Back in the early aughts, Mary Nichols and a number of her graduate students at Fordham University, put together a website of teaching units, suitable for high-school or undergraduate classes called Great Books & Film. Each unit used films to introduce or further develop prominent themes of a number of classic texts.
I was one of those grad students, and the unit I worked on is titled “Self-Love and Ambition,” which features texts such as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Henry V, Lincoln’s Lyceum Speech, and other selections from Robert Penn Warren, Tocqueville, Jefferson, and Rousseau, and links these to the films All the King’s Men, Bull Durham, Henry V, and Patton. The central issue of the unit is the problem of the Great Man for political life, especially as it is discussed in Lincoln’s Lyceum Speech.
Here’s what Mary Nichols wrote for our guide to Patton, using her own ideas, but also using/polishing substantial chunks of my own prose:
The blurbs say: "Maverick General! Super Patriot and Super Rebel!" And indeed, for many, Patton will remain an icon, like John Wayne, of rugged American individualism. But there is much more to the movie, and the man, than that. Indeed, to leave it at that would be to miss the point. Unlike Coriolanus, General Patton knew how to put on an act when it was in his interests to do so, and his main act was pushing his own feisty personality over the top, so that his soldiers would be inspired to be brave, aggressive, and confident. Reporters dubbed him "old blood and guts" for the gory details and exhortations to bravery he used in his speeches. Like Coriolanus, Patton's reputation for fighting spirit and bravery was based upon deeds. Moreover, for battlefield strategy he had no peer in the allied armies.
Unlike Henry V, a king striving to obtain another kingdom, or Coriolanus, a patrician expecting to become consul, this warrior was a servant of a democracy. Still, Patton was something of an aristocrat. His wealthy family was known for its forebears' prominence in confederate military service, and he married into an even more upper-crust family from Boston. He maintained horses, competed in polo and steeplechase, and always traveled, dressed, and dined in high style. He loved military pageantry and was an expert in military history, being particularly drawn to the ancient military commanders depicted in the pages of Plutarch's Lives. He relished daring and deplored cowardice. More than anything else, he loved the thrill, the trial, and the glory of war, even as he genuinely deplored the deaths of "so many fine young men" in battle.
Of course, in a modern bureaucratized army serving a democratic nation, such a classic warrior-type is bound to run into trouble. In Patton, the general gets in trouble with his nation for three reasons. 1) He disobeys the intent, if not the letter, of certain orders, in favor of his own strategically superior plans. 2) He makes controversial statements about foreign policy. 3) He angrily slaps a soldier admitted to a field hospital with a case of nerves and calls him a coward. Although Patton gets in a great deal of trouble with American public opinion over the latter incident, it is actually a very minor and quite innocent instance of Patton's deeper problems that threaten to remove him from command at the height of the war. As in the case of Coriolanus, Patton's defects are the flip side of his virtues. But unlike Coriolanus, Patton does not want to rule. He wants only to serve his country as a general. He wants desperately to do what he seems made for and can do better than anyone else. Thus, the political issue surrounding Patton involves whether democracy can make a suitable place for those like him. That is, does democracy have a place of honor for the warrior, and more generally, for the man who excels others?Patton addresses those with vaguely pacifist inclinations who may be appalled, and in some ways rightly so, by Patton's zest for warfare, and by the slapping incident particularly. The film also addresses those inclined to warmly embrace Patton as a Dirty Harry macho-man. To steer away from both these mistakes, we should focus upon Patton the thinker, who seeks, not always successfully, to rationally employ his passion for greatness toward worthy military ends.
This still seems right to me, although I do wish we had qualified the “Coriolanus seeks to rule” statement, as his political desires were a tad more complicated than that. And our analysis agrees entirely with Titus’s recent essay.
The unit also features discussion/essay questions on Patton, as well as dialogue from five or so key scenes. Take a look—and if you like what you see, and especially if you’re an upper-secondary or college-level teacher, I encourage you to explore the five other units available.
Here at PostModernConservative, we’ve highlighted the contributions of Paul Cantor and Peter Augustine Lawler to what we might call “Strauss-Influenced Film/TV Studies,” and we regularly highlight the mounting (and believe me, major!) contributions to that field of our own Titus; but Mary Nichols is an important figure in this field as well. Better-known for her pathbreaking work on Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides, and fondly remembered by those graduate students who studied under her at Fordham, and later at Baylor, she wrote some important essays on Westerns, Whit Stillman, Casablanca, and the best (i.e., most philosophical) book on Woody Allen’s films.
There’s much more to say about Mary’s more-standard academic contributions, mostly in the area of classical political philosophy, which are by no means over—a book on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is coming—even if she did retire from teaching a couple of years ago.1 An upcoming post of mine on Republic commentaries will say a little about one of those.
But I must say here that more than even Peter Lawler, it was she who taught me how to analyze films. Yes, she has a soft-spot for one film that I believe was overrated, Shakespeare in Love, due to her general love for the Bard, but overall, her selections and judgments regarding cinema are consistently wise ones. Yes, she has a taste for Allen’s Manhattanite film-musings that some would regard as too soft, but her book on his films takes the reader directly into some very tough philosophic issues, and many of her best essays on film illustrate understanding of the harder facts of politics, and how they often require manliness, in addition to wisdom, to handle. Her selection of Patton for our unit, and her writing on it above, are examples of that side of her thinking, as is her authorship of one of our very best books on Thucydides.
So with Titus, let us remember this Memorial Day those who made the ultimate sacrifice, and those who fought with Patton-like skill, courage, and battle-zest, qualities we might regard as aristocratic, to lead our democratic armies to victory.
On his last album Bob Dylan had this in a song called “Mother of Muses”:
Sing of Sherman, Montgomery, and Scott
And of Zhukov, and Patton, and the battles they fought
Who cleared the path for Presley to sing
Who carved the path for Martin Luther King.
A jarring way of thinking about things, especially the putting of Zhukov and Presley in there—but there’s something to it. And if you’re tempted to think the Western freedom won by the deaths of so many young men simply lead to the triumph of an abstract embrace of equality, and a bodily embrace of “Presley” and all he might be made to stand for, remember that it also made possible, regardless of whatever it is we will face in the decades to come, the philosophic study of Great Books in democratic institutions, as exemplified by the career of Mary Nichols.
A recently published festschrift for Nichols, to which I contributed an essay, “Social Dance in the Films of Whit Stillman,” is Politics, Literature, and Film in Conversation: Essays in Honor of Mary P. Nichols. Fun collection, esp. for “politics and literature” scholars. A more important recent volume, modelled on the Strauss-Cropsey history of political philosophy but given a thematic focus on democracy, is Democracy and the History of Political Thought, and it seeks, albeit more obliquely, to honor both the work of Mary, and that of her husband, the American political scientist David Nichols. The Nichols have consistently sought to highlight the more liberal-democracy-friendly aspects of Strauss-influenced studies, so the latter 25-chapter work is a fitting tribute to their shared legacy.
A wonderful scholar--a timely tribute, Carl!
If I may make use of the idea that the wise are wise enough to know they need the manly, Dirty Harry was right & he deserves praise-