The Real "Civil War" Movie That We Needed
On Jimmy Stewart in 1965's "Shenandoah"
As a sort of Machiavellian realist, I try to avoid all political conversations in person. It usually amounts to delusion swapping.
But the most recent one was unavoidable, when, among several people, a man of the cloth told a group of us that civil war in America was not only possible but looming gravely.
Having dealt with people under the same impression for months now, on my video on the recent “Civil War” movie, it’s clear that such delusions are unpoppable. When I deny that civil war is in fact on the horizon, I am usually told that I’m smoking crack.
This ignores the fairly clear problems that civil-war worriers have. Those include the most basic question of all, such as “what would the sides be?”
I think you wouldn’t have a more serious problem than this. I have no conception of who would be fighting whom. I also don’t know why they would be fighting to the death, and for what cause.
It seems to me that people these days, in America at least, have better things to do than kill each other for unclear reasons over unclear goals. Hedonism’s call has never been louder. America’s aspiring towards Las Vegas, not Bastille Day.
So presentism persists, even for the man of the cloth, who lived through observably revolutionary times, such as when major political figures were assassinated regularly and when major wars that killed tens of thousands of young men were fought.
That would be the 1960s and ‘70s, back when student protests at campuses actually turned violent and when commercial jets were hijacked with comparably absurd frequency.
That brings me to “Shenandoah,” a 1965 movie set during the Civil War and starring the incomparable Jimmy Stewart. Here’s a film that signals many signs of very troubling times, arguably worse than our own.
Also, I’d suggest that Alex Garland should’ve consulted this one for his own “Civil War.” Compared to that, “Shenandoah” is more learned, more adult, less like a videogame, and with fewer howlers. It speaks more towards genuinely troubled times, and less towards a Las-Vegas view of impending social doom.
As all historical movies do, “Shenandoah” uses its historical setting to obliquely discuss contemporary times. At least that’s how a literary historicist would view it.
In other words, why make an 1860s Civil War movie in 1965?
One answer is economic: you make it because it’s a commercial fad, such as Westerns.
Still, that’s never wholly satisfactory, and it isn’t with “Shenandoah,” which features a thorny, 1864 Virginian farmer played by Stewart.
He’s the single patriarch of a family of seven older children and one daughter-in-law. In his backyard, more or less, the Confederacy and the Union are blowing each other to bits. In one early scene he’s asked by one of his sons whether he should do anything about this. “Are they on our land?” he asks. No, they aren’t.
“Well then, it doesn’t concern us.”
What’s set up here is the potential for a great number of story tensions. One is a property right’s question.
Another is a question of duty and loyalty, which will come up repeatedly in the film. Despite social pressure, including pressure from clergy preaching from the pulpit, here the Southern farmer offers no help to what could be his cause, that of the South. He’s extremely clear that he wants his sons to not be a part of the war that they can hear and smell, just down the road. And they don’t want to be.
One strong way that any viewer could watch this is by asking “what does this have to do with the present day?” Which is 1965, again the year of the movie’s release.
At least two 1960s elements are present in “Shenandoah” — the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement.
Regarding the latter, we have the strange yet historically true case of a Southerner who dislikes slavery intensely. That’s one major impetus for not fighting for the Confederacy, despite his Virginian alliances. The Stewart character believes in self-ownership only. Everybody should be a laborer, not an owner of labor. From that you get pride in transforming your property into your own little kingdom. Slavery, therefore, is a detestable practice. (The movie is among the most inherently pro-natalist films I can think of, aligning that with labor — you make your own laborers by having lot of kids!)
Regarding Vietnam, “Shenandoah” asks the question early of whether we normie Americans should just sit this war out. By protesting conscription, it anticipates 1960s draft protests! Again, Stewart’s patriarch completely refuses any assistance to his own government. But it’s his sons who also refuse.
One plot point in “Shenandoah” is that the youngest son, about halfway through the film, will get inadvertently captured by the Union and sent to a prison camp. It’s up to his father to track him down, “Taken” style.
In that way, the war in the patriarch’s backyard is unavoidable. Still, he doesn’t believe in the cause at all. He sees two sides fighting, and neither has any appeal, and neither has any call of duty for him.
What I appreciate just about that plot tension is the in-between nature of the character. The recent “Civil War” movie sort-of tried this, by featuring neutral journalists weaving their way between sides to get the story. But unlike Stewart’s patriarch, a representative of a typical person, the journalists in “Civil War” are a bit out of touch with the common viewer today, who likely has a distrust of the media apparatus that those characters represent.
“Shenandoah” has good political reasons to exist for sure. The1964 Gulf of Tonkin debacle — it is a travesty that it’s still labelled in an Orwellian way as an “incident” — stimulated Congress to hand military power to President Johnson. The Americans enacted thereby another East-Asian war.
The movie therefore asks whether Ciceronian duties to the State, the ultimate loyalty owed by a citizen, has any truth and relevance — both universally, and particularly for 1965.
It’s telling that a classic American, Stewart, playing a classic type of American, an independent farmer, strongly resists the faux-calls to service and loyalty foisted upon him by both officials of church and state.
Obviously I am giving a mild recommendation to this film, despite a scene of cornball barnyard fighting and the errant practice then of casting 30-year-old actors as 16-year-olds.
The director Richard Linklater recently said that Hollywood has stopped making movies for adults. Anybody noticing the releases in theaters for the last several years would agree, I think. We can enter Garland’s “Civil War” into this, whose videogame-like structure offers non-sensical plot moves in order to resolve itself. It’s a good-looking film, yet it doesn’t seem to me to have anything to do with present-day reality, as “Shenandoah” does, just with the current delusions that one hopes will pass as quickly as the day’s flatulence.
“Shenandoah” has its mid-century entertainment value for sure. But it also offers a basic philosophical discussion of key matters we all contend with — e.g., why should we obey the State, and when shouldn’t we?
And it deals with the situation of normal people in horrible times, how these people might respond to those times.
Just check out this clip, for a response to the Vietnam War, and to present-day delusions about an upcoming American “civil” war: