The Many Trials Of Nate Parker
I've lost count of the amount of times a filmmaker has been shredded by critics and academic specialists for their lack of historical inaccuracy in a particular film. The likes of Spielberg, Ridley Scott and Oliver Stone come to mind but the list is surely endless.
I love a good old-fashioned conspiracy theory but Stone's lack of accuracy and manipulation of historical fact and biographical detail in his take on the JFK assassin was beyond laughable. Spielberg chose in “Munich” to show guilt-riddled Israeli assassins because he wished to depict these state recruited assassins as inherently decent men who did what they had to do for the greater good. Unfortunately for Spielberg, during the many months of Munich’s release several of the surviving members of the Israeli hit team went out of their way to make it clear they felt no remorse about the killings and were actually offended by Spielberg’s Speilbergian sugar-coating of their work. Rafi Eitan, Mossad's chief of operations during the period following the Munich massacre, lambasted the movie as "unprofessional" and totally "unrealistic." While defending the movie against growing criticism in Isarel Alan Mayer, Spielberg's battered representative, argued that: "Spielberg, a strong supporter of Israel, is a storyteller. This movie is not a documentary. It is a story. “
When it comes to historical manipulation and bias Spielberg is a shameless serial offender. Spielberg used the sordid tale at the heart of “Amistad” to service the notion of a noble American male whose naturally superior Judeo-Christian values will always ensure he does the right thing under duress, so producing a barely credible intellectually vacuous companion piece to “Twelve Angry Men”. I can’t imagine Spielberg, Stone or Ridley Scott having any major issues with all the provable inaccuracies in the “The Birth Of A Nation”, and if we were to stop the tape every time a “mistruth” occurred within Katherine Biglow’s “Hurt Locker” or “Zero Dark Thirty” or Clooney’s “Syriana” would we ever reach the end of the movie?
Ultimately, these films reflect the intellectual, creative and human choices their directors have made to illuminate and buttress their perspective of historical events. We have to trust at some basic level that these storytellers are wise enough to make sound, defensible choices . With that said I don’t want to feel I’m forcing myself into policing Nate Parker’s work and then, in turn, police myself by coming to a “correct” conclusion about Birth Of A Nation and its director.
I haven’t yet seen the film or watched interviews with the director and I’m loath to take part in any kind of social media driven “retrial” of the old rape case that has caused several commentators to accuse Parker's critics of attempting to lynch him online. There’s something intrinsically odd about an online attempt to lynch the director of a movie about Nat Turner, a work that is set during a time when arbitrary mob rule “served righteous justice” on thousands of black men. However, upon reflection I don’t think the use of the word “lynch” is fair or sustainable.
Post the Cosby Rape revelations we’re clearly watching a powerful energy to say “never again” can we turn our backs on the voices of abused women whose stories have been hushed up or ignored by a complacent and compliant film and media industry. If Nate Parker’s past deeds and current words are catching flak from a more sensitised and proactive public, frankly, in the greater scheme of things, I think these difficulties are a small price to pay.
Despite Nate Parker’s many attempts to qualify and justify his past behaviour I'm of the opinion that the concept of consensual sex is quite straightforward, and I believe anyone who attempts to blur the simple dos and donts in play when a man’s penis is not welcomed, invited or desired by a woman is doing humanity a basic disservice. If Nate Parker’s current problems help to sharpen the awareness of any men who find themselves in an ambiguous sexual encounter and encourages them to try and clarify the situation or, better still, to keep their dicks zipped up, walk away and avoid an unwanted, non-consensual, potentially life-damaging experience for both of the involved parities then so be it.