How Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’ parlays the ‘great man’ notions of
history “You begin your second term with semi-divine status,”
the 16th president of the United States is told in Steven
Spielberg’s film Lincoln. The evidence of that status is in the
film’s mythifying visual style that presents Abraham Lincoln as
an icon—silhouetted, spectral, sculptural. The people around
him, such as the white and “negro” Union soldiers relating their
Civil War experiences of the 1865 Jenkins Ferry massacre during
the film’s introduction, are also made into myth. (These weary
men have already committed the Gettysburg Address to memory—a
presentiment of the schoolboy’s homework in Minority Report.)
Spielberg’s concern with “the right side of history” turns the
film into cult-of-personality deification; it’s on the side of
power, which makes it one of the weirdest pieces of supposedly
democratic Americana ever to come out of Hollywood. The story in
Lincoln dramatizes the president’s efforts to install a 13th
Amendment to the Consti