General Prompt: Read John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (and our class discussion) against the texts we’ve explored in class (both the documents in Fehrenbacher and the essays and book chapters) up through week 4 in a 4-5 page essay (double spaced, 12 point, Times New Roman font, or something comparable).
As we discussed in class, the film turns on the audience’s awareness of what Lincoln became – and has become in our collective imagination. The audience, in other words, knows what the characters in the film (including the protagonist) do not: that Lincoln will become great, the proper subject of film, memorials, poems, and national – and even world-wide — admiration
. How does Ford suspend our foreknowledge so that we can take an almost innocent place in the audience and find ourselves in suspense, wondering how things will turn out? What is the relationship between the work the film is doing in its time (so that it becomes an artifact of its present, in this case, 1939) and what it tells us today about its ostensible subject (in this case, the Lincoln of history). And, after all, what is the film trying to do?
This film gives us a particular kind of Lincoln, one the filmmaker (Ford) presumably considered worth presenting to his own era as a, what, model for emulation? Hero for admiration/adulation? Myth for incorporation and absorption?
Idea for approximation? It will be worth comparing the kind of Lincoln we get from Ford in 1939 with that given us by Spielberg in 2012 (and if you wait on your assignment, you can write on that question). But why this Lincoln in this particular time and place? Why “young” Mr. Lincoln just beginning to hone his skills and not wizened President Lincoln cleverly manipulating his (as we will see in the Spielberg)? You might even wonder what sort of people need this particular representation of history at this moment.
Some questions you might consider include (but are surely not limited to):
a. What story is the film telling us about Lincoln’s significance to the film’s present and how compelling is that as an assessment of his meaning in his time?
b. Given what you know from our reading, how well does Ford represent Lincoln’s conception of law? Of politics? (Do we see politics in the film?)
c. How does Ford wrestle with the tensions between individual aspiration and community well-being in the film? Is Lincoln in the community or out of it? And how closely does the film approach Lincoln’s own stance on this question (given the texts we’ve read)?
d. How does Ford represent Lincoln’s potentiality and free will to an audience already aware of what he will become? Remember, the film was called Towards His Destiny in France.
e. Considering the film’s own time, is Ford’s vision of the 1830s nostalgic? What image of America is Ford offering his audience in 1939 and why (you might speculate)?
