Alex Massie really hates Braveheart.  Fair enough.  While it is not the historical absurdities of the film that bother him the most, they are enough to make me shake my head in disbelief, so I am not going to say very much on behalf of Braveheart.  I am afraid that I’m having trouble finding the racist element in it beyond the general categorisation of Englishmen as barbarous thugs who want nothing more than to rape and pillage (oh, wait, I’ve got it now).  If I were a Scot, I would probably find it to be as dreadful as I found The Patriot as an American.  My objections to the latter may be slightly idiosyncratic, since I found the movie’s treatment of Loyalists, for one thing, absolutely awful; the happy South Carolinian beach community where our hero takes refuge is also a bit hard to take.  (In knocking The Patriot, I risk no backlash from outraged fans, since none exists.)  I think I may be able to explain why Braveheart won such a following in Scotland.  First, any group of people will respond favourably to the the dramatic re-telling of the stories from their national history that portray them as the put-upon, longsuffering people who throw off the yoke of oppression and whose hopes are embodied in a charismatic warrior figure who suffers and dies on their behalf.   Maybe this is why some Indians liked Mangal Panday–who knows?  My guess is that they liked it because of Rani Mukherjee, but that is another story.  

On a different point, I would remind everyone of the great enthusiasm Braveheart generated among many on the right, along with neo-secessionist sympathisers with the SNP, in this country.  It was frequently feted in the American conservative press as the “conservative movie of the year.”  Why?  Because Gibson was always talking about “freedom,” which was a word that had already become a substitute for alot of conservative argument back in 1995.  In fact, the redeeming features of Braveheart had little to do with some general “freedom” (sorry, that’s “freedom!”) and everything to do with waging a vendetta for his murdered woman (compelling, but totally fictitious) and fighting on behalf of his friends and countrymen.  (If I recall correctly, Wallace’s original skirmish with the authorities was actually a fight for the right to keep a fish that he had caught, which is a respectable, if less romantic, thing to fight for.)  The things that made Apocalypto worthwhile were the things that kept Braveheart from becoming a purely Eisensteinesque approach to the middle ages.  My impression is that students of film could probably learn something by comparing Alexander Nevsky and Braveheart as similar ideological treatments of medieval warfare that recast the medieval struggles in totally different, modern terms.

Setting aside their problems, the thing I find interesting about Braveheart and The Patriot is the way that they show how, for lack of a better word, “blowback” comes into being.  Gibson always sets up the story as one of the average man whose hand is forced by brutal and repressive action by the invading/dominating (always English) forces to take violent retaliatory action.  He reprises part of this sort of story in Apocalypto.  This was a Gibson action flick that I actually enjoyed, which was described to me as the most paleo film ever made and which Peter Suderman has called “the ultimate reactionary movie,” which may well be true.  When Republican audiences see Gibson leading a rebellion against a tyrannical occupying force, be it the English of the 14th century or the British of the 18th century, they tend to eat it up (though, somewhat weirdly, there was a much stronger positive response to Braveheart in America than to The Patriot), but when it comes to Americans projecting power far from home and occupying other peoples’ lands, well, they seem to forget all of this and become very incensed at the idea that people in other countries might respond to the indignities and humiliations of domination by foreign powers in a similarly rebellious way.

One final point: people tend to respond more favourably to Wallace-like martyr figures than they do to successful Bruce-like political leaders in their art and literature (not necessarily in their voting), because I think there is a broadly shared and deep sentiment that makes many people really want to believe that good leaders are firmly uncompromising and slightly mad.  Political leaders who engage in politics are always going to be considered less inspiring and less admirable, even when those leaders actually bring home the bacon, because people will receive this “bacon” with the knowledge of the supposedly unsavoury process by which it was acquired.  It was acquired by compromise, you see, which is obviously less desirable than acquiring it through a bold armed raid on the local pig farm.  This doesn’t make any sense.  It is part of the chaotic, destructive side of romanticism, and it isn’t supposed to make sense, because it is an open revolt against things that make sense.