I recently built an ambitious four-semester syllabus that examines how film portrays American history, pairing the films against American history surveys by Jill Lepore, Michael Harriot, Bhu Srinivasan, Elie Mystal, Kurt Andersen, and Nikole Hannah-Jones’ facilitation of the 1619 Project. Each author brings a different lens to the broad sweep of the American story, whether from the perspective of venture capital, historiography, constitutional values, or minority rights. The first unit captures the founding myth: the historiography of The Last of the Mohicans, the McCarthyite metaphor of The Crucible, the shameless display of Mel Gibson’s The Patriot (think happy slaves), before ending on the unexpectedly dark scenery of the musical 1776 and its “Molasses to Rum” sequence, where John Rutledge reminds the northern sister colonies that they are just as complicit in the slave trade as his dear South Carolina.
I went into Unit One with a working theory that has only sharpened since, which is that every one of these films lies to you. That is not an accusation. It is simply what cinema does. The question is never whether a film lies but what the lie is for, whom it serves, and whether the film is honest about the lie it is telling. The Patriot lies to protect a mythology. 1776 lies and then, in that one darkening sequence, briefly tells the truth. Hold that idea, because Unit Two is where it becomes the whole game.
Unit Two is dubbed, “The Original Sin”. It showcases how the American experience is mired in the darkness of slavery, and the films bring that feeling home, as cinema tends to do well, after the idealism of the founding stage.
I started with Amistad, Steven Spielberg’s depiction of the famous trial in which John Quincy Adams — son of the John Adams we had just watched lobby for independence in 1776 — argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the Africans who liberated themselves aboard an illegal slave ship. Immediately the syllabus drops you into the hold of that ship, the symbol of the inhumane compromise made by the founding generation. The film centers its White moral witnesses and lets Cinqué return home while the free Black abolitionist played by Morgan Freeman is told he must stay safe, a liberal lie, but one that names the founding contradiction in its opening frames.
Next is 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s beautiful and visceral rendering of how the institution feels in the body. Solomon Northup is a free man stripped of his identity and turned into chattel; Lupita Nyong’o’s Patsey embodies the dehumanization of enslaved women used as both sexual objects and field hands. The psychological wage that slavery extracted from White Americans is everywhere in the film. It’s in Paul Dano’s jealousy of Solomon’s expertise, which threatens his belief that no matter how poor he is he remains above a slave. It is in Michael Fassbender’s Epps, the slave driver whose moral degradation and megalomania fixate on seeing human beings as his property. And it is in Benedict Cumberbatch’s Ford, whose discomfort with an institution the film insinuates he knows to be monstrous does nothing to interrupt his participation in it. McQueen’s lie is a formal one, and he admits it as the closing text concedes that most people stolen like Solomon left no record and never got out. The film can only exist because Solomon was the exception.
After 12 Years a Slave came Chris Eska’s The Retrieval, which follows a young Black boy conscripted into helping White bounty hunters track down a Black Union soldier. He comes to admire the man he is meant to betray and to see him as a father figure. Ultimately the soldier sacrifices himself so the boy can go free. It is a quiet study in the impossible bargains the institution forced on the enslaved and how those bargains eroded the very capacity for trust and kinship.
Then I watched Emancipation, Antoine Fuqua’s blockbuster starring Will Smith, which uses the image of Peter’s scourged back (one of the most politically consequential photographs in American history) as its historical anchor while changing other details to fit the survival-adventure film it wants to be. It is not fully accurate as the real Peter was Louisiana-born, and the film relocates him culturally. But the symbolism of that photograph, and the way the film makes the normalization of brutality visible, is another rendering of how the nation was stained by this abnormally cruel institution. It is, in a sense, The Patriot’s action grammar pointed in the opposite direction.
After Emancipation came Beloved, which was a shock to the nervous system. The scene in which Oprah Winfrey’s Sethe (the younger version played by LisaGay Hamilton) kills her child rather than allow her to be returned to slavery is heartbreaking and hair-raising. America’s demons had risen so far out of the ground that the same nation which proclaimed freedom and human rights produced mothers committing infanticide on plantations to spare their children the country’s darkest contribution to human history. Though Beloved is not about real people, this act is documented in the historical record. Toni Morrison drew it from the case of Margaret Garner. And it is worth remembering that Morrison wrote the novel in 1987 and the film failed at the box office in 1998, because American audiences were not ready to feel what she was asking them to feel. The haunting she wrote about was not only the 1870s. It was the crack epidemic and deindustrialization arriving in real time. The lie in Beloved is the most generous kind: it offers an exorcism, a resolution, that the historical record rarely granted.
After Beloved I watched Lincoln and Glory. These films offer more closure than the ones before them, yet both shed the White savior reflex even as they wrestle with it. Lincoln does a remarkable job of capturing the procedural distance of the debate over the Thirteenth Amendment inside the gilded fortress of Washington, D.C. — a distance that should feel familiar today, where moral emergencies are still converted into political calculations. Glory, made in 1989, the same year as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, carries the weight of Black participation in the Union Army, nowhere more so than in Denzel Washington’s Trip, a man who comes from a haunted house and whose tears under the lash are not about the pain, but rather about the pain being normalized by the North too.
Finally, I made it to Gone with the Wind, a beautiful film that launders a deadly ideology. It arrived in 1939, when the medium itself was still new enough and overwhelming enough that audiences had almost no defense against the claim its beauty was making. Hattie McDaniel won an Academy Award for it and was made to enter the segregated Atlanta premiere through a separate door. This is the film’s argument about its own Black characters stated as fact. It explains why generations of Americans, after the Civil War and Reconstruction’s devastating end, allowed such brutal injustice to continue against the country’s historically voiceless communities. It explains the political capital later seized by the late-twentieth-century Republican Party and the Trump movement it evolved into. When you can slide the Lost Cause of the Confederacy into gorgeous Technicolor, you get even the humanitarian Jimmy Carter describing the South as before and after the premiere of Gone with the Wind. Its lie is the most dangerous of all the films’, because it is the most sincere and the most beautiful.
These nine films are a journey into the way cinema depicts America’s original sin, and watching them in sequence has made this Juneteenth all the more meaningful. As Frederick Douglass once asked what the Fourth of July meant to the slave other than hypocrisy, it is crucial to remember that America is as notable to history for its contributions to the perpetuation of ethnonationalist authoritarianism as it is for the possibility of multicultural democracy. The movies have spent a century telling us which of those two we are. The truth is that we have always been both, and the lie each film tells is just another way of choosing which one to look at.
