CASE STUDY OF THE DOCUDRAMA AMISTAD

CASE STUDY OF THE DOCUDRAMA AMISTAD

One of the movie hits of the winter 1998 film season was Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, the previously little-known story of a rebellion by

53 kidnapped Africans aboard a Portuguese slave ship in 1839. They killed all but two of their captors. Double-crossed by these two sailors, who kept sailing to America at night, the Africans ended up in a Connecticut jail. However, their cause was taken up by Christian abolitionists, who hired ex-President John Quincy Adams to argue their case up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which eventually released them. The movie left out or downplayed certain major protagonists and enhanced the roles of others or combined them into fictional composites (e.g., Morgan Freeman’s character). J.Q.Adams’ (Anthony Hopkins) stirring speech to the U.S. Supreme Court never happened, according to Amistad historian and film consultant Clifford Johnson. The Africans’ earlier attorney Roger Baldwin is portrayed as a more minor and inept character than he in fact was. Abolitionism as a movement almost disappears in the film, except for the abolitionist Lewis Tappan, who is played as a hypocrite with a more minor and far less noble role than the historical Tappan had. The central driving role of Christianity in the lives of the abolitionists is largely absent in keeping with the general invisibility of

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religion in American popular culture (see chapter 11). Still, for all its rewriting of history, the film Amistad brought this important but previously largely unknown incident to the consciousness of millions in a way that historians could never hope to do (W.Goldstein, 1998; A.Schneider, 1998).

In a curious footnote to the controversy over this film, an egregious historical error has come to light. The revolt’s leader Cinqué, portrayed as a hero in Spielberg’s film, has been identified in several sources as having later returned to Africa and himself become a slave trader. In a bit of bibliographic sleuthing, Amistad historian Howard Jones traced the historical source of this claim to several history textbooks by Samuel Eliot Morison in the 1950s and 1960s. The sole source cited in these texts is a 1953 novel Slave Mutiny by William Owens. Apparently, several historians adopted Morison’s interpretation without checking primary sources. Although novelist Owens apparently reported seeing some document somewhere confirming Cinqué’s role as a slave trader, researchers at the Amistad Research Institute could find no record of such activity (Hot Type, 1998).

Even if news is not quite the preeminent influence it is sometimes heralded to be, it occupies a major place in the popular imagination. The coverage of news has itself become news, sometimes bigger news than the event being covered. On the eve of the Iowa presidential caucuses one year, a voter in the studio was asked if she planned to attend the caucus and thus participate in the selection of a nominee for president. Her reply was to look around the studio and say, “Oh, I guess so, but I hate to miss all the excitement here.” In other words, the act of reporting had become the newsworthy event, eclipsing the event being reported. This example suggests the continuation of this discussion in the context of the specific area of politics, which is the subject of chapter 8.

CHAPTER 8