In the midst of this, Shaw comes to understand that his men will never be seen as men so long as they accept the role assigned to them.  He threatens Montgomery and their overall commander, BG Charles Harker, with exposure for their looting, smuggling, and general war crimes if his unit is not reassigned to the front, a proposal to which they happily assent. 

A skirmish on James Island sets the stage for the culmination of their struggle, as assault on Battery Wagner.  The fighting that Shaw and the 54^th have engaged in to this point has been indecisive, desultory, and personally and collectively unfulfilling. They are chasing a largely defeated enemy at what everyone must know is the winding down of the war, and they have proven nothing to their country and their fellow soldiers, who still despise them.  More to the point, they’ve proven nothing to themselves.  To become what they know they can be, it will not be enough merely to play a part and fight, to accept the meaning that the war has been assigned by its contemporaries and would be given by liberal historians.  Through a supreme act of will, they must transcend all that they have been and assert their manhood in blood and fire. 

Battery Wagner in strategic terms means little, but the very fact of it being an impossible target signifies that whoever assaults it is making a declaration of the power of will over life.  It is this opportunity that Shaw requests from his new commander, specifically asking for the ‘honor’ of leading the attack.  His men understand the significance as well.  A remarkable scene plays out the night before the battle, a religious ritual wherein the men bare their souls to one another, reconcile their previous animosities, and prepare themselves for death.  As they march to their staging point the next day, Union soldiers who had earlier abused the black troops of the 54^th now cheer for them; they sense the change. Shaw, on the beach at dawn, releases his horse and hands his papers to a friendly journalist, knowing he will not survive.   

The attack on Battery Wagner is a masterpiece of filmmaking, opening on a bright morning and ending in dreadful night.  The 54^th launches a frontal assault under artillery fire, and reaching the fort, gets pinned down at the base in a network of obstacles as death rains down around them.  Amidst the cries of the wounded Shaw draws his sword and pistol and charges up the earthen embankment, only to be cut down before his men.  At the sight of his death a kind of transfiguration takes place, and they become less a regiment than a warband, something from Tacitus:

In battle, it is a disgrace for a chief to be surpassed in courage, a disgrace for his retinue not to equal him. But it is truly infamous and a life-long stain for a companion to survive his chief in battle. To defend their chief, to protect him and also to add brave deeds to his personal glory – these are the companions’ outstanding commitments. The chiefs fight for victory, the companions for their chief.  [Raw Egg Nationalist trans.]

Trip, who had earlier declined to carry the American flag on account of the hypocrisy it represented to him, rushes forth to hold it aloft, a banner now sanctified as the battle-standard of their posse comitatus.  He too is shot down and falls next to Shaw.  The rest surge forward to James Horner’s soaring Wagnerian score, surmounting the walls in a bloody hand-to-hand contest.  Searles, the secretary, becomes a screaming berserker as he bayonets his way into the Confederate ranks.   It is he who waves the standard on the parapet, screaming the name of his chief.  Having at last transcended his own weakness and inner doubt, he is slain in turn.  His men dying all around him, MAJ Forbes, Shaw’s XO who so strongly doubted the project at the outset, leads the survivors into the breach, charging down, and the audience is allowed to believe for a moment that victory is perhaps at hand. 

It is not to be.  They come to a halt before a secondary battery, and the scene ends with the implication that they are all blown to pieces.  The Rebel flag is still flying at dawn, a different Star-Spangled Banner in allusional apposition to the one at Ft. McHenry.  That battle was of mythological significance for America; the assault on Battery Wagner was an afterthought, a skirmish fought between men from two despised racial castes.  So far as the war went, it was meaningless.  But as the film has shown, the men who fought there gave it meaning, in a sense Junger would have recognized.  Through sheer will they surmounted the role their society intended for them and turned that worthless stretch of beach into a crucible in which they forged an aristocratic sprit.  The rebels buried them all in one great hole, intending to insult Shaw by entombing him with blacks.  But of course, the exact opposite message was conveyed- where else should a great chief rest but in the company of his mannerbund?

Zwick’s film turned the great liberal narrative of the Civil War on its head.  The war to free the slaves was but a chapter in a campaign of liberal imperialism that began with the Revolution and continues, no longer quite so successfully, to this day.  Such meaning as the conflict had was a created rather than emergent property, and the men of the 54^th, before they liberated any others, liberated themselves.  Zwick belongs to a generation of filmmakers who grew up in an environment when older, triumphalist narratives could be challenged, and has lived long enough to reflect in interviews that that is no longer possible.  But in his most productive period, certainly without consciously intending to, that instinct to interrogate received wisdom could result in cinema that offered a de facto rightist critique of contemporary liberal values. 

In a similar way, his 2003 film The Last Samurai continues the critique of advancing liberalism, this time onto the global stage.  In many ways, the film can be thought of as the spiritual successor to 1989’s Glory.  The main character, CPT Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) is what Matthew Broderick’s Robert Gould Shaw might have been if he’d survived the Civil War, a jaded superfluous officer reduced to his permanent rank and sent to deal with the last resistance to the emerging liberal order in America, the Indians of the frontier. We learn Algren’s backstory mostly through narration and flashback; given orders to destroy a peaceful Indian encampment, he harbors a deep hatred for his former commanding officer, COL Bagley (Tony Goldwyn).  His talents and experience specifically against premodern traditional people are such that despite his animosity Bagley recommends him for a job as a mercenary working for the Japanese government, training its new, modern army. Alcoholic and reduced to working as a pitchman for Winchester, Algren is compelled to take it.

Unlike Glory, which followed a real historical figure and added fictional elements, The Last Samurai is more heavily original, with only the Emperor Meiji being an actual real-life person. The plot is loosely based on the Satsuma Rebellion, led by Saigō Takamori, with which exactly zero Americans were involved (Algren is an amalgam of two French military officers who fought in an earlier rebellion). This gave Zwick a bit more room to expand on themes that would otherwise have been hard to relate to a modern American audience, as a purely Japanese story would not have so starkly implicated American liberalism without an American around.

The stand-in for Saigō is Katsumoto, played majestically by Ken Watanabe. Algren becomes acquainted with him at first by study, learning what a Samurai is and why his enemy is rebelling against the emperor. The comparison between the samurai and the Indians is made explicit at many points in the film, and that they are meant to share the same fate. Both are creatures from another age, suitable for romantic admiration, but doomed to extinction.

The instrument of that doom is Omura. Unlike the aristocratic Katsumoto, Omura is a member of the merchant class, traditionally despised in oriental societies but newly empowered (and enriched) by the westernizing Meiji reforms. He is the grey eminence who brings Algren to Japan, largely because he believes the latter to be much like Bagley and Americans generally, whom he dismisses as a nation of “cheap traders.” But Omura is no cartoon villain; despite his venality his loathing of the samurai is genuine and rooted in his belief that their backward ways have made Japan weak. He has bought into the premises of liberalism wholeheartedly- the purging of tradition, the worship of technology, and the rapacious materialism and means to implement those values once those of the old Japan are uprooted and destroyed.

The real villain, much as in Glory, is Bagley, Algren’s fellow officer. One can imagine Bagley as a Jayhawker in the mold of James Montgomery, burning plantations as merely the first part of a career that would continue with torching tipis and end in foreign lands, civilizing the natives through the familiar program of fire and gunpowder. He is less a man than a type, the embodiment of an unrestrained and unthinking exterminating daimon of progress. Of all the characters, he is the only one Algren expresses hate for, a distain that Bagley interprets as Algren hating his own people, a telling point.

Algren takes the job, and despite himself takes his work seriously and demonstrates real concern for Omura’s peasant conscripts. Tasked with taking them to fight before he believes them ready, Algren courts suicide to prove his point. Nonetheless, they march off despite his misgivings. The army encounters Katsumoto in a woodland ambush, the samurai leader emerging from the fog as a literal forest rebel in the Junger mold. Seriously wounded, Algren is taken as a prisoner back to the samurai territory.

Here he learns more about Katsumoto and the samurai. The samurai leader is everything Bagley is not, and represents virtues lost to the world the colonel represents. His people form a kind of atavistic community centered around the conscious preservation of their way of life over and against the changes Omura represents. It’s a kind of bushido Magic Mountain, a Shangri-La refugia where time has stopped on an impossibly idealized samurai world.

It’s easy to criticize the film in this aspect (and people have) but it’s worth pointing out that this world is meant to be seen by the audience through Algren’s eyes, much as Shaw represented the filmgoer envisioned by Zwick for Glory. The avatar is a white male, but the world he inhabits is a non-white mirror against which liberalism is held up to scrutiny and found wanting. Both films are a kind of updated Persian Letters, or if you prefer, a sort of minstrel show, where aspects of cultures outside of the white liberal norm that boomers like Zwick grew up with (and worked so hard to unmake) are used as counterpoints to critique the hegemonic zeitgeist. The idealization of the samurai is dramatic chiaroscuro that works so long as one bears in mind that both parts of the contrast are necessary for the picture as a whole to work as art.

Algren takes to this traditional way of life, noting that his capture has involuntarily cured the rootlessness inherent to his previous service to liberal expansionism. His drinking is also cured, the pathologies that have characterized his life to this point are undone by a literal program of sun and steel. He trains kenjutsu, fights ninjas, meditates, and earns the respect of Katsumoto and his followers. When he is finally released, he returns to the capital in Katsumoto’s company for the latter’s parley with the emperor.

Unsuccessful in persuading the emperor to reject the influence of Omura. Katsumoto is imprisoned before being rescued by Algren and Katsumoto’s son, who is killed in the breakout. Katsumoto contemplates seppuku but is dissuaded by Algren, in a callback to the latter’s own earlier suicide ideation. Having bonded over their saving of each others’ lives, in both the figurative and literal sense, they return as brothers to the mountains to face the certain attack.

The final battle is, as with Glory, masterful. Zwick simply has a talent for such things that is hard to believe inhabits the imagination of the producer of My So-Called Life. The samurai no longer face a rabble; the Meiji army has been hardened by Bagley into an efficient and fully modernized force. Luring them once more into an ambush, Kastumoto, Algren, and the samurai fight hand-to-hand and drive the imperial forces back, but both comrades understand that there is no defeating them.

As in Glory, meaning must be found in a courageous death signifying a willing sacrifice in the name of the virtue one espouses. Liberalism isn’t defeated on the battlefield so much as in the soul. And so the remaining samurai charge the enemy lines, with Algren running Bagely through, as they race to the enemy Gatling guns. As with Glory, Zwick allows the audience to believe, for a moment, that victory is possible, before the guns open up and everyone is shot to pieces.

I was reminded in that scene of another subtly subversive film, Rambo: First Blood Part II. Rambo, revealed in the film to be of both German and Apache descent, which is to say, a genetic hybrid enemy of liberalism, returns to his base after having been betrayed by the same cynical military system that opposed Shaw and Algren, and empties a belt of ammo cathartically into the advanced computer equipment that represented the supposed superiority of modern warfare. Only, in The Last Samurai, the warriors were on the receiving end of the bullets, the catharsis their own death before dishonor. Recognizing this, the imperial soldiers cease firing and fall prostrate in reverence.

Only Algren survives. He appears again, wounded, staggering into the emperor’s presence with Kataumoto’s sword, to tell him how his former mentor died. Also present are the American arms manufacturers and government officials set to bind Japan on its course. Moved at last by Katsumoto’s death as he could not be by his words, he finds his courage dismisses the representatives, and takes Omura to task.

Algren returns to the mountains, the film implying that he will spend his life there, having regained his honor through his violent turn against creeping modernity. Whatever happens in America or Japan, it is clear that he will have no part in it; much like the ring-bearers, he has earned his place in Valinor. The message here is that while societies might fall to liberalism, the individual can find his way, through courage and integrity, to resist on his own terms. Algren, in a sense, has taken Katsumoto’s place as a forest rebel.

Much, much more could be said, and the theme of subversion of liberalism could be traced through Legends of the Fall and Blood Diamond just as clearly. Edward Zwick has served up the right-o-sphere some egregiously excellent critiques of some of modernity’s most cherished fables about the inevitability and desirability of progress for its own sake, and he has done so, from all available evidence, unintentionally. He had no choice really. As this author has noted, all great art is right wing. To create a work with real and lasting value, one must, of necessity, turn to the noble and transcendent. Edward Zwick to move forward, had no option but to RETVRN.