Robert Burgoyne,
Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S History.
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 1997.
ISBN 0 81662071 7(pb)
137pp
US$14.95

(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

Uploaded 1 March 2001

In this stimulating, if tantalisingly short book, Burgoyne explores the changing film narratives which, he contends, constitute genuine assaults on the “dominant fictions” that define the American nation. Working from a series of film texts which “take the American past as their subject” – particularly Thunderheart (1992), Born on the 4th July (1989), JFK (1991) and Forrest Gump (1994) – Burgoyne accepts that “the link between national identity and narrative is especially apparent in the American cinema”. Yet in revisiting these connections he contests the comforting assumption that cultural fictions embedded in dominant cinema have worked consensually or simply as overriding stories shaping an unquestioned nationalism. “With questions of national, racial, and cultural identity emerging as a central topic of debate in the United States” he writes, “the American past has become a contested domain in which narratives of people excluded from traditional accounts have begun to be articulated in a complex dialogue with” what he identifies as “the dominant tradition”. Although based on subtle explorations of just a handful of films, his broad claims are presented with only limited qualification and little circumspection. He is confident that the stories and images interrogated here represent the dominant contemporary fictions of American life while, at the same time, he argues that this film culture projects a “counter narrative of American history”. Rejecting consensual understandings of American national identity as “imagined community bound by deep horizontal comradeship”, Burgoyne argues that American identities are structured by social antagonisms and contradictions, notably those posed by race, ethnicity and sexuality.

The films interrogated in detail offer, Burgoyne argues, complex treatments of the links between historical representations and nationhood. Each film addressed different moments of national crisis, crystallising issues of identity in an increasingly complex and fragmented society. He is convinced that the defining points of US history are embedded in these films which bring “the margins in to the center of the national text” and “compel a new configuration of the nation’s self image”. Thunderheart is explored as a text representing the ways in which native Americans are agents for counter narratives of the nation – “bearers of an alternative historical and national consciousness” growing out of war and struggle. In Born on the 4th July he finds a field for understanding national identity, gendered identity and the Rescue Fantasy and he argues that this film opens up a more “complex reading of masculine agency in the Vietnam film than has been given to date”.

In JFK Burgoyne finds not a narrative of national cohesion but stylistic ruptures and fractures which betray ideas of unity, representing the disjunctures and contests of contemporary social relations (in short a post-modern text). Forrest Gump he argues, is an example of the construction of prosthetic social memory which erases the struggles of history to integrate the past into an unproblematic and essentially traditional narrative of nation. This film manages memory, enhancing, improving and redefining historical events and ultimately implying that this evocation of the 1960s and 1970s is more authentic than memories of a contested society in these years. “It appears that the film evokes the cultural encyclopaedia” of these years, he writes, largely “in order to construct a virtual nation whose historical debts have all been forgiven and whose disabilities have been corrected”. While Burgoyne’s interpretation of Forrest Gump might appear benign, indeed strangely sanguine, he does acknowledge it as the antithesis of the other films analysed: it works consensually by denying tensions; it represents a singular narrative of nation – not the “polycultural interdependence” of America’s past. Yet even Gump betrays, if somewhat perversely, the way film in general is refashioning popular memory and the stories of the nation.

Burgoyne’s explorations are a wonderfully perceptive introduction to the way US film has joined the debates over the nation’s past, setting forth counter-historical narratives which validate the cultural hybridity, differences and contests that are contemporary America. While this reviewer might argue that Burgoyne is rather too optimistic about the capacity of film to undermine or refashion dominant national fictions, he is undoubtedly justified in claiming that film texts are central to efforts to reconfigure the “recovered memory” of the American nation. His stimulating insights deserve a wide readership.

Roger Bell