I saw Selma this weekend and am not sure what anyone means by “villainizing” LBJ. I think the movie did a fine job of presenting the kind of pressures and problems that government/liberals of the time had in supporting King. LBJ is presented as someone who cares, but has many other concerns which he must balance against outright support for King. LBJ could not have gotten the VRA passed without the courage and determination with which so many blacks faced brutality and death in the civil rights movement. This movie was not about LBJ, and made no claims to be about LBJ. I think much of the negative reaction to the film comes from white folks who are so used to the notion of “white savior” perspectives that this comes as a bit of a shock to them. I particularly loved the scenes such as the woman who kept trying to register to vote, that represented the quietly courageous actions of so many people who will never share the fame of LBJ or King, but without whom no progress in civil rights could have been made. Furthermore, in the argument of “true history” versus “distortion”, let’s remember that this was never billed as a documentary. I disagree with using the term “distortion” when it seems to portray a very real and “true” picture of how the civil rights movement felt to many of us - that there were tensions and pressures both within the movement itself and within the white liberal communities who wanted to support civil rights. As someone who came too late to march with Dr. King, but who participated in civil rights work in the 70’s and anti-apartheid work in the 80’s, frankly I tend to be skeptical of films like this - and I found this movie did not hit any of my “bullshit” buttons. It was moving, portraying all of the characters with depth and dignity. I did not come away from this movie thinking less of LBJ, or more of King, but rather feeling the bittersweet emotions and memories that come from having been just one of the faces in those marches, with all the passion and sense of both stumbling and triumph that came from that participation. I agree with BenRailton that it accurately portrays a perspective held by many.
“I have to agree that it does distort history, making Johnson into more of a villain than seems justified by the historical record as it exists. And I believe doing so was a correct and necessary choice.”
This isn’t distorting history to make it fit into a more dramatic narrative, its distorting it to serve an explicit political objective.
This ultimately will not lead to a good place in human endeavors, no matter what your good intentions are in this particular case. Its a wrong and dangerous road to embark on.
The tapes and his retrospectives from people who knew him are not always kind to LBJ. He was a crass man that wanted to talk to people on the toilet as a form of intimidation. If you want to laugh, listen to the tape of him ordering a pair of tailored pants for himself. Let’s just say it is not something I would have recorded.
LBJ supposedly peed on a Secret Service man a s the man was trying to frantically hide the president from being seen as he was taking a whiz outdoors. He was kind of lucky most of this material came out long after his death.
Now there is a part of history where LBJ and Martin Luther King parted ways, it was the Viet Nam War. I would like to see a film on Martin Luther King and his fight with the liberal establishment in the Johnson administration over the Viet Nam War. It created a split in the Civil Rights movement between those who appreciated what LBJ did for civil rights and those leaders like King who saw the Viet Nam War as killing primarily young and poor Americans white and black.
Interesting article you’ve penned here. I don’t necessarily agree with you that distortion of LBJ’s role is necessary to balance the leger as it were, but I get where you are coming from. i’d planned on skipping the film because I’d read it was inaccurate, but having read your article and the comments here, I will probably go see it. And thank you for reading the comments and responding.
Ugh. What a gross article. Give me a break. How 'bout if I make movie wherein Ronald Reagan is super-sympathetic to the AIDS epidemic… yeah? Would that be justified by a relativistic-theory of historical narrative? Please. Go pound sand up your ass.
Although I’m put off by your analogy, I think you’ve got the right idea. All films about historical events distort what happened – no one disputes this. But not all distortions are equal and one should judge this case by case. What rankles about “Selma” is that it gets LBJ so wrong. And before I accept the author’s claim of “no biggie”, at a minimum I’d need some sense of where he thinks the line should be drawn. What if we had a conversation of LBJ picking up the phone and saying, “Get me James Earl Ray”. Because c’mon, what this film does is not far from that.
twice now, a lot of words to basically say “the ends justify the means”.
I don’t buy it when I hear it from a teabagger, and I don’t buy it when I hear it from someone who is lying for Jesus. Therefore, I am certainly not buying what you are peddling here. “Selma” completely misrepresented LBJ in this historical episode, period. I fully support the notion that too often in Hollywood and mass media, black struggles for equality boil down to feel-good stories for white people, starring white people, one/some of whom rode to the rescue of those poor helpless black people. I am certainly tired of seeing white people portrayed in the media as the ‘default humans’ (can’t we have a movie with an all-black or mostly-black cast without it being a civil rights epic or a ‘black comedy’? How about a science fiction movie where the crew is mostly black with a token white or two for diversity, instead of vice versa?) Perhaps Ava DuVernay’s next film could find and tell the stories of such black people rather than resorting to wholesale historical revisionism in order to make the point that black people wanted to fight and win their own struggles rather than being infantilized by white liberal do-gooders?
I have never forgotten the scene in “Malcolm X” when such a woman goes up to him and confesses her white guilt, concluding with asking him, “is there anything I can do to help your people in their struggle?” He tartly replies, “No.” I didn’t fully comprehend that at first but when it sank in later, it was a powerful message.
The justification of the movie’s fictitious revision of LBJ’s actions is presumably driven by an important need, as the author says. That need is to neutralize the long standing tendency in Hollywood to run away with all stories about the struggles of African-American protagonists and insert a white character as the savior and central figure. The movie’s director clearly tried to resist this impulse to belittle African-American stories and view them merely as a byproduct of some random white person’s noble actions.
If she had done so by writing out or diminishing some random, minor white character’s role in ‘Selma’, in order to make sure that that character did not take over the story of the civil right movement and Dr. King, it would be understandable, and forgivable as artistic license.
Unfortunately, Lyndon Baines Johnson was no minor white character in the story of the Voting Rights Act. He was the President of the United States. And he was, unavoidably, both a prime mover in the creation and passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights act, and white.
For the film’s director to ignore this rather large historical fact and narrative complication in the interest of defending the “black” narrative, is at best cynical, and at worst, dishonest.
LBJ was Texan, larger than life, casually racist and in the mid-sixties, the most important friend of the Civil Rights Movement in white America. A friend who was President of the country, no less.
The story of the Civil Rights movement rightly belongs to Dr. King and African Americans. But it is impossible to tell it honestly by writing out LBJ or by making him a bad guy.
The movie’s director and this article’s reasoning only provides ammunition to racists who will now claim that all African-Americans, the moment it suits their purpose, will slander any supporters or friends who are white.
The justification of the movie’s fictitious revision of LBJ’s actions is presumably driven by an important need. That need is to neutralize the long standing tendency in Hollywood to run away with all stories about the struggles of African-American protagonists and insert a white character as the savior and central figure. The movie’s director clearly tried to resist this impulse to belittle African-American stories and view them merely as a byproduct of some random white person’s noble actions.
If she had done so by writing out or diminishing some random, minor white character’s role in ‘Selma’, in order to make sure that that character did not take over the story of the civil right movement and Dr. King, it would be understandable, and forgivable as artistic license.
Unfortunately, Lyndon Baines Johnson was no minor white character in the story of the Voting Rights Act. He was the President of the United States. And unavoidably both a prime mover in the creation and passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights act, and white.
For the film’s director to ignore this rather large historical fact and narrative complication in the interest of defending the “black” narrative, is at best cynical, and at worst, dishonest.
LBJ was Texan, larger than life, casually racist and in the mid-sixties, the most important friend of the Civil Rights Movement in white America. A friend who was President of the country, no less.
The story of the Civil Rights movement rightly belongs to Dr. King and African Americans. But it is impossible to tell it honestly by writing out LBJ or making him a bad guy.
The movie’s director only provides ammunition to racists who will now claim that all African-Americans, the moment it suits their purpose, will slander any supporters or friends who are white.
I suspect if this OpEd were written by a professor of history rather than a professor of English, it would not advocate a distortion of history. I have no problem with this or any film telling this or any story from a black perspective and not turning it into the story of a white hero. But if you want to depict a real life meeting between real people - i.e. LBJ and MLK - I think you have an obligation to be somewhat consistent with what historians and biographers know (and what Andrew Young has said) about the two men. Otherwise you are no better than Oliver Stone, totally making stuff up about real people and real events by the truck load (as in JFK, Nixon, etc.)
If you change history in a film for political reasons, where does it stop?
How about the Tea Party claiming Martin Luther King? I bet Dinesh D’ Souza is ready to roll the cameras right now on that film, How about a film glorifying Ronald Reagan as an enthusiastic supporter of the Martin Luther King federal holiday when he fought the law tooth and nail before eventually caving in. The irony is that Reagan apologized to Coretta Scott King for remarks he made against Martin Luther King when he was golfing at Augusta National in 1983. They did not allow their first black member until 1990 and were forced to by sponsors and not by any change of heart.
The Times and the raw Story articles where Glenn Beck and the Tea Party are claiming Martin Luther King shows how far you can stretch history in the name of politics. Their justification is that the liberal narrative made them unfairly characterized as racist.
“We are the people,” Finley said, “who practice Dr. King’s dream. It is the Tea Party where people are not judged by the color of their skin, and it’s Tea Party Americans who believe that character still counts.”
“So today, I am officially announcing that the Tea Party is taking Martin Luther King away from the liberal left,” he said. “And to you race-baiting promoters of division and hatred, you’re not getting him back until you renounce your shameful skin-color politics and start practicing the politics of character.”
what I find either hilarious or infuriating (depending on my mood at the moment) about the conservatives trying to hijack MLK as one of their own, is that not so very long ago the proto-Tea Party - that is to say, John Birch Society dead-enders - were still peddling J. Edgar Hoover’s smears of King as a Communist, therefore he was wholly undeserving of a holiday. In fact, when the state of Arizona notoriously rescinded MLK Day back when Ev Mecham was governor, quite a few of his defenders came out of the woodwork to push that line even though the formal reason given for the action was that the holiday had been declared in an illegal manner by Mecham’s predecessor Bruce Babbitt.
I suppose folks are allowed to change their minds, but to go from “he’s a Commie!” to “he’s one of ours” - a guy who was wholly pro-union, very much anti-Vietnam War, and surely would have been one of the chief targets of Fox News slander had it existed in his time - is a feat of mental gymnastics that only a cynically dishonest turd can pull off.
The Wire comes to mind—not a feature film, of course, but an expansive look at people in an inner-city world very alien to most of us, portrayed very much as individuals, responding in particular ways to the general and particular situations they find themselves in.
He’s not trolling us, trust me. This is standard stuff among many academics. Pomobabble, if you want it, can be found in most academic journals.
Hollywood doesn’t do history well, I think, in large part because history doesn’t tell a nice simple story that works well in a pitch meeting. And video in general doesn’t convey as much information, minute for minute, as print can, so again you’re losing detail and nuance. I’ve seen documentary work, freed of the need to make money, that seemed to ring true and present history in the round, but of course someone has to pay for that, and there has to be an audience interested enough to watch it.
and yet he wasn’t wrong. I believe that peoples really need to liberate themselves. Iraq is a textbook example of what happens when some well-meaning, benevolent outsider comes in and does the work for them. The process of liberation is transformative.
Wow. The premise of this piece is utterly ridiculous. Getting history wrong in the opposite direction from how they (“they” be it Hollywood, academia, or whatever) have gotten it wrong before is not a correction. It’s a pendulum swing back too far in the other direction. In the movie Selma, it would have been entirely possible to narrate the perspective from the MLK/African-American point of view without vilifying LBJ or makng him a surrogate hero of the story. Falsely - and deliberately - portraying ANY historical figure in a negative (or, for that matter positive) light does a disservice to the truth, and to a warts-and-all understanding of reality.
An “alternate vision” of provable, obvious facts is distortion. Ask your
colleagues in the History Department.
I think people make a distinction between films like Inglorious Bastards which is clearly a fiction account of WWII and forgive a historical rewrite of Hitler’s death (8 academy award nominations?) and films like Selma which are seen as entertaining documentaries. Not using Dr. Kings exact word is forgivable but changing the basic narrative is not.
From the point you made about the right calling King a commie. By the way, Reagan in 1983 was asked whether King was a communist. He replied. We will know in 35 years. It was that remark and others during the debate over the MLK holiday that got him in trouble.
In the Tea Party’s talk of states’ rights, critics say they hear an echo of slavery, Jim Crow and George Wallace. Tea Party activists call that ridiculous: they do not want to take the country back to the discrimination of the past, they say, they just want the states to be able to block the federal mandate on health insurance.
Still, the government programs that many Tea Party supporters call unconstitutional are the ones that have helped many black people emerge from poverty and discrimination. It is not just that Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for Senate in Kentucky, said that he disagreed on principle with the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that required business owners to serve blacks. It is that many Tea Party activists believe that laws establishing a minimum wage or the federal safety net are an improper expansion of federal power.
Critics rightly note that Dr. King spoke over and over of the need for this country to acknowledge its “debt to the poor,” calling for an “economic bill of rights” that would “guarantee a job to all people who want to work and are able to work.” In Mr. Beck’s taxonomy, this would make him a Marxist.
I haven’t seen the movie yet but curious: is there any kind of disclaimer on-screen about the historical accuracy of the events and persons portrayed?