The Good Lord Bird and the Problem with Filtering John Brown’s Message Through Comedy

The defining moment of John Brown’s life came when he decided, relatively early, that the only solution to the institution of slavery in the United States—the only way to abolish it—was through violence. He has been painted in the intervening years by some (primarily southern historians, as Jacob Oller noted in his review) as a lunatic and a madman, and there’s no doubt that his passions ran deep, but on this count he was perfectly sane. He was also correct. But unlike most citizens of the time, he took his realization to the next step. Slavery so offended his sense of morality that if it could only be destroyed by violence, then he saw it as his mission to propagate that violence, and to stir his country to violent acts of its own. It’s why he fought (and murdered) the slave state forces in Bleeding Kansas, and it’s why he led the doomed raid on Harper’s Ferry (intending to start a slave rebellion), that led to his hanging. It would be too historically convenient to say that he set out to incite the Civil War, but in fact the audacity of his final act —which made him such a hero in the north and such a villain in the south—helped escalate tensions that did, actually, bring about the war of emancipation. In this sense, he fulfilled his mission with a clarity of purpose that few other American figures can claim.

In discussions of The Good Lord Bird, Showtime’s good-but-not-great series in which Ethan Hawke portrays the character of Brown in a narrative that fictionalizes a good deal of his story while adhering to broad biographical strokes, many critics have focused on the applicability of Brown’s story to modern racial justice. Understandably so; seemingly everything bad that happens in this country is a consequence of our original sin, and it’s impossible not to contrast the successful abolition of slavery with the racial disparities that have continued in American life ever since. But equally as interesting, to me, is Brown’s broader notion that certain problems just don’t have a non-violent solution. The thought is anathema to the worldview of many people who believe they live in a relatively stable democracy, but even in America we’re beginning to confront catastrophes like climate change that threaten to destroy our planet, but whose root causes seem intractable. Even now, major magazines and some activists are confronting the idea of whether a solution is possible without some level of violence, and it’s my guess that eco-terrorism will be an emerging story in the next decade, perpetrated by radicalized people who look with hopelessness at peaceful avenues of reform.

That’s the characteristic of John Brown that fascinates the most—he saw no path but a violent path, and then committed himself to the violence. To some, that’s fanaticism; to others it’s a rare case of a privileged person who didn’t need to engage in this particular battle doing so anyway because he had the courage of his convictions. Any portrayal of Brown, then, has to be judged on these merits—does it capture the singularity of vision?

With Ethan Hawke’s depiction, the answer is “for the most part, with a few caveats, yes.” If that sounds decidedly un-Brown-like in its equivocation, so be it. Hawke’s Brown, and the series at large, has a nagging predilection for comedy. While it serves to lighten the mood, it also creates a strange hybrid man out of Brown that is almost certainly ahistorical. Which is fine, since this isn’t a strict biography, but the problem comes when it turns Brown into a muttering incompetent who veers between absent-minded prattling and sudden bouts of righteous fury. The fury is great—Hawke’s eyes swim with holy fervor, and he lights up with all godly vengeance that infused Brown (and which gave him credibility, after Harper’s Ferry, when he tied his motivations to biblical passages in his famous last speech). In the heat of battle, you can see the vibrational intensity that would inflame a man to the extent that he could undertake that last, quixotic mission.