LCT JOURNAL 2020
The Ownership of History and Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell Beck Siegal
R
ichard Jewell’s story, his varied passage through the collective imaginary, serves as a tool to think about the implications of claiming the right to narrativize history, especially through a fictional format. Clint Eastwood presents his fictional film as a representation of reality through which he might set right the errors of an irresponsible media’s false objectivity. He refuses, even, to acquiesce to criticisms about his film’s representation of reality with regard to clearly invented aspects of his narrative. In this way, his film presents itself as an ultimate end to the multiple narratives of history in tension with each other around the events of Richard Jewell’s past; Richard Jewell, Jewell, the film, becomes the holder and knower of history. The film’s critics engage with it on this level, claiming that their ownership of the historical events surpasses Eastwood’s. In the warping of history around new and successive narrative modes, we see that Richard Jewell undergoes several stages of being owned and directed through the medium of the public imagination by individuals who claim that they can make and decide, or set right, history. Eastwood’s Richard Jewell makes a claim of ultimate alignment with Jewell’s historic voice, and, in doing so, positions itself as able to critique the narrativization of history from within its own historical narrative. It fails to acknowledge the unknowable place in history held by Jewell, especially following his 2007 death: its re-narrativization of Jewell’s life is simultaneously above history and deeply historically symbolic. As Hayden White writes in his essay, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” the events of Jewell’s life are variously positioned as part of an “extended metaphor.” White continues, “As a symbolic structure, the historic narrative does not reproduce the events it describes; it tells us in what direction to think about the events and charges our thought about the events with different emotional valences” (290). The significance of Jewell’s involvement with the Centennial Park Bombing is nebulous and unknowable, intimately tied to the narrativizing efforts of historian-subjects within the history of Jewell’s life and death. The facts of Eastwood’s narrative slide around to accommodate public perception while claiming that they are a subjective representation of events where the subject is Jewell. At one point in the film, viewers find themselves submerged in a flashback which is later revealed as a nightmare. Jewell dives to the ground and hugs the Centennial Park bomb to himself, bracing for impact. Earlier, we saw the diegetic reality of these events: Jewell upright and evacuating people from Page 25
