A Little Chaos: Historical Landscaping in the Ancien Regime

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17th Century Europe, 17th Century France, A Little Chaos, Alan Rickman, Ancien Regime, Kate Winslet, Louis XIV, Marquis de Lauzun, Matthias Schoenaerts, Versailles

Alan Rickman died too soon. My first memory of him was his appearance as the criminal leader in Die Hard, but I think he really captured my heart as the manic Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves; he was pretty much the only good thing in that film. And of course, he found a legion of new fans in what is probably now his most famous role, Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films. A Little Chaos (2014) was both his last film role released while he was alive and his second and final film as a director. It’s a modest little film, but not without its charms.

The film tells the story of the construction of the Bosquet de la Salle-de-Bal at the Palace of Versailles, during the reign of Louis XIV. Louis’s landscaper was André Le Notre, one of the greatest landscapers of the 18^th century. One of the more unusual things he installed at Versailles was a small outdoor ballroom set in a grotto decorated by seashells and fountains.

The film’s central conceit is that Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts) had enough work to do that he fielded out the construction of the grotto to a female landscaper named Sabine de Barra (Kate Winslet), who struggles to win the respect of Louis (Rickman) and deal with the jealousy of Madame Le Notre (Helen McCrory), while coming to terms with the death of her husband and daughter in a coach accident a few years earlier. Louis is himself grieving the death of his first wife, Maria Theresa, and when Sabine accidentally mistakes him for a gardener, the two strike up a cautious friendship based in their mutual sense of grief.

The Bosquet de la Salle-de-Bal

 

The film has a nice set of linked metaphors in the relationship between gardening, politics, and the realities of life. 18^th century landscaping sought to impose a strict sense of order onto nature, the same way that Louis wishes to impose his will on France and the way that Sabine needs to impose constraints to her grief. And yet, as Sabine acknowledges, life always means a little chaos, so she tries to introduce the unexpected into her landscapes (in this case, the unusual grotto), while the unexpected forces of both death and romance disrupt the lives of most of the main characters. In the most touching scene, Sabine finds herself a fish out of water in Louis’ court, and yet suddenly discovers a great deal in common with the other ladies of the court, most of whom have their own dead husbands or children to grieve. It’s a nice reminder of just how high the mortality rate of the pre-modern world was.

Rickman and Winslet as Louis and Sabine

Rather refreshingly, the film acknowledges right at the start that the whole story is fictional. It’s prologue text reads simply “There is an outdoor ballroom in the gardens of Versailles. In what follows, that much at least is true.” Sabine is a completely fictitious character. The idea that 17^th century society would have had room for a female landscaper who essentially ran her own business is a pretty fantasy, but nothing more.

The film has a good deal in common with 2000’s Vatel. Both the brilliant cook Vatel and the innovative landscape Le Notre were historical figures in service to the powerful men of the Ancien Regime, and both films dwell on the complex entertainments and artificiality of court life. Both include Louis XIV, his homosexual brother (a sadly wasted Stanley Tucci), and the Marquis de Lauzun as characters, and both address the problems of being Louis XIV’s mistress (Anne de Montausier in Vatel and Madame de Montespan in this film). So if you’re interested in the court of the Sun King, these two films make an interesting pair.

That said, A Little Chaos is not a great film. There are quite a number of characters who go nowhere. The performances are better than the script deserves, and the film’s feminist ambitions are undermined by a plot that makes men the solution to Sabine’s problems. Winslet and Schoenaets lack the chemistry to make their romance interesting. If you like historical gardening the film gets some bonus points, but it doesn’t live up to its promise to explore the philosophy of landscape design. And the soundtrack frequently becomes intrusive. But it’s worth a watch, particularly if you’re a fan of Rickman or Winslet. The final scene, in which Louis stands serenely in the center of the outdoor ballroom as his court dances around him seems a fitting way to bring down the curtain on Rickman’s career, even if that curtain came down too soon.

 

Want to Know More?

A Little Chaos is available on Amazon.

If you want to know more about Louis XIV,  there are a lot of biographies, such as Richard Wilkinson’s Louis XIV (Routledge Historical Biographies). This is a little off-topic, but one of my favorite books about Loui’s court, Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV’s France (Magic in History)deals with the occult demimonde of 17th century Paris; it goes into considerable detail about the complex social and sexual hierarchies at court.

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Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: Witches in Medieval England?

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Alan Rickman, Geraldine McEwan, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Witchcraft

I commented in an earlier post about Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, dir. Kevin Reynolds) that one of the biggest anachronisms in the film is Mortianna the witch and what appears to be a Satanist coven. The problems with it are big enough that I decided to give it its own post.

 

Medieval Notions of Witchcraft

One of the persistent notions about the Middle Ages is that people were constantly terrified about witches and that witch hunting was a common phenomenon in the period. The reality is quite different. The average medieval person probably did have a vague belief in witches and some fear that he or she could be a victim of witchcraft, probably the way that many modern Americans have a belief in serial killers and some vague fear that they could become a victim of one. But the surviving evidence from the medieval period suggests that this wasn’t a serious fear that obsessed people, the way films and tv shows typically present it.

Many communities probably had a small number of men and women that I will call ‘cunning folk’. The term is not really medieval (it’s mostly used in the period form the 15^th to the 20^th centuries), but it’s one of the terms modern scholars of witchcraft have adopted. Cunning folk were men and women who had unusual knowledge of semi-magical matters, such as the medicinal uses of plants, contraceptive and abortifacient techniques, the making of poisons and love charms, faith healing practices, how to find lost objects or predict the future, how to manipulate the weather, how to curse people and protect against curses, and so on. Different cunning folk appear to have specialized in one or two of these matters, and accepted payment in exchange for their assistance. These folk magical practices were used to help people deal with problems that were out of their direct control (such as medical problems and the weather). Such practices were not, by and large, illegal in the medieval period.

McEwan as Mortianna

What was illegal, however, was using such practices to inflict harm on another person, for example by causing crops to fail or making someone fall down a flight of stairs. Employed this way, folk magic could be charged in court as maleficia, the causing of harm by magical means. The issue here is not that using magic is inherently evil, it’s that harming a person is evil. Magic is simply understood as the tool through which evil was done. (If I kill you with my car, I may have commited vehicular homicide, but driving a car isn’t evil in itself.) So periodically, down into the 15^th century, we find secular courts charging people with maleficia. But in the surviving records, it’s not a common charge; I know of only a tiny handful of such cases across the entirety of medieval English history.

Nor was the medieval Church particularly worried about witches. As I noted in one of my posts on Salem, for much of the medieval period, the prevailing view among theologians is that witchcraft wasn’t really possible. If people thought they had performed magic, they were actually deluded. In particular the idea that old women could perform malevolent magic was discounted. That doesn’t mean that medieval clergy had no belief in magic at all; they often had a strong belief in astrology, in alchemy, in the hidden (‘occult’) properties of plants and minerals, and in the communication with spirits, who might have knowledge beyond what humans had. These forms of magic were seen as educated, and therefore more legitimate than folk magic.

However, in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, the ecclesiastical position on witchcraft began to change, for reasons that historians have still not managed to completely pin down. Intellectuals began to embrace the argument that magic was only possible through the assistance of the Devil, so that all forms of witchcraft were a form of Satanism. This led to an idea that witches were not simply cunning folk with specialized knowledge but were actually in active collusion with Satan. Whereas a cunning man or woman might commit maleficia for specific human reasons like envy or revenge, a Satanist witch was simply malevolent as a person (rather the way Hollywood presents serial killers as just figures of motiveless violence). This meant that any magic cunning folk employed could be evidence of Satanism, even if it wasn’t maleficia. And increasingly there was an assumption that witches did not operate alone; they taught other witches and operated in covens that periodically assembled to worship the Devil, fornicate, and plan evil.

But this evolution took about 300 years to happen, so that its major manifestations took place in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, not in the Middle Ages. It is not the Middle Ages that was obsessed with witches and witch hunting, it is the Early Modern period. The 15^th century was a transitional period, in which the number of witchcraft accusations began to climb, but there is no evidence of a ‘witch hunt’ during that period.

 

Mortianna

In RH:PoT, the witch is Mortianna (Geraldine McEwan), who is presented as a classic Early Modern stereotypical witch; she is an ugly old hag with a milky eye who lets toads and snakes roam freely in her rooms within Nottingham Castle. She’s Nottingham’s mother, so presumably she’s minor nobility. She mostly seems to predict the future, rather than performing curses or whatever. She also covers the altar of the castle’s chapel with magical paraphernalia, including a pentacle, knives, and, bizarrely, cobwebs. Early on in the film, the Sheriff of Nottingham (Alan Rickman) confronts Robin’s father as part of a group of white-robed, torch-carrying people. This looks a lot like 20^th century cinematic depictions of Satanist covens, but this group is never mentioned again and the film basically drops this plotline after that scene. So I think the audience is supposed to assume that Mortianna and Nottingham are part of a coven of witches who worship Satan, even though the film never directly explains this.

Nottingham and his coven

But as I’ve already explained, this is entirely out of place in late 12^th century England. The concept of Satanist witches and covens won’t even begin to emerge until the early 14^th century, and they are entirely fantasies anyway, with no evidence that anyone actually did such things. Given that Robin Hood is an entirely fictional character made up well after the 1190s, I suppose it’s no more egregious to depict the Sheriff of Nottingham as working with a Satanist witch, but it’s a pretty glaring anachronism.

However, the film does unintentionally suggest that Martianna has some pretty impressive magical powers. In the finale, Nottingham drags Marion (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) into the chapel, where the evil bishop of Hereford is waiting to marry them so Nottingham can legally rape her. Mortianna is with him, and he bars the door of the chapel. Robin (Kevin Costner) and Azeem (Morgan Freeman) get to the chapel but are unable to get in, and try unsuccessfully to batter the door down with a statue. So the film seems to establish that there is only one door between the chapel and the hallway outside.

Eventually Robin goes out a nearby window and manages to swing through one of the chapel’s windows. About the same time, Mortianna magically appears in the hallway where Azeem is still trying to get the door open; she comes charging down the hallway at him and stabs him in the leg with a spear. Then she notices he’s black and briefly thinks he’s the Devil. She runs away, Azeem successfully impales her with the spear, and she falls out the window. Later, after Robin has just killed Nottingham, Mortianna suddenly appears behind the altar, having magically teleported there instead of falling to her death. She tries to stab Robin with the spear, but Azeem miraculously kicks the door in (the one he’s been unable to open so far), and kills her by throwing his scimitar at her (apparently his scimitar is aerodynamically balanced for throwing, despite the absurdly wide head). So apparently Satan has given Mortianna the ability to teleport at will. Either that or the film’s ending is just nonsense. You’ll have to decide which is more likely.

 

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves [Double Sided]is available on Amazon.

One of the best studies of the shift from the folk magic model to the Satanic model of witchcraft is Richard Kieckhefer’s European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300-1500. He documents the shift in the accusations at trials. It’s a bit old, but it’s worth a read if you’re interested in medieval witchcraft.

 

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: Cheerfully Disregarding the Past

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Alan Rickman, Caesarian Sections, Kevin Costner, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Needlepointing the Bayeux Tapestry, Robin Hood, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

I saw Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, dir. Kevin Reynolds) when it first came out. I was a budding young medievalist in grad school, and I hated the movie. Over the years it’s acquired a fairly negative reputation for its many egregious anachronisms (like Robin Hood’s mullet). So I sat down to watch it was some trepidation. But about half way through the film, I realized that I just couldn’t hate it. It’s not that it’s a good movie; it wasn’t when it came out, and it hasn’t aged especially well. It’s just that the movie so obviously doesn’t take itself even remotely seriously. It’s not a comedy, but the movie just gleefully doesn’t give a damn about anything other than the story it wants to tell, even if that story isn’t especially good. Alan Rickman completely dominates the film with his manically villainous Sheriff of Nottingham, who is basically Snidely Whiplash made flesh. This movie is interested in history about the same way that Here Comes Honey Boo Boo was interested in talent.

The film is mostly a paint-by-numbers version of the Robin Hood story with a few new touches thrown in. Robin Hood (Kevin Costner) is trying to thwart the evil Sheriff, who is planning to depose the absent King Richard by marrying Richard’s cousin Marion (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), which will somehow allow Nottingham to ignore the fact that there are several closer claimants to Richard’s throne, such as his brother John and his nephew Arthur (at the end of the film, Nottingham is so monomaniacally-focused on this goal that even as Robin is literally battering down the chapel door to kill him, Nottingham just wants to finish forcing Marion to wed him so he can have sex with her. That’s real commitment to villainy). Robin Hood is a former crusader who rescues and brings back to England a black Muslim named Azeem (Morgan Freeman), who repeatedly demonstrates that Islam is more scientifically advanced than late 12^th century England by inventing things that won’t actually be invented for centuries. And Nottingham is working with a witch, Mortianna (Geraldine McEwan), as part of some sort of Satanic cult. Oh, and Will Scarlett (Christian Slater) is actually Robin’s long-lost half-brother.

Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham

 

The Top Ten Biggest Anachronisms in the Film

• Azeem gives Little John’s wife Fanny (Soo Druet) an emergency caesarian section. He knows how to do this because he’s watched horses delivered this way. That in itself is possible, since the earliest-known c-section was performed in 320 BC in India. But what’s more problematic is that Fanny not only survives but is up and running around literally the next day. Prior to the 16^th century, c-sections were generally performed only when it was already accepted that the mother was not going to survive the birth or had actually died; the procedure was a last-ditch effort to rescue the child. Prior to the 19^th century, they were performed without anesthesia or blood transfusions, making them insanely risky for the mother; most women probably died of shock or bloodloss before the process was finished. And even if the mother did somehow survive the procedure itself, in the absence of modern hygiene, there was a very good chance of severe infections setting in. (See Update below)
• Azeem owns a primitive telescope, two glass lenses than he fits into a leather tube. It’s not clear where he got this; since he’s first met in a prison and literally escapes with nothing, the most obvious explanation is that he made it after Robin and he escape. Given that the first known telescope was invented by the Dutchman Hans Lippershey in 1608, and the film is set in 1194, Azeem’s telescope is roughly 400 years too early.
  

  Azeem and his telescope

• Mortianna and the Satanist coven. But that deserves its own post.
• Robin’s father has a framed portrait of Robin hanging on his wall, which is pretty much about 200 years too early for framed portraits.
• Robin and his men all use the so-called Welsh Longbow, like pretty much all other Robin Hoods. Longbows themselves date back to the Neolithic period, the Welsh only began to use them in the late 12^th century (within a decade or so of 1194), and the English only generally acquired them in the late 13^th century, after Edward I’s conquest of Wales. The bow came to play a very important role in English warfare in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, and given that the original tales of Robin Hood seem to originate in exactly that period, it was as natural for Robin to use a longbow as it was for Dirty Harry to use a Smith & Wesson .44 magnum. But in 1194, it’s about a century out of place unless Robin Hood is actually just a Welsh bandit wandering around England.
  

  Robin and his longbow

• Azeem manufactures gunpowder so they can blow stuff up in the climactic confrontation at Nottingham Castle. Black powder certainly existed; it may have been invented in China around 492 AD. The Islamic world acquired knowledge of gunpowder some time between 1240 and 1280, and the earliest European recipe for it dates to around 1300. So Azeem basically has to invent black powder. Apparently he’s a 12^th century Thomas Edison. (See the previous picture for a nice example of a Stuff Blows Up scene.)
• Nottingham decides to hire some “Celtic” mercenaries, and what we get is a bunch of Time-Traveling Killer Picts. They are dressed in ragged furs and kilts and paint their faces, and several of them actually wield Stone Age axes. These guys are even more out of place than the Viking mercanaries King John hires in Ironclad.
• Nottingham’s men pretty much all wear Norman helmets, a simple bullet-shaped metal helmet that left the face and cheeks exposed, but provided a nasal strip to give a little protection to the nose and eyes. This style of helmet was widely used in the 10^th and 11^th century, but in the 12^th century it gave way to the closed helmet (for those who were better equipped) and a helmet that left the face exposed but provided coverage for the cheeks (for those less well-equipped). So I suppose we could say that Nottingham is just a cheapskate who gave his men very old, crappy helmets, but it’s sort of like making a movie about the 21^st century American military and giving all the soldiers doughboy helmets. (See the above photo for a guard in a Norman helmet.)
  

  Christian Slater’s largely useless Will Scarlett

• After Robin Hood begins the whole ‘stealing from the rich to give to the poor’ routine, Nottingham’s men post wanted posters (an anachronism in itself) that are written in modern English and look pretty clearly printed rather than hand-written.
• Friar Tuck is a friar wandering around England in 1194. St Francis didn’t invent the concept of the friar (a wandering monk, basically) until 1209. The Franciscans didn’t come to England until 1224. Tuck seems to be a priest, since he presides over Robin and Marion’s wedding at the end of the film, but the early Franciscans were generally not priests. So everything about Tuck is wrong.
• Bonus Anachronism 1: Marion’s female servants are named Rebecca and Sarah, which means they’re Jewish, since in medieval Europe, most Old Testament names were associated with Jewishness (the major exceptions being David and Adam). Because English Jews were a despised minority, Christian women would not have used Jewish names, and Marion would have been very unlikely to hire Jewish servants.
  

  Gotta love that totally non-medieval neckline on Marion’s dress!

• Bonus Anachronism 2: In one scene, Marion is needlepointing a panel from the Bayeux Tapestry, a now-famous but then fairly obscure embroidery from the late 11^th century. Marion is Richard’s cousin, meaning she must be French, so I suppose we could hypothesize that she paid a visit to the bishop of Bayeux at some point and fell in love with his wall-hanging and did a quick sketch of it, but why bother actually trying to explain the little details? The film sure doesn’t.

Update: A couple of readers have asserted that Azeem doesn’t perform a caesarian section, merely turn the baby. At the start of the scene, he declares that the baby has not turned and so cannot be born. Then he tells Marion to get a needle, thread, and water. Then he says that he has seen some technique used on horses. He never says exactly what he’s going to do, but it’s presented as some exotic Middle Eastern knowledge. So I suppose there’s some room for debate about exactly what the film wants us to think is going on. However, if he’s only planning to turn the baby, asking for a needle and thread makes no sense. That request only makes any sense at all if he’s planning on cutting Fanny open and then sewing her up after the baby is out.

The whole scene is quite silly. There is approximately 0% chance that a Muslim man without specialized medical training would know anything about gynecology and midwifery. Even most trained physicians in the Islamic world knew nothing beyond some vague theories about childbirth, because gender segregation and the practice of women veiling meant that even physicians almost never had physical contact with unrelated women. Honestly, Robin Hood had more chance of knowing something about delivering a baby than a Muslim man did, because Western men had somewhat greater familiarity with women’s bodies (since veiling and segregation were not as rigidly enforced in the West as they were in the Middle East). Childbirth was women’s work and not something men would get involved in.

Furthermore, breeched babies are, if not common, still a recognized phenomenon across the medieval world. Being able to recognize it and address it was not something that required exotic Middle Eastern knowledge. Marion probably would have at least known the concept, even if she hadn’t encountered it before.

 

Want to Know More?

I’m not sure why you’d want to know more about this film, but Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves [Double Sided]is available on Amazon.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler: Ronald Reagan and Racism

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20th Century America, African Americans, Alan Rickman, American Presidents, Apartheid, Eugene Allen, Forest Whitaker, Lee Daniels' The Butler, Nancy Reagan, Racial Issues, Ronald Reagan

One accusation that has been leveled against Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013, dir. Lee Daniels) is that it depicts the Reagan White House unfairly. For example, Michael Reagan, President Reagan’s son, wrote that to depict “Ronald Reagan as a racist because he was in favor of lifting economic sanctions against South Africa is simplistic and dishonest.” Ben Shapiro of Breitbart News complained that “[Eugene] Allen had warm relations with all the presidents with whom he served, and left the White House in 1980 with a hug from Ronald Reagan; Cecil Gaines, leaves the White House in rage over Reagan’s stance on South African apartheid. The film depicts Eisenhower as a colorless milquetoast, largely ignores southern Democrats’ support for Jim Crow during the 1960s and paints Reagan as slightly senile.” Reagan biographer Paul Kengor blasted one scene in which Reagan refuses to accept a bill that would have imposed economic sanctions on South Africa due to its Apartheid system of segregation, because the film offered no wider political context for Reagan’s decision.

So does the film merit such criticism?

It’s clear that Eugene Allen, the man on whom The Butler’s Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) is based, was treated at least somewhat better than Gaines is in the film. Whereas Allen retired as the White House Maitre d’hotel at the end of his career, Gaines spends 30 years as a butler and quits when he is refused a pay raise and promotional opportunities by an unnamed supervisor. While the incident represents Gaines’ acknowledgment that some of his son Louis’ (David Oyelowo) complaints about American society are valid, the scene as it literally plays is false, and in that sense, Shapiro’s objection is valid. It undeniably misrepresents Allen’s decision to retire. (But Shapiro’s claim that Gaines quits “in rage” is a serious exaggeration; Whitaker plays the scene very quietly and calmly, with no expression of emotion at all. Nor is Reagan’s stance on Apartheid the actual issue, although it does seem to prompt his demand for a raise.)

Eugene Allen and his family posing with Ronald and Nancy Reagan

But the film includes an incident from Allen’s life in which Nancy Reagan (Jane Fonda) invites Gaines and his wife to a State Dinner as guests rather than staff. There’s a suggestion that Gaines is uncomfortable at the dinner when his co-workers are waiting on him, but apart from that, the film plays the scene as the Reagans respectfully acknowledging his long service.

The Allens with Nancy Reagan

The film’s whole approach to the scenes with presidents is to show Gaines quietly serving in the background while the various presidents are discussing political issues with advisors. Periodically, one of the politicians will briefly acknowledge Gaines in a more personal way. President Kennedy tells him that he didn’t understand how deeply black people were hated until he saw the treatment the Birmingham marchers received, and after the assassination, Jackie Kennedy gives him one of her husband’s ties. Gaines receives a tie-pin from President Johnson. The film also shows him attending Johnson in a vulgar scene in which a constipated Johnson is sitting on a toilet discussing racial issues with his advisors just outside the bathroom door. The film spends more time on Richard Nixon (John Cusack) than anyone else, showing him as Vice-President trying to get the black staff at the White House to vote for him, and as President discussing how to deal with the Black Panthers and then drunk and despondent just before his resignation. Ford and Carter don’t even appear, except in news clips. So in most scenes, the presidents and their advisors treat Gaines as a domestic servant, but the film scatters in a few brief personal conversations, at least one each for Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan.

The Kennedys greeting the White House domestic staff, with Cecil Gaines (Whitaker) on the right

In Reagan’s case, the personal scene comes when Reagan (Alan Rickman) asks Gaines to mail a letter to a constituent. The constituent is having economic problems, and Reagan wants to send some money, but Nancy and his staff object to him doing this. So he asks Gaines to do it on the sly. It’s a scene that humanizes Reagan for the viewer, although it doesn’t say anything about Reagan’s attitude toward Gaines. Personally, I think Reagan comes off quite well in that scene.

Nor does the film “paint Reagan as slightly senile” as Ben Shapiro charges. I certainly saw no sign of that in the film. And it’s worth pointing out that Reagan, who died of Alzheimer’s 16 years after leaving office, almost certainly had the disease while he was president. His son Ron Reagan Jr has said that he saw traces of the characteristic confusion in his father as early as 1984, and reporter Lesley Stahl did as well. So had the film chosen to explore that facet of Reagan’s time in office, it would have had justification for doing so.

Reagan and Apartheid

However, the essence of the complaints about the film is really that the film treats Reagan poorly because it includes a scene in which South African Apartheid is an issue, and implies that Reagan was racist. Gaines is serving Reagan during a meeting with unnamed Republicans who are seeking to persuade the president to not veto the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which aimed to impose economic sanctions on the white South African government because of the country’s system of segregation, which became infamous during the 1980s. During the scene, Reagan says twice that he has made up his mind to veto the bill, without explaining why.

Jane Fonda and Alan Rickman as Nancy and Ronald Reagan

Reagan did veto the bill, which had bipartisan support, but his veto was overridden by a substantial margin in both houses. It was, in fact the first time in the 20^th century that a veto of a foreign policy bill was overridden, and it was seen as a significant defeat for Reagan. After the override, Reagan released a statement attributing his veto to a concern that the bill would hurt the people it was intended to help.

So the scene is essentially accurate. Republicans did press Reagan to accept the bill and he did in fact veto it. And it’s hard to argue that the film should have ignored the event. The whole film is about the dismantling of segregation in the US, and the CAAA played in role in helping to bring about the end of Apartheid in South Africa, so its inclusion in the film is appropriate. But the film does not make any statement that Reagan was motivated by racism. Kengor is correct that the film does not explore any wider context for the bill or Reagan’s decision, but I’m not sure that the film could have provided a meaningful context without going substantially out of its way.

Is this film biased against Reagan? Does it depict Reagan as a racist? I don’t think so. If it had wanted to paint Reagan in a negative light on race issues, it could certainly have done so by including reference to his use of the racist Southern Strategy to woo racist whites into the Republican Party, for example by using coded language about ‘welfare queens’ and ‘young bucks’, or his decision to kick off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, an obscure town whose only claim to fame is the lynching of three Civil Rights activists in 1964, or his 1982 defense of Bob Jones University, which was losing federal funding because of its ban on interracial dating. It could have mentioned that Reagan declared the Voting Rights Act “humiliating to the South”, or that he described Confederate president Jefferson Davis as a personal hero. It could have highlighted Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager, Lee Atwater, who explicitly acknowledged the role coded racism played in the campaign. In a film dealing with race and racism in the United States, inclusion of these events would have been entirely reasonable.

Reagan at the Nashoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi

The fact that Reagan was friendly to domestic servants in the White House and once hugged Eugene Allen doesn’t really occlude the numerous ways that Reagan used racism as a tool during his political career. Michael Reagan insists that his father was not a racist and at various points did nice things for black friends; that may well be true but it doesn’t mean that Reagan can’t have exploited racism to further his own goals. It is entirely possible to have black friends and yet still say and do racist things. So whether Reagan’s veto of the CAAA was motivated by racism or something else entirely, the film uses the incident as an example of the way Reagan’s policies looked quite different to blacks than to whites. Given that the whole movie is about how black people viewed America and American politics in this period, that’s an entirely reasonable approach. Could the film have gone into deeper detail about Reagan’s decidedly mixed record on racial issues? Could it have provided more of the context Paul Kengor wanted by delving into the Reagan administration’s policies and the political strategy Reagan used to win two elections? Absolutely, but had it done so, I think Reagan would have come off much worse than he does in the film.

Want to Know More?

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is available on Amazon. The article that inspired the film was released as a promotional piece for the film, along with some material about the making of the film. You can get it as The Butler: A Witness to History, but it’s probably not worth the money. You can find the original article here.