Telling Tales

I found myself watching North West Frontier (1959) again the other day.  I had no intention of watching it, but it was on and I was waiting for something else to start on another channel, so just kept on watching.  I seem to remember that it was always on TV when I was a kid, during the seventies, when we watched it in all innocence, seeing it as just an historical adventure film set during the days of the Raj.  Seeing it in a contemporary context is quite fascinating on the surface it is a stirring story of British military types facing down a local Muslim uprising in what is now Pakistan.  Yet, being made in 1959, with India having been an independent country again for more than ten years, you can see glimpses behind the stiff upper lips and stoicism of doubts over Britain's role as an Imperial power.  While heroic army captain Kenneth More tells half-Indian Muslim journalist Herbert Lom, 'see what happens when we aren't here to keep order', (the script writers perhaps looking forward to the ani-Muslim violence which accompanied the partition of India upon independence), as they view the aftermath of a rebel attack,  Lom's character makes some impassioned arguments in favour of self rule and the injustices of Imperial rule.  Sure, Lom is ultimately the villain of the piece, but, to be absolutely fair, it isn't so much his belief in self-rule for indigenous peoples that is condemned as the violence of his methods and for trying to make these beliefs concrete.  The film even ends with a foreshadowing of events to come (it is set in 1905), with the five year old Hindu prince that More has been protecting from the rebels informing the British officer that his late father told him that eventually he would have to fight the British to secure true independence for his people.  

Ultimately, though, what struck me most about the film on this viewing was that it was so clearly an attempt to tell ourselves, the British, that, despite the beginning of a reassessment of our Imperial legacy, we could still see ourselves as the good guys.  They might have been maintaining an essentially unjust system of colonial rule and expropriation of indigenous wealth for the benefit of Britain, officers likw Kenneth More's character were still basically decent chaps.  After all, he respects the expertise of the Indian locomotive driver and doesn't patronise him, he accepts the professionalism of the Indian soldiers under his command and accords the boy prince the level of deference appropriate to his position.  The British certainly aren't the villains of the piece - these are the warmongering but essentially faceless Muslim rebels and, to a lesser degree, the arms dealers who indiscriminately sell their wares to the highest bidder, (as represented by cheerful arms company rep Peters - Eugene Deckers in one of his biggest film roles - who, although having a British passport, is clearly of foreign birth).  While Lauren Bacall's feisty American governess provides a caustic critique of the British approach to crises, it never really amounts to a full-blown condemnation of Imperialism and she inevitably falls for More's terribly British charms.  North West Frontier is one of those stories we, as a society, like to tell ourselves in order to reinforce our narrative that, despite some shortcomings, historically we have been a force for good in the world and don't need to feel guilt or question the values which informed Imperialism.  

Obviously, this sort of story-telling isn't unique to the British.  All nations seek to justify themselves and their values in this way.  While Germans might not try to justify Nazism, for instance, in the same way as we try to justify empire, they have, in the post war period, sought to find some good among the evil of Hitler's regime.  Just look at the proliferation of biographies of wartime figures like Luftwaffe ace Adolf Galland, which try to establish him as an honourable soldier, loyally defending his country, while avoiding involvement in the politics of the regime.  Likewise the rehabilitation and veneration of Field Marshal Rommel as an apolitical homourable soldier,  While such interpretations of these figures might, to some degree, be true, the fact is that they still chose to operate within a regime openly based upon racism and anti-Semitism and which justified genocide.  Even if they didn't align themselves fully with these policies, or simply chose to turn a blind eye to the ample evidence that they were happening, their continued participation in the war effort was an endorsement of the ruling regime.  But it is still important for people to be able to look back and be able to say, 'well, we weren't all bad, not everyone who fought on our side were villains tainted by Nazism', just as it is important for the British to be able to look back at our Imperial past and say, 'well, we weren't the worst Imperial overlords - most of our boys were at least pretty decent chaps'.  For the US, of course, the mythologising of the Old West as a tale of brave pioneers and fearless lawmen battling against the odds to found a nation and tame the west, is a way of coming to terms with the fact that their nation was founded upon the injustice of  violently dispossessing the indigenous people's of their lands and way of life.

But it isn't just nations that seek to construct positive stories out their pasts. As individuals we do it all the time, constantly reshaping our memories in order to cast ourselves as the heroes of our own lives.  We all do it - I know that I certainly do.  We look back and try to justify our every decision, our every move, reinterpreting events so as to put ourselves in the best possible light.  Even those incidents which might seem discreditable are are reinterpreted - that time you were rude to shop assistant, for example, we try to recast, telling ourselves that we were somehow justified in being rude and churlish over what was really something trivial.  But increasingly I have come to believe that it is often better to be brutally frank with oneself and accept that sometimes we don't act heroically, sometimes we are wrong, sometimes we treat others badly, or behave selfishly - all in ways that we can't, in all honesty, justify.  If only we could do that at a national level maybe, just maybe, we could start moving forward rather than clinging to a past built on self delusion.