Discordant 'Ballad'

The Ballad of Jack & Rose marks the end of the road in a Daniel Day-Lewis sextet of movies -- and the closing of the frontier in his version of American history

The following is the final post about Daniel Day-Lewis in a larger project about Hollywood actors as historians. Comments welcome on Facebook or jcullen@ecfs.org.

To date, Daniel Day-Lewis has not made a movie about the Great Depression. Or World War II. Or the Eisenhower era of the 1950s. There may be any number of reasons for that, and he may yet make a movie about one of those moments in American history. But I’m willing to bet that he’s passed on an opportunity to do so, because that’s what real movie stars do with their power: say no. Sculpting a career by choosing roles is what turns actors into movie stars.

Day-Lewis has not made a movie about the sixties, either (or a movie about the United States in the 1960s, anyway; in his most recent film, Nine, he plays an Italian film director modeled on Federico Fellini). But the legacy of the sixties – the counterculture, anyway; he’s had little to show in the way of Civil Rights, for instance – shadows the final character in his gallery, Jack Slavin, in his 2005 movie The Ballad of Jack & Rose, which is actually set in 1986. It’s not a pretty picture, in large measure because it shows us a frontier that is not only closed, but barren. 

As with The Crucible, this was a family enterprise. The Ballad of Jack & Rose was written and directed by Rebecca Miller, Arthur’s daughter. Day-Lewis was first offered the part before he met Miller, and turned it down. As a career move, I would say that changing his mind was a mistake: this is not a very good movie (perhaps not entirely coincidentally, it’s also the only one of Day-Lewis’s American sextology that isn’t based on a pre-existing source like a play or novel). But it is nevertheless a revealing one when juxtaposed against the rest of his work, and one that allows us to begin bringing the story of this chapter to a close.

One reason why is a piece of subtitled information we get at the start of the movie as to its setting: “an island off the east coast of the United States.”  (That I always think of it as an island off the coast of Maine may reflect the fact that the film was shot on Prince Edward Island.) Manhattan is also an island, and Bill the Butcher, like Day-Lewis’s character here, is fighting off the encroachments of the outside world (in this case a real estate developer played by Beau Bridges). But the house in which Slavin has virtually barricaded himself is essentially the opposite of a frontier. It’s a collapsing preserve. And it’s collapsing around its protagonist, who’s afflicted with a vague illness that we understand is not yet crippling but will be fatal.

Slavin is the quintessential environmentalist who loves trees and hates people. A Scottish immigrant who came to United States and became a citizen – “I fell in love with this country, or what I thought it was going to be come,” he explains at one point – using a family inheritance to buy a compound that was once a countercultural compound. But now, in the aftermath of his wife’s death, the homestead is inhabited only by himself and his teenage teenaged daughter, Rose (Camilla Belle), with whom he has a relationship that is dangerously close to incestuous.

In apparent recognition of his literal and figurative unhealthiness, Slavin invites what has been a casual girlfriend from the mainland (Catherine Keener) and her two sons Rodney and Thaddius (Ryan McDonald and Paul Dano, with whom Day-Lewis would team up again with There Will Be Blood) to come live with them. This proves to be a poor arrangement, because Rose resents Catherine and seeks revenge by throwing herself at the boys, one of whom (McDonald) is apparently gay and the other (Dano) is an exploitative lout. Slavin is progressively more enraged by Thaddius, and Rose convinces him to dump Catherine.  “I wish it could be just us like it was before,” she tells him after running away and hiding in one of the developer’s houses. “The happiest man in the whole world.”

Yet the very imbalance of this sentiment suggests the instability of their relationship, in which Rose repeatedly says that she plans to commit suicide once he dies.  Slavin literally buys off Catherine, and then provokes a confrontation with Bridges by destroying the McMansion in which he and Rose have spent a night waiting for her to clear out of his home. But when his growing emotional volatility swings toward resignation, the developer, whether out of compassion or caginess, refuses to exploit Slavin’s sudden willingess to be bought out himself. (The lack of clarity as to what we’re to make of this decency on the part of the ostensible bad guy, and the truly distasteful behavior of Slavin, is one source of the movie’s dissatisfying ambiguity.) In the end, Slavin dies a relatively tidy death, and Rose – to whom this story really belongs – turns their home into a funeral pyre. We see her in an epilogue two years later on a Vermont collective. In effect we’ve come full circle, back to the edge – the far western edge – of Puritan New England. The frontier has become a garden.

Coming next: a series of posts about Denzel Washington.

'Blood,' run cold

In There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis shows how greed as an end in itself is, well, an end

The following post is part of a work-in-progress about Daniel Day-Lewis specifically and actors as historians generally.

Daniel Plainview, the protagonist Daniel Day-Lewis portrays in There Will Be Blood, projects a paradoxical sense of self-containment. But more than any of his predecessors in Day-Lewis's canon of characters, he moves deliberatively toward the fixed objective of mastering an independent domain, seizing opportunities and exploiting them with an element of calm deliberation that seems less reactive than his roles as John Proctor, Hawkeye, Bill Cutting, or even Newland Archer, all of whom are responding to events rather than consciously shaping them. Day-Lewis is able to convey this sense of methodical purpose without uttering a word; indeed, in a splendidly audacious piece of filmmaking, the first 18 minutes of There Will be Blood is silent, literally evoking the early days of the film, but in full color with brilliant sunlight desert landscapes and the unnerving soundtrack of Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead fame).   In calm but nevertheless fast-paced sequence that moves from 1898 to 1912, we watch Plainview begin as a sole wildcatter to building a small business. When one of his workers accidently gets killed when equipment falls down a well, Plainview adopts the child, H.W. (Dillon Freasier) as his own. We quickly realize that whatever his personal motives may have been, such a move is a shrewd investment, because it allows him to depict himself as a family man when he seeks leases from individual Californians to drill on their property. (The first time we hear him speak is to make a sales pitch with the boy at his side; the cacophony of greedy squabbling – and Plainview’s departure – that follows happens to be one of the scenes from the novel.)

Over the course of the story, Plainview shows real devotion to the child, even though his work comes first, and even though his work will exact a price on his adoptive son, when a gushing derrick injures the by making him permanently deaf. He also shows some devotion to that which the child is devoted. When Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), who has a major role in the novel but a minor one in the movie, arrives at his office to say that his family property is likely to have oil under it, father and son visit the Sundays under the pretense of quail hunting. It is here that the two meet Eli Sunday (also played by Dano, which I will confess confused me for a while) and Mary Sunday (Sydney McCallister), who will eventually become H.W.’s wife. When Plainview learns from his son that the family patriarch, Abel Sunday (David Willis), is abusing Mary, Plainview quietly but effectively threatens him amid the celebration that follows the opening of the pumping operation. Noting the new dress he’s bought her in front of her father, Plainview asks, “Daddy doesn’t hit you anymore, does he?” When she shakes her head no, he adds, “Better not. I’ll take care of you. No more hitting, right?” Abel’s humiliation in this scene is complete – and thrilling. Plainview’s power is such that it’s hard not be moved when deployed for good ends, even as we know he’s not a very good man.

In some sense, Plainview’s virtue is beside the point: it’s that power that compels our attention – and, perhaps, our reluctant admiration. Yet at the very moment of his triumph we begin to see him unravel. Some corporate types offer to buy Plainview out; they’re literally and figuratively seeking to capitalize on his hard work, but they’re also willing to make him a millionaire in the process. But Plainview will have none of it: What would he do then? I don’t know, one of the men, H.M. Tilford (Daniel Warshofsky) tells him more than once, you could spend more time your boy. This is an innocuous remark, part of a set of essentially polite remarks about H.W.’s handicap that Tilford makes as part of his sales pitch. But Plainview’s reaction is utterly irrational. “Did you just tell me how to run my family?” he asks in his voice of quiet rage. “One night I’m going to come into your house, wherever you’re sleeping, and cut your throat.” Tilford is stunned. “What are you talking about?” he asks. “Have you gone crazy, Daniel?”

Not entirely, but he’s on his way. With a mania that seems as much a matter of spite, Plainview not only refuses to sell but builds a pipeline to the Pacific so that he can retain control over the flow of his oil. He still cares about his family, but does so in a dysfunctional way, sending H.W. away to a special school against the boy’s will.  When a man shows up claiming to be his long lost brother Henry, (Kevin J. O’Connor) Plainview accepts him into the fold.  One night he confides to Henry, “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.” He takes comfort in Henry’s company. But when he figures out, at the moment of his triumph, that Henry is not in fact his brother, Plainview’s reaction is utterly remorseless in its savagery.

It turns out that there are people in Plainview’s life that can be a ruthless as he is. When proprietor (Colton Woodward) of the so-called “Bandy tract” that Plainview covets finally agrees to sell his land, he blackmails Plainview into baptism at Eli Sunday’s church, an opportunity Eli makes the most of in avenging his humiliations at Plainview’s hands. But these setbacks are merely temporary and amusing; what’s unnerving is the way Plainview’s emotional and material avarice twist him into madness and self-destruction.  In the last half-hour of the film, which is principally set at the Plainview estate in 1927, we watch the now-alcoholic Plainview alienate H.W. for good by revealing that his son is not actually his child in a cruelly calculating manner. We also see a blackly comical showdown with the slick but desperate Eli, in which Plainview reveals he’s sucked wealth right out from under the preacher – the screenplay dialogue “I drink your milkshake!” is adapted from actual testimony in the Teapot Dome Scandal – and culminates in a final scene of grisly violence that shows Plainview is beyond redemption. The acquisitive imperatives at the heart of the frontier mentality, unmoored from any broader social, cultural, or affective ties, devour those who embrace them. The frontier, which more than anything else was a state of mind, has become an addictive, end in its own right, and mindless nihilism as a result. Bill the Butcher died for something; Hawkeye and Newland Archer lived for something. But Daniel Plainview lost his way sucking wealth from the land. The frontier may not be closed, but his mind has.

 

Oil!, refined

The tranformation of an Upton Sinclair novel into There Will Be Blood

The following post is part of a larger work in progress about Daniel Day-Lewis specifically and actors as historians generally.

At first glance, Daniel Plainview, the fourth figure in Daniel Day-Lewis’s American gallery, marks a return to the fierce intensity of John Proctor in The Crucible, Nathaniel Poe/Hawkeye in Last of the Mohicans, and William Cutting/Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York. He is, moreover, a bona fide westerner – about as western you can get: a Californian (the genuine frontier article, which is to say a transplant).  In this movie, he arrives after the frontier in 1898, five years after Turner delivered his famous “Significance of the Frontier” address, and almost a decade after the frontier was declared closed. But starting out in the rocky desert of the Golden State, he is a pathfinder nonetheless, the prophet of a new frontier who connects a promised land to the Pacific. His name is deceptively simple in its remorseless clarity: Daniel Plainview. His rise – and, significantly, his fall – is charted in the 2007 film There Will Be Blood.

Like most Day-Lewis projects, this one is grounded, albeit loosely, in on old literary source, the 1927 Upton Sinclair novel Oil! Sinclair (pictured above left) first came to fame on the strength of his 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle, which detailed the often appalling state of the meatpacking industry and led a reluctant President Theodore Roosevelt, who preferred to lead than follow in forcing social reform, to sign the Pure Food and Drug Act the same year. Sinclair had a very long and commercially successful career that stretched well into the 1950s, but The Jungle is the really the only novel for which he is remembered today. (“I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit it in the stomach,” is his famous line on the book.”) Actually, Sinclair could write prose of riveting social realism, but tended to undercut it with a didactic impulse that often veered into propaganda. That’s what happened in The Jungle, which ends as a virtual Socialist tract – Sinclair ran unsuccessfully for governor of California as a Democrat in 1934, with a platform to End Poverty in California (EPIC) – and these traits are evident in Oil! as well. The novel tells the story of James Arnold Ross, a fictionalized composite character partially resembling Edward Doheny through the eyes of his son, Ross Jr., nicknamed “Bunny.” A former teamster and merchant, we meet the Ross and his son in 1912 as he gets his start in petroleum drilling. Over the course of the next fifteen years he becomes a major operator, reluctantly drawn into a cartel whose illegal activities culminate in the Teapot Dome Scandal, in which naval oil reserves in Wyoming were leased to private operators in exchange for a bribe.[1] The scandal did much to tarnish the administration of President Warren Harding, whose reputation waned rapidly after his unexpected death in 1923.

Oil! had been culturally dormant for decades when it was discovered by Eric Schlosser, a modern-day muckraker whose expose Fast Food Nation garnered a good deal of attention when it was published in 2001. (Schlosser in effect did to French fries what Sinclair did for ground beef.)[2] Not surprisingly, Schlosser was asked a lot about Sinclair, who he knew chiefly from The Jungle. Schlosser was nevertheless curious about his polemical godfather, and dipped into Sinclair’s vast body of work. He was particularly intrigued by Oil!, which he thought could make a good movie. So he optioned the rights from the Sinclair estate. At the same moment, it turned out there was someone else interested in the novel: the screenwriter/director Paul Thomas Anderson. Anderson had discovered Oil! in a used bookstore in London, where he was struggling with a screenplay, and was captivated by it. He contacted Schlosser and the two met to discuss the project. Although initially skeptical, Schlosser was impressed by Anderson’s vision.[3]

When Anderson began working on the project circa 2004, he was still only in his early thirties. He had made four of relatively small movies that were nevertheless hailed for their striking originality, among them Boogie Nights (1997) a surprisingly loving portrait of a group of pornographic filmmakers and Magnolia (1999), a sprawling family saga with seemingly disparate characters whose lives converge. The screenplay that Anderson eventually produced, renamed There Will Be Blood, would only use a sliver of Sinclair’s novel, principally the father-son relationship in the oil business and a clutch of incidents like the death of a worker on an oil derrick.

But the difference between novel and screenplay are about more than plot details. Oil! is at heart a story of labor. The main narrative line is that of Bunny’s gradual radicalization and the need to break free of his father’s loving but misguided hopes. Ross Sr. is certainly an arch capitalist, but one whose love for his son leads him to make allowances and tolerate people far different from even plutocratic allies to whom he tends to defer. In Anderson’s screenplay, however, the Ross character, now renamed Daniel Plainview, is a ruthless independent operator who proves as hostile to bigger operators as he does smaller ones. But his primary adversary in the movie are not workers or even fellow oil titans, but instead an evangelical preacher named Eli Sunday, a minor figure in the novel clearly patterned on the somewhat dubious preachers of the twenties like Aimee Semple McPherson (whose extramarital affair and claims of being kidnapped became a national joke). This is, in my view a mistake, and perhaps an illustration of the way that neoconservative politics and economics have impoverished our imagination about class conflict, which was much more vivid and urgent then than it is now. Philosophically pure plutocrats have always a bigger problem than hypocritical preachers, and Anderson’s elevation of Eli Sunday to a major character says more about the politics of the Bush era than it does the Harding era.[4]

Certainly the Daniel Plainview of Daniel Day-Lewis would have been as capable of staring down a labor leader as anybody else. Actually, Anderson wrote the screenplay with Day-Lewis in mind. Day-Lewis, for his part, had seen and liked Anderson’s 2002 film Punch Drunk Love, an unusual love story starring the unlikely figure of Saturday Night Live alumnus Adam Sandler. He signed on to the project even before the screenplay was finished. And as was true with his previous characters he made this one wholly his own – and indeed won his second Academy Award for it.

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[1] Upton Sinclair, Oil! (1927; New York: Penguin, 2007). We learn of Ross’s background on p. 14. On Doheny, see Margaret Leslie Davis, The Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

[2] Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001). Chapter 5 deals with the fries – or what passes for fries.

[3] Eric Schlosser, “’Oil!’ and the History of Southern California,” The New York Times, February 22, 2008. Accessed via nytimes.com.

[4] My thinking on this matter has been influenced by Timothy Noah; see his piece “What’s Wrong with ‘There Will Be Blood,” Slate, January 3, 2008, accessed at http://www.slate.com/id/2181270/ (Dec. 17, 2010). Noah says at the outset that he had not read Sinclair’s novel; as I hope my remarks above make clear, I have.

Old World Man

The following post is part of a work-in-progress on Daniel Day-Lewis specifically and actors as historians generally.

As with Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese’s decision to make The Age of Innocence was catalyzed by Jack Cocks, who also got the credit for this screenplay. Cocks gave the novel to Scorsese to read in 1980; is often the case with Scorsese projects, this one took a long time to gestate. Scorsese didn’t actually read the book until 1987; a first draft of the screenplay was not completed until early 1989, and filming didn’t begin until three years later (by that point Twentieth Century-Fox had dropped the project, but Columbia stepped in). As with Gangs, the majority of smaller roles went to British actors, whose accents were closer to those of 19^th century Americans than Americans’ typically were.[1]

Day-Lewis was a relatively late acquisition. Though he was a huge Scorsese fan, he was chary about accepting the director’s offer, which Day-Lewis received literally on the eve of his Academy Award for best actor in My Left Foot in 1990. “Too English,” he explained later. “I was hoping he’d ask me to do something more rough and tumble” (which, of course, Scorsese ultimately did). It was not until the following year, just before embarking on Last of the Mohicans – the role that would smite any of his lingering fears of typecasting – that Day-Lewis finally said yes.[2]

Whatever the degree to which the actor resembles his character, this is a role that seems like of a stretch than Hawkeye or Bill the Butcher: Day-Lewis looks every inch the aristocrat. But here as in every other American he’s played, the Day-Lewis character is in a world but not quite of it – and has the strength to stand apart comfortably. From the beginning of Innocence, it’s clear that Newland Archer has little patience for the superficiality of the men around him or the pettiness of the women. He shows a genuine proto-feminist indignation in the way that divorce is simply not considered a feasible option for the Countess Olenska, even as anyone familiar with her situation concedes her husband’s behavior has been outrageous. And he’s as open with his opinions on the matter with mother and sister as he is the senior partner at the law firm where he works.

But Archer is nevertheless afflicted by an ambivalence that ensnares him. It is his very independence and curiosity that draws him to the Countess, an attraction that he allows himself to pursue even as he tries to counteract it by seeking to accelerate his engagement and marry May sooner. The irony is that his relationship with the Countess is furthered by his involvement in her legal affairs, a professional entanglement that’s actually urged on him against his will by May’s family. Even more ironic is that Archer’s desire to resolve his ambivalence toward her by speeding up their engagement is also thwarted by his fiancé and her family.  At one point, he asks her in exasperation, “Can’t you and I just strike out for ourselves, May?” (the same line, missing the colloquial “just,” appears in the novel).[3]

Archer’s plaintive query – “can’t we strike out for ourselves?” is a kind of Turnerian pivot in Day-Lewis’s American history. Previous Day-Lewis characters lit out for the territory or took a stand, but Newland Archer finds himself at the mercy of events beyond his control – and, as he will come to realize, beyond his understanding. May’s family will give him what he says he wants at precisely the moment he decides he doesn’t want it. And yet he sees himself as having no real alternative than going ahead with the wedding anyway. Yet this act fails to resolve his ambivalence; the Countess remains in the picture and his desire for her intensifies, leading him to take risks that may endanger his standing in his family and his community. Yet when Archer finally resolves to force the question he finds he has been totally outflanked, not only by his wife but by a set of confederates who, with the assent of the Countess, maneuver him into submission.

The scene where this happens is priceless. The Archers have just hosted a dinner party for the departing Countess, who will be returning to Europe (it’s at this meal that he realizes that everyone, including his wife, has long assumed he’s been having an affair that has not only never been consummated, but which he believed was a secret). During the dinner, Archer talked, as he had been recently, of travel – once again, he was looking east – but somehow the conversation never attained a degree of seriousness. Now he again attempts to take up the subject with May, who replies to his idea about going to India or Japan by beginning to administer the coup de grace. “I’m afraid you can’t do that, dear,” she says, rising in her chair to tower over her husband before then curling up with her head in his lap. (Scorsese lavished great attention on this scene, and has spoken at great length and detail on how he achieved the desired dramatic effect with camera speed and editing.[4]) She’s having a baby, she explains, and therefore the two must remain together. There will be no frontier for Newland Archer.

Reflecting on this pivotal moment sparks a memory of another actor, one Day-Lewis is said to admire: Jimmy Stewart. Interestingly, in citing his admiration for this giant of classic Hollywood, Day-Lewis expressed a preference not for Stewart who starred in a series of psychologically sophisticated westerns under the direction of Anthony Mann in the 1950s, but rather the Stewart of Frank Capra movies.[5] The most famous of these, of course, is It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), which Stewart plays George Bailey, the would-be adventurer who’s repeatedly prevented from leaving his hometown of Bedford Falls and ultimately becomes a pillar of his community. As a number of observers (myself among them)[6] have noted, Bailey’s life is a less wonderful than the ending would have you believe. But for that very reason, the things he trades his freedom for become all the more precious.

  The same can be said for Newland Archer. Scorsese cuts – actually, it’s more like a seamless transition – from the final scene between Archer and May in his library to the same room some decades later. (Wharton describes it as about 26 years;[7] given that the backdrop of the climactic moments of the story is a financial crisis that would correspond to the Panic of 1873, and the telephones and motorcars we see, the action of this epilogue would appear to be sometime in the first decade of the 20^th century). May is now dead, victim of an illness she contracted while tending to one of her sons. The couple’s daughter is now married (in the book it’s to the child of a minor character; in the movie, it’s to “the dullest and most reliable of Larry Leffert’s many sons”). Their oldest son, Ted, is now engaged to Julius Beaufort’s daughter – ironic how Archer ends up even more tightly bound up in the lives of men he detests.

Ted is going to Paris on business as a budding architect, and insists that Archer join him.  We understand that Ted, a smart confident young man, a credit to his father, is not to be denied, even as we understand that he lacks Newland’s understated charm. The two make the trip, and Ted, with studied off-handedness, suggest that the two visit the old man’s former flame. Archer is shocked that Ted knows about the Countess; Ted explains that on her deathbed that May told the boy he was in good hands because, “once, when she asked you to, you gave up the thing you wanted most.” Archer replies (twice) that “she never asked me,” but the point, perhaps, is that she never had to: his devotion would now be complete. Later Archer, who is said to have genuinely mourned his wife, reflects that “After a little while he did not regret Ted's indiscretion. It seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, someone had guessed and pitied. And that it should have been his wife moved him inexpressibly.” It is perhaps this realization that leads Archer to resolve, despite what could very plausibly be considered the right to do so, not to join Ted, at least not immediately, in ascending to the apartment of the Countess. “What will I tell her?” he asks his father incredulously. “Don’t you always have have something to say?” Archer jabs back.   “I'll tell her you're old-fashioned and you insist on walking up five flights instead of taking the elevator,” Ted rejoins. “Just tell her I’m old-fashioned,” Archer concludes in what is the final line in the movie, as he walks past a couple parked cars. In the end, Archer is an old-world man. Strong, in a real but limited way. But a man who decides to live in an ordered society rather than break free – Jimmy Stewart, not John Wayne.

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[1] David Thompson and Ian Christie, eds, Scorsese on Scorsese (2^nd ed; London: Faber, 1996), 177-179.

[2] Hirschberg; Jackson, 194.

[3] Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920; New York: Collier, 1993 [movie tie-in edition]), 82.

[4]Gavin Smith, “Martin Scorsese Interviewed,” in Martin Scorsese Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), 200-202.

[5] Hirschberg, “The New Frontier’s Man”

[6]See Robert Ray, A Certain Tendency in the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 213-25, and Jim Cullen’s chapter “It’s a Wonderful Death,” a chapter which compares It’s a Wonderful Life with another Scorsese film, The Last Temptation of Christ, in Restless in the Promised Land: Catholics and the American Dream (Frankin, WI: Sheed & Ward, 2001), esp. 131-134.

[7] Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 344.

Native American study

In Gangs of New York, Daniel Day Lewis is the last of a (downstate) Mohican


The following post is part of a work-in-progess. Comments welcome at jcullen@ecfs.org

Like Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans, the 2002 Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York has a twisty history. If Mohicans began as a novel rooted in historical events, Gangs began as a history with more than its fair share of invention. The core source material was The Gangs of New York, a 1927 book by journalist and crime writer Herbert Asbury. As Russell Shorto points out in his foreword to the 2008 edition of the book, Asbury “wasn’t writing history – there are no footnotes in the book – but popular entertainment. And he was working with material that would be hard to verify even if you were getting it as events unfolded. His sources are themselves tellers of tall tales, old men with scarred faces reminiscing, maybe misremembering, setting the record straight or crooked.”

Nevertheless, in its broadest outlines the parameters of the world Asbury described have long been accepted as true. Since New York lacked a recognized and effective police force well into the nineteenth century, an active gang culture flourished in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, like the Bowery and the Five Points, typified by the presence of informal clans with colorful names like “The Plug Uglies,” “The Shirt Tails,” and the “Dead Rabbits” (according to Asbury, dead rabbit was slang for a rowdy, athletic fellow). The character Day-Lewis plays in the movie, Bill Cutting, a.k.a. Bill the Butcher, is modeled in the real-life figure Bill Poole, a butcher who was shot to death amid a series of gang vendettas and whose dying words, after lingering four fourteen days, were reputedly, “Goodbye boys, I die a true American.” (Those last four make it into the movie.)

Martin Scorsese first encountered The Gangs of New York in 1970, and almost immediately hoped to make a movie of it. His friend, critic and screenwriter Jay Cocks, discovered the book independently around the same time, and began working on a screenplay (he would ultimately share credit with Kenneth Lonergan and Steven Zaillian). Scorsese and Cocks knew at the outset that the project would be difficult to realize, because it couldn’t be shot in New York – the world of the movie had utterly disappeared – would thus require the recreation of lower Manhattan on a massive scale. After a flurry of initial activity in the late seventies – a trade ad announcing the project appeared in Variety in 1977 – the movie lapsed into turnaround as both Scorsese and Cocks moved on (they would collaborate in 1993 in realizing The Age of Innocence.)

The rise of independent cinema in the 1990s, and in particular the success of Miramax under brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, fostered the creation of a series of movies that broke out of the box office formula that had documented major-studio moviemaking since the 1980s. By the turn of the century, the independents were increasingly swallowed by larger companies (Disney bought Miramax), but it was still possible to launch projects with a deeply personal vision. The Weinstein brothers backed Scorsese, and British producer Graham King picked up the foreign rights. Scorsese procured the famed Italian Cinecitta Studios for his sets, and the services of production designer Dante Ferretti to create the New York’s Paradise Square as it was reported to look between the 1840s and 1860s. By no means was it smooth sailing from here – power struggles and delays dogged the picture, whose shoot ran long and whose release was delayed.

One of the bigger challenges Scorsese and Co. faced was casting. On a picture of this scale, shot in a foreign country, recruiting was a major logistical enterprise. Many actors turned out to come from the British Isles, among them some pretty impressive names. From Ireland came Liam Neeson, who plays Bill the Butcher’s archenemy, Priest Vallon, and Brendan Gleeson, who plays the rising Irish politician Monk McGinn (both characters are fictive). England’s Jim Broadbent is Boss Tweed, who of course was real. Tweed was the master of Tammany Hall, ground zero for the city’s rising Democratic Party base, and in an ironic coincidence, our friend Tammanend of Last of the Mohicans resurfaces as a statue in the movie (as indeed it was featured at the real Tammany Hall). The Hollywood firepower for the movie was provided by Cameron Diaz, then at the height of her commercial appeal, was cast as the Jenny Everdeane, the main love interest in the story. And the lead role – or what in theory was the lead role, anyway – went to Leonardo DiCaprio, who played the part of Amsterdam Vallon, the deeply conflicted son of Priest Vallon who experiences Hamlet-like ambivalence in trying to avenge his death at the hands of Bill the Butcher. DiCaprio, whose critical cache in the nineties was vastly augmented by his success as a leading man in the hugely successful Titanic (1997), not only brought tremendous box office potential to the project, but also a bankroll: he, like Scorsese, agreed to be partially liable for cost overruns.

But the keystone of the project was Day-Lewis. As is often the case, getting him on board took some persuading. There were anecdotal reports at the time of the film’s lease that Scorsese had coaxed him out of retirement in Italy, where Day-Lewis had reputedly become a shoemaker. While the degree of Day-Lewis’s alienation from his acting career was probably exaggerated, it is true that he has experienced periods of depression and burnout, like the period following The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and the his well-publicized breakdown while playing Hamlet onstage, which led him to lay low. Actually, five years lapsed between the release of The Boxer in 1997 and Gangs in 2002. But Day-Lewis had tremendous regard for Scorsese – he well might not have taken the role of Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence in 1993 (which we’ll get to shortly) had not Scorsese been at the helm of it – but Gangs was a juicy opportunity to stretch his range. So he took the role of Bill the Butcher, even though he had some reservations, among them working with the notoriously abrasive Harvey Weinstein. “What he doesn’t understand,” Day-Lewis told film writer Peter Biskind at the time of the film’s release, “is that I did Gangs in spite of Harvey, not because of Harvey.

As with Last of the Mohicans, Day-Lewis prepared for Gangs with a period of intense physical and psychic preparation. He exercised with the music of the venom-filled Eminem every morning, and inhabited the rage of Bill the Butcher whether or not the cameras were rolling. In 2007, Day-Lewis said that “in America, the articulate use of language is often regarded with suspicion.” But the remarkable thing about his Bill the Butcher, is the spellbinding way in which his savage intelligence is expressed with unique patois that fuses profanity and poetry. My favorite such moment comes late in the movie when Boss Tweed comes to see the Butcher to remonstrate with him over the killing of Monk McGinn. The Butcher has just finished sizzling a piece of meat (looks like veal), and is slicing it up as he addresses Tweed:

I know your works. You are neither hot nor cold. So because you are lukewarm, and are neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth. You can build your filthy world without me. I took the father [Priest Vallon]. Now I’ll take the son [Amsterdam]. You tell young Vallon I’m goin’ to paint Paradise Square with his blood. Two coats. I’ll festoon my bedchamber with his guts. As for you, Mr. Tammany fucking Hall, come down to the Points again and you’ll be dispatched by mine own hand.

This is great dialogue, but it’s animated by even greater delivery. Day-Lewis accompanies “two coats” with a sign of the cross, made with a knife in his hand. And “festoon” is delivered with lusty aggression: “I’ll festoooon my bedchamber.” Ironically, there’s something downright Catholic about the way this militant Protestant uses a biblical idiom in secular context (much in the way that Catholic crucifixes are much more graphic than Protestant crosses). But there’s also something appropriate about this, in that the Butcher considers the papist Priest Vallon the last worthy adversary he’s ever had. In any case, the effect is utterly riveting, and an illustration of why Day-Lewis utterly dominates the movie.

Indeed, he almost overwhelms it. Nominally, the plot of Gangs of New York concerns Amsterdam’s Vallon’s loss of his father in a gang fight in 1846 and his return, after sixteen years of reform school, to kill the Butcher, only to fall under his sway and become a virtual son. This patricidal struggle takes place against the backdrop of a fratricidal one: the Civil War, which engulfs New York in the form of the draft riots of 1863, a five-day episode of urban anarchy that would only be quelled by the arrival of troops returning from Gettysburg.

But it quickly becomes clear – or, at any rate, after a first viewing it becomes clear – that the movie belongs to Day-Lewis’s Bill the Butcher. Indeed, while the film garnered ten Academy Award nominations, the reviews were not uniformly rhapsodic, and much of the complaints focused on a belief that DiCaprio simply lacked the heft of his counterpart (not the last time such a problem would surface in a Daniel Day-Lewis movie. ) We first see him about five minutes in the film; Scorsese’s camera starts on the ground, where the Butcher stamps the snow from his shoes. As the camera pans up his flowing coat and red/white/blue sash of combat, we see a figure who, like that his character in Last of the Mohicans, does not have the kind of gangling physical presence we’ve come to expect from our movie stars. But his internal power is so tightly coiled, his murderous rage as evident as it is (temporarily) held in check, that it’s impossible not to be awed.

The Butcher has come to Paradise Square for a showdown between his men and those of a variety of gangs under the leadership Priest Vallon, head of the Dead Rabbits. Vallon, as we can tell on the basis of Liam Neeson’s accent alone, represents the rising tide of Irish immigrants who have been flooding into New York as a result of their oppression in their homeland. After a ritual exchange of insults, the Butcher’s men help him shed his coat and top hat as he pulls out a knife and cleaver declaims what’s stake: “By the ancient laws of combat, we are met on my challenge to settle for good and all (read: “awlllllll”) who holds sway over the Five Points – us Natives, born rightwise on this fine land, or the foreign hordes defiling it.” Vallon accepts the challenge: “By the ancient laws of combat, I accept the challenge of the so-called Natives. You plague our people at every turn.” Behind his well-oiled handlebar mustache, the Butcher smiles with satisfaction.

Again, there is something appropriately ironic that the Butcher’s gang goes by the name of the Native Americans. The term is historically accurate in denoting what was at the time a growing number of U.S. citizens who were increasingly hostile to the rising tide of immigrants, especially Irish immigrants, a tide that would crest with the power of the “American,” a.k.a. “Know-Nothing” Party in the 1850s, which would prove to be a temporary but powerful force in U.S. politics. But of course in our day the phrase “Native American” is a synonym for Indian. Though a gleeful racist who regards anyone who is not a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant as a real American, the Butcher’s situation in Gangs of New York resembles no one’s more aptly than that of a Delaware sachem confronted with growing numbers of outside interlopers and deciding to take a stand against them.

On that day in 1846, the Butcher and his Natives prevail despite their enemy’s greater numbers. But as we sense, he’s only bought himself time. He can manage, even absorb, the steady stream of new arrivals for a real interval. Indeed, it’s one of the paradoxes of the Butcher’s character that he can employ his former enemies, and even tease them affectionately about their ethnic foibles. But like a hydra-headed monster, Vallon’s legacy returns in the form of his son, whose ironically Teutonic name – “Amsterdam” – will ultimately challenge the Butcher for supremacy. In the meantime, however, the unwitting chief takes a shine to the kid and nurtures him in the ways of tribal power. As such, he’s like a triumphant Indian warrior who incorporates the kin of vanquished foes into his own clan.

Over the course of the almost three-hour movie, Amsterdam will struggle to grow sufficient strength to reassert his true patrimony. But the truly overwhelming forces that Bill Cutting faces do not come from knives, or even guns, but the mortal threat of votes and the overwhelming force they can ultimately impose on behalf of those who control them. The first person to realize this, naturally, is Boss Tweed. He starts out as an eager collaborator with the Butcher, but comes to see him as an obstacle to consolidating his power. Instead, Tweed turns his attention to the new arrivals that will be the shock troops of a renovated Democratic party. “There’s the building of our country right there, Bill. Americans aborning,” Tweed says down at the docks as Irish immigrants arrive. The Butcher’s reply: “I don’t see Americans. I see trespassers.” After a further exchange, their dialogue culminates as follows:

TWEED: “You’re a great one for fighting, Bill, I know. But you can’t fight forever.”
BUTCHER: I can do down doing it.
TWEED: And you will.
BUTCHER (who was walking away but now turns around): What did you say?
TWEED: I said you’re turning your back on the future.
BUTCHER (waving a pointed finger): Not our future.

Yet another irony: the Butcher puts his hand on young Vallon’s shoulder as they depart from the scene. A piece of tour de force silent filmmaking follows, as the camera rotates from immigrants disembarking from one ship to newly recruited Union soldiers embarking on another, as coffins are lifted from that vessel to join the immigrants on the dock. Though it’s highly unlikely anything like this actually ever happened, there’s an allegorical truth here about the way immigrants were raw material to be consumed in a not-so virtuous cycle of death and rebirth.

When, about two-thirds of the way through the movie, the Butcher learns the true identity of his protégé, he turns on him with ferocity. Yet he seems glad when Vallon, set free by the truth being revealed by his jealous friend Johnny, finally seems ready to take him on in an organized, collective fashion by resurrecting the Dead Rabbits and forging an alliance with Tweed. The Butcher embarks on a course that strongly suggests a fatalistic death wish. In a scene more shocking than any gang fight, he murders Vallon’s Irish mentor, Monk, who has been elected sheriff on a Tammany ticket, in broad daylight. “See if his ashes burn green,” he says to the horrified onlookers after throwing a knife into the conciliatory Monk’s back – a move reminiscent of a tomahawk throw – and bashing his head in with the club Monk used to use in his own gangbanging days. (It’s this act that leads Tweed to go to the Butcher in protest – “you don’t know what you’ve done to yourself” – but the Butcher sends “Mr. Tammany fucking Hall” away.) The Butcher also literally crucifies his former minion, Johnny, who has reconciled with Vallon, by impaling him on an iron fence, an act of cruelty so brutal that Vallon honors Johnny’s request to put him out of his misery by shooting him. The film closes a circle when Vallon challenges the Butcher to a gangfight; when the two sides meet to discuss conditions, the Butcher is pleased that they will eschew the use of guns. “Good boy,” he tells Vallon. There’s sarcasm here but also an implicit compliment than in honoring the “ancient laws of combat” cited at the start of the film, an erstwhile adoptive father is complimenting his enemy’s biological son for having grown into a worthy opponent.

By the time Vallon and Bill the Butcher have their climatic confrontation, however, their blood feud is beside the point. For it is taking place against the backdrop of a much larger one: the Civil War. At the very moment of their fight, the city is engulfed by the Draft Riots, a mass protest against conscription by the working class against the power of the state, to which the state responded with a massive show of federal force in the form of Union army, who, for so long seemingly irrelevant – the war is on the margins for much of the movie, finally overtaking the main story line – ultimately becomes the real enemy of the gangs of New York. The Civil War is traditionally represented as the triumph of federal government over a feudal plantation elite. Here we see that it’s not only slaveholding Southerners who are steamrolled by the power of the national state, but a local urban subculture as well. In “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner depicts the power of the national state as an implacable, but largely benign force that stitches the nation together. Here, it’s a terrible swift sword that slices cuts down existing growth to make room for a new society.

Scorsese underlines this point in an embellishment that did not actually happen, by bringing Union naval batteries to New York harbor, whose guns pulverize the paving stones of Paradise Square. The Butcher and Vallon can barely find each other amid the smoke, and the former is mortally wounded by a large piece of shrapnel that lodges in his gut. So it’s with something resembling grateful affection when the dying Butcher has a final moment with Vallon, both men on their knees, because he knows that Vallon will deliver the final blow. “Thank God: I die a true American,” the Butcher says – a line reputedly delivered by the real Bill Poole. Vallon then delivers the coup de grace by plunging a knife into him, an act of vengeance and compassion.

Gangs of New York represents a transposition of roles for Daniel Day-Lewis: In Last of the Mohicans, he was Hawkeye; this time he’s effectively Chingachgook. Like generations of dime novel readers and fans of westerns, we admire him in his savagery, which has a kind of nobility even as it is unacceptable as a basis for contemporary society. As with Indians of the frontier, Bill the Butcher must die so that we (a non-WASP multiracial majority) might live. It’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s Vallon who represents the synthesis of cultures who will survive as a hearty hybrid and make a modern America.

The problem is that one is haunted by a perception that he’s a lesser man. And that in some important respects the subsequent characters embodied by Daniel Day-Lewis in his narrative arc of American history are, too.

The urban frontier

 
The following post is part of an ongoing series on the work of Daniel Day-Lewis specifically and actors as historians generally. See earlier posts below.

Like all historians, Frederick Jackson Turner had his biases and blind spots, which were evident even at the height of his influence. Richard Hoftstadter, who came of age as historian in the shadow of Turner, and who reckoned with him at the end of his own distinguished career, noted that, “Beyond doubt, Turner depicted the frontier in bright colors. His disciples are quick to answer that he somewhere mentioned almost every dark aspect of frontier influence that his critics cite – but the point is precisely here: Turner mentioned them in passing, and they have the position in his essays only of faint qualifications in a full-throated paean to American virtues. And while he was also admitting American cultural shortcomings, he was also at bottom apologizing for them.” Even if you put aside Turner’s failure to acknowledge that democratic reform was at least as likely to originate in the east than the west, or in his presumption that “open” or “free” land was simply unoccupied – two fronts on which he has been repeatedly challenged – you’d still have to conclude that accepting Turner on his own terms involves minimizing the pain and struggle that accompanied even a successful frontier cycle, and the internal conflicts that often co-existed alongside the more obvious ones with outside forces like nature or Indians. A New York Jew acutely aware of the xenophobia and anti-intellectualism that laced through frontier social movements like Populism, Hofstadter was not inclined to romanticize the frontier, even he recognized the power of the Turner thesis.

One of the more notable – and, given the circumstances of his unveiling of the Turner thesis in Chicago, ironic – limits of Turner’s vision involved his difficulty incorporating cities into his vision of U.S. history. As the great environmental historian William Cronon has observed, “Turner consistently chose to see the frontier as a rural place, the very isolation of which created its special role in the history of American democracy. Toward the end of his career, he looked with some misgiving on the likelihood that there would be an ‘urban reinterpretation,’ of American history that might ‘minimize the frontier theme’ – as if frontier history had little or nothing to do with cities.”

And yet, as Hoftstadter admitted, “the great merit of Turnerism, for all its elliptical and exasperating vagueness, was to be open-ended. The frontier idea, though dissected at one point and minimized at another, keeps popping up in new forms, posing new questions.” It is in this spirit that I suggest that a frontier perspective can help us understand the role – in the literal as well as figurative sense of the term – of Daniel Day-Lewis in the next installment of his cinematic history, Gangs of New York.

New York, it should be said, is not typically viewed as frontier territory any more than Salem, Massachusetts is. For one thing, it’s an island, not a continent. For another, it was effectively urban from the moment of its (Dutch) inception. And yet one can plausibly view Manhattan (and its borough outliers) as a frontier in two senses. First, like the rest of North America, New York was a geographic space that was settled along an irregular line of development over a long period of time, albeit from south to north rather than east to west. And second, the frontier was a process of demographic transformation, as immigrants of one kind or another gradually gave way to other ethnic and racial groups, often in process of gentrification. Only by the end of the century did the entire island effectively become an enclave of affluence. These twin processes were captured in the prose of Luc Sante, whose now-classic study Low Life was an important influence on the filmmakers, Day-Lewis in particular. "The conquest of Manhattan was a microcosm of that of the whole of America, with its spaces so vast it was assumed that they could be squandered and there would still be so much left over that errors could be overlooked,” Sante wrote. In New York the natural wilderness was much more concisely and thoroughly swept away, so that a human wilderness could take its place." This notion of a human wilderness is important: whether on the mountain path or the city street, it wasn’t the trees that made the Wild West wild.

Next: How Gangs of the New York came to the screen.

A bullseye version of Hawkeye

How Daniel Day-Lewis transformed Last of the Mohicans

The following post is part of a work in progress (previous posts below).

By the time director Michael Mann, and his co-screenwriter Christopher Crowe, decided to tackle Last of the Mhicans in the early 1990s, they had a treasure trove of material to work with, and fragments of these sources end up in their final product.  At one point in the book, for example, Magua pretends to obediently follow Major Haywood’s instructions to slow down for Cora and Alice’s sake, but mocks him in his own language. “The pale faces make themselves dogs to their women,” he says to himself, “and when they want to eat their warriors must lay aside the tomahawk to feed their laziness.” At a similar point in the movie, Magua says, “Magua understand white man is a dog to his women. When they want to eat he puts down his tomahawk to feed their laziness.”

But the 1936 version is Mann/Crowe’s most obvious template (Philip Dunne’s 1936 screenplay is acknowledged as a basis for their movie in the credits). A number of lines, most memorably Hawkeye’s sarcastic assertion to Heyward, “Someday you and I are going to have a serious disagreement,” are imported into the 1992 version wholesale. I also like, “If your aim is as bad as your judgment, Major, I don’t imagine there’s much danger of you hitting him,” another exchange between the two characters at a moment when Heyward is unwisely attempting to shoot Magua. In 1992, the line is shortened to the scout simply pointing Haywood’s rifle down and saying “in case your aim is any better than your judgment.”

The most important precedent for the filmmakers of 1992 movie, however, was a long tradition of artistic license. Once again there’s the tweaking of names – for no especially compelling reason, Hawkeye is renamed “Nathaniel Poe” this time around – and rearranging of characters. This time, Heyward (Steven Waddington) is in love with Cora (Madeleine Stowe), not Alice (Jhodi May), while Alice pairs off with Uncas (Eric Schweig).  It is also Alice, not Cora, who finds herself perched at the end of a cliff, and Alice who plunges off it (an act we associate with what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome). One reason Alice is so traumatized is that her father, Col. Monro (Maurice Roeves) dies at the hand of Magua in a notably graphic scene, instead of surviving as he does in the book or dying in battle as he does in 1936. Magua, as usual, kills Uncas, but this time it’s Chingachgook (the famed Native American activist Russell Means, in a real star turn) who dispatches him instead of Hawkeye. In keeping with a well-known historical phenomenon, the Hawkeye character this time around (who I will henceforth call Nathaniel) is actually Chingachcook’s adoptive son; Nathaniel’s parents were killed in his infancy and he was raised as a Mohican. At one point he mentions attending Reverend Wheelock School, a reference to the real-life academy founded by Eleazar Wheelock, which ultimately became Dartmouth College.

Perhaps the most crucial change in this version of Mohicans – and one of a number of things that really sets it apart from its predecessors – is the skillful way it sharpens the latent geopolitical dimension in what his typically treated as a frontier tale with a little romance in it.  The character of Montcalm (Patrice Chereau, in another outstanding performance) is both appealing and ambiguous, and the elaborate rituals involving the surrender of Fort William Henry, depicted with great pomp, underlines the way in which British and French imperial officers have far more in common with each other, even as adversaries, than their respective colonial and Indian allies. Even better in this regard is the scene where Nathaniel negotiates for the release of Cora and Alice with the Tamenend figure, here an Ottawa named Ongewasgone (Dennis Banks, a founder, along with Means, of the American Indian Movement [AIM]). The only way Mohican can communicate with Ottawa is literally through the lingua franca of the eighteenth century world. So Nathaniel speaks in English to the bilingual Heyward, who translates Nathaniel’s words into the French for the Ottawa. Magua (a fabulous Wes Studi), who also knows French, gets predictably angry when he finally understands what’s being said. Ongewasgone has a final monologue in his own tongue (all this dialogue is subtitled). The scene is a pointed and useful reminder that multiculturalism was not invented in 1990.

But perhaps the most important renovation in Mohicans ’92 is the way in which Mann & Co. effectively turn it into a movie about the coming of the American Revolution. Again, the DNA for this was always there, most obviously in 1936. But the filmmakers play up the tension between local colonial militias, who are first and foremost trying to protect their homes, and the professional British military, which has its own strategic objectives. Their divergent interests become an issue when the militiamen seek to leave the fort to defend their hearths and are barred from doing so by Monro, even when Nathaniel informs him that Indian war parties are indeed ravaging local residents. “Does the rule of English law no longer govern?” asks Jack Winthrop (Edward Blatchford, playing a character unique to this movie), noting that he had been promised he would be allowed to leave in such a contingency. “Their law no longer has rightful authority over us, he says later, bitterly.” In this argument, Heyward, who has also witnessed the destruction in the countryside, nevertheless sides affirms Monro, the man he hopes will someday be his father-in-law. But his decision to so completes Cora’s tilt away from Heyward and toward Nathaniel – part of her larger Americanization (and one way in which the movie as a whole does more with its female characters than any previous incarnation of the story).

Of course, the pivotal figure in this regard – the linchpin of the movie, and that of the point I’m ring to make in this chapter – is the character of Nathaniel, more specifically the Nathaniel of Daniel Day-Lewis. This is much more than a matter of which lines of the script he utters. To put it simply, the Day-Lewis incarnation of Cooper’s creation is a magnificent creation in its own right. Though he lacks the muscularity of the typical movie-star hero, he is an impressive physical specimen: lanky but taut, strong but agile. As was becoming typical at this point in his career, Day-Lewis disappeared into the role. He worked out five times a week for six months in England before shooting commenced in Appalachian North Carolina. He also spent a month in the woods living there. Moreover, he learned to track and skin animals, build canoes, fight with tomahawks, and fire as well as re-load a flintlock rifle – which he carried with him everywhere, even to Christmas dinner.[2]

            But Nathaniel’s presence is much more than physical. Actually, the Hawkeye of all too many Mohicans – nowhere more so than Cooper’s – is something of a buffoon, a hayseed who’s not as dumb as he looks. Randolph Scott’s Hawkeye is one of the better ones, because the geniality he gives the character doesn’t undercut his sense of competence. But Day-Lewis blows all his predecessors away with his sheer intensity. More than that: it is an intensity of self-assurance. “I liked the idea of a man who had not been touched by 20^th-century neurosis,” he explained later. “A life that isn’t drawn inwards.”[3]

As such, Day-Lewis’s Nathaniel is the quintessential frontiersman. “You call yourself a patriot and loyal subject of the crown?” a sneering British officer asks at one point, wondering why Nathaniel shows no inclination to enlist in the militia. “I do not call myself subject to much at all,” he replies dryly. When Nathaniel joins the war effort, which he   does provisionally, it’s for his own reasons, not the empire’s. Though he’s involved in a dangerous scheme to help the militiamen escape from the fort and return to their families, he reveals that he won’t be with them. “I got a reason to stay,” he explains. “That reason wear a striped skirt and work in the surgery?” Winthrop asks. “It does,” Nathaniel replies. “No offense, but it’s a good deal better-looking than you, Jack Winthrop.”

What follows is the great love scene of the movie between Nathaniel and Cora, conducted against one of the major musical themes of the soundtrack, which fuses a Scottish reel and a Native American drumbeat. Day-Lewis’s chemistry with Stowe was part of a demographic appeal that cut across gender lines and ensured the film’s commercial office success. But it’s also crucial to Nathaniel’s identity – and Nathaniel’s central place in Day-Lewis’s gallery of American character portraits.  Nathaniel’s relationship with Cora faces all kinds of logistical complications – “Stay alive!” he shouts with furious rage on the eve of her capture by Magua, “I will find you!” – but the strength of that love, its uncomplicated purity, is never in doubt. Never again would Day-Lewis play a person so straightforwardly in love, so unconflicted internally, whatever the chaos around him.

This romantic clarity is of a piece with the larger sense of integration that marks Nathaniel’s character as a whole. He is a perfect Turnerian specimen, as at ease in a pick-up game of lacrosse as he is dining at the cabin of his friends, teasing Uncas about his prospects of finding a Delaware bride in Kentucky. At that point at the beginning of the film, he, Uncas and Chingachgook have just returned from fur hunting; in effect, the stretch of land between the Hudson and Ohio Rivers are Nathaniel’s stomping grounds. The three are headed back to Kentucky when they stop Magua from implementing his plans to seize the Munro sisters.

The fact that Nathaniel is not the entirely restless loner of Cooper’s saga, that there’s a place in his life for a woman who by the end of the film will literally stand by his side wherever he may go, is very much a part of the film’s larger design. The movie eschews the traditional funeral scenes of most Mohicans by having Chingachgook spread the ashes of Uncas over the western mountains amid a setting sun. He observes, as most versions of the story do, that he’s now the last of the Mohicans. But as sorry as we feel for Chingachgook, this version of the movie – as I will discuss, there are actually two 1992 versions, with subtly, but significantly, different endings – has a hopeful feel. That’s because we feel so strongly that the tragedy of Uncas notwithstanding, Nathaniel really is Chingachgook’s son (we moderns consider race and even parenthood a social construction, after all), and that in his presumed merger with Cora – a name takes on a new significance – the seed of a new national identity will be planted. As a hybrid, it will be resilient. And have plenty of room to grow. In this, the first film Day-Lewis made about American history, he embodies the frontier in its brightest phase and greatest height.

It will be all downhill from here.

Next: DDL and Gangs of New York

.

The Old Frontier

The following post is part of an ongoing work in progress about actors as historians. Earlier posts below. Comments welcome at jcullen@ecfs.org

Daniel Day-Lewis’s decision to make The Crucible in 1996 coincided with a new level of stability in his life. His previous film, In the Name of the Father (1993), had earned Academy Award nomination as Best Actor (he lost to Tom Hanks in Philadelphia),  and ratified his standing as one of the premier actors of his generation. He also solidified his standing on a high plateau by settling down by marrying screenwriter and director Rebecca Miller, daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, who he met after shooting the move and married shortly thereafter. (The fast courtship and marriage followed a relatively long-term relationship with French actor Isabelle Adjani, with whom he had a son, and a series of appearance on gossip pages with figures that ranged from Julia Roberts to Madonna.)

The fact that a Hollywood version of The Crucible ever got made is surprising. It is, of course, a bright star in the firmament of American theater, and a staple of high school English classes. It also single-handedly turned the Salem witch-trials into a form of allegorical shorthand for McCarthyism in the 1950s and any form of social pressure through scapegoating ever after.  But even as one might expect some form of independent film production to surface sooner or later, a big-budget shoot on location in Massachusetts – on Hog Island in Ipswich, not far from where the original event took place in 1692 – would be very unlikely under any circumstances.

 Except for the fact that Miller’s son, Robert, was friendly with Joe Roth, then the head of 20^th Century Fox.  As it was, it took years to get the film in the production pipeline. And it could very plausibly have been run aground when Roth left Fox for Disney. But the new management under Bill Mechanic left the project in place. There had been hopes that this prestige project – Arthur Miller himself adapted the screenplay, and the cast included highly regarded actors like Joan Allen and the legendary Paul Scofield, directed by Briton Nicholas Hytner – would generate Oscar, and thus box office, buzz. Neither materialized. But this remains a beautifully rendered, if austere, work of art, in which the work of the performers is greatly amplified by the beautiful sets, evocative costumes, and other high production values.

 The Crucible is a story that’s typically read one of two ways. The first, and perhaps primary, one is what prompted Arthur Miller to write it: as a warning about the dangers of social conformity and letting irrational fears – in particular a fear of Communism that dominated American public life at the time of the play’s premiere – govern everyday life. The second tends to see the story in terms more specific to its time and place: seventeenth century New England. Such an angle of vision leads one away from viewing it as a tale about American character generally, and more about a particular sub-species: Puritanism.  Ever since the seventeenth century, North American settlers, including some in New England, have pointedly contrasted themselves with what they considered the arrogant piety of these religious dissidents (some inside, others outside) the Church of England – and their secular heirs. In this telling, the Salem Witch trials are the logical, if not inevitable, outcome of a subculture in which religious fanaticism runs amok and consumes those who burn with self-righteousness.

Both of these views have cogency, of course. But I’m not particularly interested in tracing them here. In part, that’s because it’s been done so often. In part, too, it’s because I think the Puritans have gotten a bit of a bum rap, as if they were the only people who ever burned witches, intolerance was invented in New England, or the people who finally stood up the witch hunters and ended this tragic event, sometimes via their own martyrdom, were not themselves Puritans (of the very best kind). Instead, I see The Crucible through a different lens, one that comes into focus through the character of John Proctor, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. And that is to see it as the story of a frontiersman. 

Actually, there are some good historical reasons to do so. Of course Salem, Massachusetts is not typically seen as a frontier town; after all, it was founded in 1626, even before Boston, and thus was 66 years old when the witch trials took place. But if Salem could not plausibly been seen as a frontier, it was in fact quite close to one: the district of Maine, which would be part of Massachusetts until 1820. For most of the seventeenth century, the beaver and timber trade of northern New England was a major source of prosperity for Massachusetts. But the outbreak of King Philip’s War in Rhode Island in 1676, which spread northward and lingered until later in the decade, broke a relatively long stretch of peaceable relations with the region’s Indians, specifically the Abenaki peoples of northern New England. The outbreak of another war 1689 – popularly known as King William’s War, but known in the region as the Second Indian War – destabilized the region. This war has geopolitical origins, in that it was partially the result of the Glorious Revolution in England, which brought the Dutch-born William of Orange to the throne and tilted the nation against France, launching three-quarters of a century of imperial conflict that would culminate in what came to be known as the French and Indian War (the setting of another Daniel Day-Lewis movie, Last of the Mohicans).  But the war also had complex local dimensions in lingering hard feelings between the Abenaki and colonists. There was also a high degree of distrust among those colonial officials and military officers, some of whom had strong ties to the former governor, Sir Edmund Andros, who was overthrown when William came to power, and whom some settlers believed put imperial interests ahead of their own in his military conduct.  

The Indian wars of the late seventeenth century destroyed lives, livelihoods and homes, and created a significant number of refugees, some of them ending up in Essex county, where Salem is located.  The noted U.S. historian Mary Beth Norton has documented that a significant number of accused witches as well as their accusers have ties that can be traced to Maine in the 1670s and 80s.  Just how decisive a factor Indian war really was is open to debate. Actually, few events in U.S. history have been as variously explained than the witch trials. But it is certainly plausible to see frontier-related stresses as a factor with what went wrong in Salem in 1692.

      Actually, the ambiguities involved in actually using the term “Salem” points to another problem – and another way in which it can be viewed as a kind of frontier. People at the time made a distinction between the incorporated district of Salem Town, and the surrounding area known as the Farms (later Salem Village, and still later the town of Danvers). Residents of the Farms resented their civic obligations to the Town, and lobbied the General Court of Massachusetts for political autonomy as early as the 1670s. They would not get it until 1752, though they did gain the right to have their own church and minister. Yet this proved to be deeply divisive, and indeed, the outbreak of the witch trials was directly connected to the controversy over the ministry of Samuel Parris, whose daughter Betty and niece Abigail Williams were the first people to exhibit the ailments that would be attributed to witchcraft. (One of Parris’s predecessors, George Burroughs, who had lived on the Maine frontier and returned to Salem, would be among the 18 accused witches who were put to death.) The lack of clear political boundaries and a tendency to resolve personal conflicts by organized means fostered a kind of vigilante justice in which Farm residents resolved grievances by resorting to what amounted to vigilante justice, settling scores by making accusations based on spectral evidence. The decision on the part of trial judges to suspend normal rules for substantiating that evidence effectively allowed them to deflect attention and blame away from their own failures in the political and military upheaval of the late 17^th century.

As far as the makers of The Crucible were concerned, this is all inside baseball. In the original script for the play, Miller has Abigail Williams threaten Betty Parris by saying “I saw Indians smash my dear parents’ heads on the pillow next to mine, and I have seen some reddish work done at night, and I can make you wish the sun had never gone down!”   (The line also appears in the movie.) This (fictive) contextual information is important in establishing a basis for the core malignancy of Williams’s character. But it’s more in the spirit of background information than a proximate explanation for her behavior. The real Williams was a child in 1692; Miller her makes her a young woman whose jealousy over severed sexual relationship John Proctor leads her to accuse his wife Elizabeth Proctor of witchcraft.  (The real Proctor’s brother-in-law had Maine ties, which may be one reason why she and her sister were accused of witchcraft.) The romantic triangle remains the core of the movie, with Winona Ryder as Williams, Day-Lewis as John Proctor, and Joan Allen as Elizabeth.

That said, the adaption of the play into a movie 43 years later resulted in a subtle shift in the story’s frame of reference. “In a sense, The Crucible is the first western, because the frontier was there and they were the first pioneers,” director Nicholas Hytner explained in 1996. “So there’s an austerity to the look that we tried to capture." It is perhaps inevitable that Miller, in adapting his work for a new medium, would literally open it up. For example, the opening and closing scenes of the play, which depict the girls’ participation in an occult ritual and the hanging of important characters respectively, take place offstage. In the movie, they are shot in exterior locations. But the most important element in establishing a frontier dimension for the film version is the portrayal of John Proctor.

Next: John Proctor as frontiersman.