The Ownership of History and Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell - Beck Siegal

Beck Siegal

Richard 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 fctional format. Clint Eastwood presents his fctional flm 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 flm’s representation of reality with regard to clearly invented aspects of his narrative. In this way, his flm 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, the flm, becomes the holder and knower of history. The flm’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 signifcance 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 flm, viewers fnd themselves submerged in a fashback 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

the area. This sequence has two related functions. First, it introduces an alternate history into the narrative. While the dream-sequence does not have a claim to factuality within the flm, and there is no suggestion that Jewell actually behaved like that within Eastwood’s invented universe, the viewer is reminded that the flm’s narrative emplotment represents only a possibility, and that it must always coexist with other factual interpretations. As White puts it, “historical accounts always represent attempts both to emplot the historical events adequately and implicitly to come to terms with other plausible emplotments. It is this dialectical tension between two or more plausible emplotments that signals the element of critical self-consciousness” (White 294). In the context of Richard Jewell, however, this use of dream-fashback confation as plot pluralizer does not represent cultural responsibility on the part of Eastwood-as-historian, but rather functions as a defater of the obvious irony in Eastwood’s reclamation of the reclamation of history. When Eastwood tells his audience that there could exist an alternate history with which his story is in tension, he absolves himself of the false-objectivism and unjust claiming of history for which his flm indicts The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Rather than placing his narrativization in dialectical tension with the other narratives of Jewell’s story, Eastwood uses this cursory acknowledgement of alternate history-narratives to place himself above and outside of the interlocking cultural exchange as a representor of history, rather than a part of it. Eastwood’s story claims to be subjective, a function of Jewell’s understanding of events. Despite the multiple histories in Jewell, one is treated as true. This subjectivization is concretized when we are totally focalized through Jewell, such as in the fash-back/dream sequence. As we enter his consciousness, we are completely aligned with Richard Jewell as protagonist. This not only avoids claims of objectivity, but places Jewell in a recognizably fctional framework. When we pass through Jewell’s consciousness into what George Wilson, in his essay “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film,” calls “a subjective shot,” that is an imagined series of events which is not “intersubjectively accessible” (81). Eastwood’s claim to authenticity transmutes from making a claim of ownership over the course of events, to one of ownership over Jewell’s perception of those events. The signifcance of this is multi-dimensional. In one sense, the effect is similar to that of the alternate narrative explored above: Eastwood’s fxation on one narrative angle–Jewell’s perception–sets the flm apart from the project of representing history, a project which is shown to be ethically fraught through the subject matter of the flm. Eastwood does not engage in what Marie Brenner, in the Vanity Fair article upon which the movie is based, criticizes as “voice of God” reporting. Rather than claiming the voice of God, Eastwood claims the voice of Richard Jewell. This is an equally fraught project, which both recognizes and avoids the public concerns around a claim to objective narrativization. Eastwood is careful not to claim authority over the narrative of events, but by inhabiting Jewell, he

claims a perspective while also suggesting that this perspective should be able to hold authority over events. The fctionalization of Jewell’s understanding is thus presented as outside of narrativized history. He is supposed to have really experienced the story. Through him, Eastwood seems to make two claims: that history can be primally experienced before it is narrativized, and that he can grasp this primal experience of events and refect it back to the viewer, even through a narrative. This can be conceptualized as the central assertion of the flm: that it represents the phenomenological experience of undergoing the making of history, engaging with the event rather than the narrative. Further, in aligning the flm to Jewell’s experience of events, Eastwood performs something which might be usefully thought of as a suturing of the flm into public imagination with closed edges. Eastwood’s direction of history and authorial voice, and with these his blind spots and biases (which are made more obviously concerning because of the problematic location of Eastwood himself in the public consciousness) seem less clear to an audience who is given an explicit epistemology of the flm. Focalized through Jewell, the flm uses perspective to protect itself from claims of shortsightedness, while still performing the operations (the unjustifed claim to history) which would garner these critiques. Of course, though, Jewell did not succeed at bypassing everything, or even most things, that might raise the hackles of its viewers, or at claiming history for itself in a culturally notable manner. It was a box-offce failure, Eastwood’s worst opening weekend in forty years (Rubin). Most critics attribute this failure to the controversy which preceded it, notably around the character of Kathy Scruggs. Eastwood’s creation of a totally unsubstantiated sex-scandal within his otherwise historically accurate flm is signifcant. The symbolism of the Scruggs scandal is primarily outward-facing; it references the hot-button issues which Eastwood seems to want Jewell’s history to engage with, ‘fake news,’ the Me Too movement, even when an experiential place does not exist for them in Jewell’s universe. Eastwood’s response to the suggestion that Scruggs’ representation is a sexist caricature comes as an appeal to factuality. Warner Bros’ claim that “The flm is based on a wide range of highly credible source material,” (Lang) represents a shirking of the responsibility of narrativization. Further, this negative argument of factuality, that it is not disprovable rather than that it is provable, suggests the unsubstantiated flling in of gaps which Jewell so thoroughly condemns in the media. Eastwood responds similarly: “You can’t live inside people because they no longer exist. We know as much as anybody knows…Kathy Scruggs was a very interesting personality, and she seemed to, she didn’t defne the answer to it, so how she did it, no one will ever really know” (Hasty). In the absence of the experience of events, Eastwood suggests that a narrative must fll the gap left by the dead subject. This raises the question of how dramatically useful conjecture around Scruggs’ sexuality is okay, when the same is not true for Jewell’s half of the story. On its surface level, this seems to be a contradiction. The flm tells

us that false ownership of history, an unfounded claim to narrative voice, is an irresponsible thing, that it might ruin a man’s life. There are explanations to be found in the misogynistic assumptions around female journalists, assumptions about sexuality and journalistic ethics that are familiar to Hollywood stories like this one. When Kathy Scruggs trades sex for information, it recalls a history of sexist tropes which were clearly at work in the writing of Scruggs. For Eastwood, after all “Kathy Scruggs was a very interesting personality,” a reference, most likely, to her recurring description as ‘a wild-card with hard edges,’ is evidence enough that “it could have certainly happened this way” (Day). This question can also be studied through the switch in focalization and purpose which the flm undergoes, from representing history to creating an analogy. This of course, is not unrelated to the implicit misogyny of Scruggs’ character: Richard Jewell, the misunderstood, all-American, is a person, while Scruggs, the immoral female reporter, is a symbol. Nonetheless, the flm privileges experience, the experience of Jewell, over narrativization, the feeling over the telling of history, and this is where it places itself for much of its action. Looking back at our entrance into Jewell’s head, we understand Eastwood’s narration as a subjectivization of event, which is not present within Kathy Scruggs. When we switch frameworks to the newsroom, we undergo something like Wilson’s epistemological shift. Epistemological shifts, Wilson says, depend on “surprising, systematic violations of narrational transparency,” (81) where narrational transparency is the clear identifability of a viewer’s subjective positionality in viewing a flm: with whom are we aligned, whose mistakes do we assume? For Wilson, the point of an epistemological shift is usually shock, we see this most clearly in thriller and horror movies. For example, when in Psycho we learn that Norman Bates was actually his mother the whole time, we undergo an epistemological shift from the errors of Norman’s perception to the flm’s non-subjective reality. This concept is employed in Jewell as a tool to bridge the gap between history and fction. Here, the epistemological jump allows for an interpretive double-standard on the part of Eastwood. He is able to consecutively critique the authorial voices which turn history narratives into broader symbols divorced from their objective experience and create his own hyper-symbolic history narrative. When the flm undergoes its epistemological shift from Jewell’s perspective to the authorial narration around Kathy Scruggs and Agent Tom Shaw, we enter the extended symbolism of the flm. Eastwood’s claim that “you can’t live inside people because they no longer exist” becomes a suggestion that there is no longer any event after it has ended and all histories are equal. The implications of this on Eastwood’s claim that he accurately refects Jewell’s voice are inconsistent, but so too is the purport of the flm, which alternatingly embraces and dismisses White’s claim that “histories ought never to be read

as unambiguous signs of events they report, but rather as symbolic structures, extended metaphors, that ‘liken’ the events reported in them to some form with which we have already become familiar” (White 291). He justifes his conversion of historical narrative into extended symbol thusly. Kathy Scruggs and Tom Shaw are not to be understood as subjects or voices within the flm’s universe, as evidenced through their shaky historic referentiality. Jewell’s power within Richard Jewell is his realness, the implication that his character understands the history perfectly, and to see through his eyes would be to approach the reality of the situation. Kathy Scruggs is different; she “certainly could have” felt or acted that way, and, from Eastwood’s perspective, the media acted unjustly in the same way she did. Her historical referent does not explain or even necessarily correlate to her character’s action. This is even more clear with regard to Tom Shaw, who is literally an amalgam of FBI agents and investigators. Scruggs and Shaw are symbolic gestures within a universe that claims historical veracity. The coexistence of direct historical referents and indirect cultural symbols within one fctional plane has far-reaching implications for Eastwood’s claim over a disputed history. The symbols which Scruggs and Shaw play out are a bridge between Jewell’s universe and ours. As symbolic agents in the plot of the flm, they refer both inwards to the flm’s “real eventhood” and outwards, to the real universe of the audience. This is how Eastwood suggests a contemporary resonance for the events of Jewell. This resonance depends on the condemnation of unjustifed narrativization, and the implicit understanding that all ‘objective’ narrativization is unjustifed. In order to make the appropriate connections to public discourse, (where else are false accusations and trial by public opinion to manifest in the conservative consciousness but in the spectre of the Me Too movement) the flm’s viewer must see that narrativization equates to unfair judgement, and that unfair judgement is the tragedy of Richard Jewell. Here, we see evidence of the tension between the flm’s message and the vehicle through which that message is delivered. Scruggs, the vehicle, is narrativized out of existence. When her brother, Lewis Scruggs Jr. protests that “the world needs to know she was as good a journalist as the world has ever seen,” (Brett) he is engaging with the wrong epistemological framework of the flm. He says that Eastwood’s narrativization misses crucial historical detail and is too hasty to make judgement, when really Eastwood’s narrativization of Kathy Scruggs is indifferent to crucial historical detail. She is a symbol. The interaction of her scenes and those of Jewell feels phony within the framework of the flm because they have drastically different dramatic purposes. Scruggs acts almost parodically; she pops up in the back of a truck and winks at the startled driver or pulls down the front of her shirt for an ogling FBI agent, whispering probing questions in his ear. Her irresponsibility and loose ethics are not character faws, but the entirety of her character. When we see her crying at the press

conference of Bobi, Richard Jewell’s mother, she matches the flm’s emotional apex. These hasty tears, primarily a device to further condemn her actions, are essentially all of her character development and the only sign that she might be internally complex. In contrast, Jewell’s complexity is almost obsessively recalled; Richard Jewell will not let its viewers forget that its titular character is multi-faceted. When Watson Bryant holds up the headline “Savage or Saint?” the irony is palpable. Having understood him in the way this flm claims it alone can communicate, the viewer knows that Jewell snaps at his mother but then immediately backs down, that he is not very bright but knows when he’s being made fun of, that he oversteps his jurisdiction but only because he cares about law and order, and so on, and so on. Jewell, in short, is neither savage nor saint, but human, experiencer of history. This, though, is not the case for nearly anyone else in the flm. These two epistemological frameworks and their contrasting narrative assumptions and character archetypes bump up against each other in ways which help to explain the type of historical repurposing which is being done in Jewell. These two types of fction, only one of which maintains a claim to historicity, co-exist uncomfortably. By comparing Jewell and Scruggs as case studies of two different understandings of the role of narrative in history, we can tease out the ethical implications of each, a function which is crucial for a movie as obsessed with the ethicality of history stories as Jewell is. This can be thought about through the framework of Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle writes: “Poetry… is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history, in that poetry tends to express the universal, history rather the particular fact. A universal is: The sort of thing that (in the circumstances) a certain kind of person will say or do either probably or necessarily, which in fact is the universal that poetry aims for.” (Aristotle 54). Understanding poetry as applicable to fction broadly, reading Eastwood’s two character-types through this lens teases out the question of what is different between these two character extrapolations from historical referents. Richard Jewell and his claim to historical veracity might be understood as a history narrative. His frame of reference is tightly contained: back to the historical Richard Jewell, rather than outwards to this type of thing, a universal principle. His actions seem picked primarily to bolster truth-claims, rather than for their symbolism. Despite the strict particularity of the Jewell character, the story of Richard Jewell undoubtedly holds universal symbolism. Eastwood achieves this without crossing the boundary between historic and poetic representation by putting Jewell and his subjective history narrative up against the objective poeticism of Scruggs. Jewell’s character next to Kathy Scruggs holds an interesting double function, wherein his very humanness affords him a type of universality and his particularity comes to be highly symbolic. Scruggs as all irresponsible

journalism, a randomly chosen particular case of a phenomenon with broad narrative and societal implications, who “could have been” like that, victimizes the individual in Jewell. She transgresses the boundaries of fction and impacts a real person. Jewell’s particularity becomes poetically symbolic of all particular fgures. If the undefnable forces of poor journalistic ethics and trial by public opinion, uncarefully shoved into the form of Kathy Scruggs, who happens to have a historical referent, can affect Richard Jewell, the individual, why can’t they affect the individual viewer as well? The ethical implications of this hedge Eastwood in on both sides. He simultaneously is not particular enough, haphazardly indicting an individual for a point which he wants to make about society, and too particular, claiming ownership over a real voice which he has no way of knowing or representing through a supra-narrative mode. Eastwood’s Richard Jewell is multiply fawed in its claims to history, but through this it makes several interesting arguments about the nature of historic narrativization. It critiques history narratives for their false “voice of God” objectivity and gestures at the possibility of a subjective representation of event before narrative, which it suggests is achieved through its alignment to the voice of Richard Jewell. Further, it introduces two types of historical veracity: the ultimately true event, which is positioned as an end to historical narrativization, a trump card over alternate stories of the same events, and the not-untrue story, which is narratively useful above all else. A look at these multiple impulses (the poetic and the historic, the event and the narrative, the universal and the particular, the subjective and the objective) elucidates some of the choices at work in stories about historical events, even when Eastwood’s gesture ends as gesture and he fails to choose one form of representation.

Works Cited

Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics: the James Hutton Translation: Ancient Contexts, Interpretations. Translated by James Hutton, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1982. 45-79. Brenner, Marie. “American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell.” Vanity Fair, February 1997, 100-165. Brett, Jennifer. “‘Richard Jewell’ Reporter Portrayal Draws Criticism.” The Detroit News, Dec 12 2019. Day, Nate. “‘Richard Jewell’ Cast Responds to Backlash Over Portrayal of Journalist.” Fox News, Dec 3, 2019. Hasty, Katie. “Clint Eastwood Only Hurt Himself With ‘Richard Jewell’s’ Worst Cliché.” Entertainment Weekly, Dec 16, 2019. Lang, Brent. “Warner Bros. Hits Back At Atlanta Paper Over ‘Richard Jewell’ Legal Threat.” Variety, Dec 9 2019. Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount Pictures, June 15 1960. Richard Jewell. Directed by Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros. Pictures, December 13 2019. Rubin, Rebecca. “Clint Eastwood Suffers Worst Opening Weekend in Four Decades With ‘Richard Jewell.’” The Chicago Tribune, Dec 16 2019. White, Hayden. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” CLIO, vol. 3, no. 3, Jun 1 1974, 277-303. Wilson, George. “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 64, no. 1, Winter 2006, 81-95.