September Dawn — the pre-release buzz

Last updated on: August 21, 2007 at 7:58 pm by Peter T. Chattaway

September Dawn — the pre-release buzz 2007-08-21T19:58:00-07:00 Peter T. Chattaway

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After a few postponements, September Dawn — a dramatization of the Mountain Meadows massacre, in which a wagon train full of pioneers passing through Utah was slaughtered by local Mormons on September 11, 1857 — is finally opening this Friday.

My review will be up that day at CT Movies. In the meantime, the pre-release buzz has begun. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Co-writer-director of “September Dawn” Christopher Cain dismisses the idea the movie puts a bad light on Mormonism, correlating the religious zealotry the film depicts with the clash of cultures that has led to America’s “war on terror” and twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I don’t have an agenda with the Mormon Church,” Cain said. “What I do have is a theoretical view of how we can look at what’s happening today.”

“We live in a time where the news is dominated by the religious, fanatical world — a time where a 20-year-old kid with his whole life ahead of him can walk onto a bus and blow himself up and war is being waged by a bunch of nut-cases ‘over there.’ Well, it happened here 150 years ago. I just saw this [movie] as an opportunity to look at how this happened in our own backyard — and not that long ago.” . . .

For his part, [Jon] Voight was drawn to his role — a man of the cloth whose deep piety results in mass murder, carried out in part by his own son — as a means of addressing what he sees as a pressing issue.

“I’m not one who goes looking for those references, but it is a chilling irony that this happened 150 years ago on Sept. 11,” Voight said.

“This film is obviously very relevant today in terms of what we’re faced with: religious fanaticism endangering all democracy. It’s our own history, and I hadn’t known it before.”

For Michael Medved, writing in USA Today, the fact that this film zeroes in on 19th-century Mormonism as a sort of metaphor for 21st-century Islam — instead of zeroing in on Islam itself — is evidence that “Hollywood” is sticking its head in the sand:

The film’s deliberately drawn analogy between Mountain Meadows and 9/11 raises the most puzzling question about this peculiar project: Why frame an indictment of violent religiosity by focusing on long-ago Mormon leaders rather than contemporary Muslims who perpetrate unspeakable brutalities every day?

In fact, Hollywood’s reluctance to portray Islamo-Nazi killers remains difficult, if not impossible, to explain. Since 2001’s devastating attacks, big studios have released numerous movies with terrorists as part of the plot, including Sum of All Fears, Red Eye, Live Free or Die Hard, The Bourne Ultimatum and many more, but virtually all of them show terrorists as Europeans or Americans with no Islamic connections. Even historically based thrillers downplay Muslim terrorism: Steven Spielberg’s Munich spends more than 80% of its running time showing Israelis as killers and Palestinians as victims, while Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center highlights the aftermath of the attacks with no depiction of those who perpetrated them. United 93 stands out among recent releases in showing Islamic killers in acts of terror — and it would be hard to tell that story without portraying the suicidal hijackers.

Beyond topicality, Tinseltown’s respect for Muslim sensibilities has proved so pervasive that there has been little or no reference to bloody episodes of the Islamic past. In Kingdom of Heaven, Muslim followers of Saladdin appear far more sympathetic than the thuggish, devious Christian Crusaders. Despite the fact that founders of Islam built their religion through centuries of conquest vastly more bloody than incidents at the beginnings of Mormonism, it’s unthinkable that filmmakers would ever depict Mohammed and his followers as viciously as they handle Brigham Young in September Dawn.

I think Medved overstates the negative portrayal of the Christians in Kingdom of Heaven; the knights played by Liam Neeson and David Thewlis, to cite just two prominent characters, are clearly meant to be positive. But yeah, it is interesting how books like The Sum of All Fears and The Bourne Ultimatum featured Muslim or Palestinian terrorists as the bad guys, whereas the movies cast neo-Nazis or American federal agents as the villains instead.

As for whether a movie about an atrocity committed by Mormons ought to be made or released, I say why not? All historical subjects are acceptable fodder for the big screen. The question, here as elsewhere, is not what movies are about, but how they are about them. But even the badly made movies can bring things to our attention that we might never have heard about otherwise, and even the badly made movies can provoke us to do a little research and learn what really happened way back when.

And don’t worry, I say all that while fully keeping in mind G.K. Chesterton‘s great essay on the perils of historical films.

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