Sherlock Holmes’ Posthumous Copyright Case

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Cinema, Creative Writing, Law and society,, Literary & Linguistics, Performing arts, Popular Culture

The image stereotype of the Sherlock Holmes character (Source: Culture Livresque)

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Few characters from modern literature pop up on cinema screens and TV sets as frequently as Sherlock Holmes does. Some observers have stated it more firmly. Christopher Redmond estimates that Sherlock Holmes is the most prolific screen character in the history of cinema (A Sherlock Holmes Handbook (1994)). Just how many different Sherlock Holmes screen adaptions have been made is too large and elusive a number to pin down accurately, but screen vehicles of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous super-sleuth and Mensa-alumni certainly number in the hundreds✱.

(Photo: CrimeReads)

A publishing can of worms
When Arthur Conan Doyle (ACD) died in 1930 the author left his literary works in Trust to his widow (Jean Conan Doyle) and immediate family. But in excluding his daughter Mary from his first marriage, ACD opened the door to an ongoing family rift, decades of squabbles, strife and litigation by his heirs, descendants and their spouses.

As the intra-family ‘Barney’ over who controls the copyright to the Sherlock Holmes works deepened, the imbroglio entangled an investment company specifically set up to manage the windfall (aptly named “Baskervilles Investments”) and even the Royal Bank of Scotland (‘History of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Copyrights’, (2015), www.arthurconandoyle.com).

1954 Holmes TV series with Ronald Howard (Photo: dvdfr.com)
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The upshot of the kerfuffle was that each of the competing parties claimed to be the rightful holder of the rights to ACD’s literary estate, and then attempted to sell it notwithstanding the prevailing uncertainty over ownership. American TV producer-director Sheldon Reynolds acquired a licence from two of Arthur’s sons to make a Sherlock Holmes series in the 1950s. When, 20 years later, Reynolds tried to get a licence for a follow-up series on TV, he found that the legal landscape had changed. The rights were now held by the Royal Bank of Scotland who had acquired them after the previous owner defaulted on a loan. Eventually, with funds provided by his Pfizer heiress mother-in-law, Reynolds secured the rights to the Holmes stories.

Andréa Plunket (Source: goodreads.com)

Culture of litigation
Since 1990 the main battle for control of the copyrights has pitted Reynolds’s ex-wife, Hungarian-born heiress Andréa Milos (née Reynolds, née Plunket) versus the Conan Doyle Estate and others. Plunket has doggedly claimed to hold the rights to the name “Sherlock Holmes” and the stories, despite a lack of legal support for the claims. Lawsuits were exchanged between her and the Estate. Plunket also threatened to sue the BBC over its Sherlock television series for allegedly infringing ‘her’ trademarks (‘The Scandalous Sherlock Holmes Copyright Issue’, Mattias Boström, I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, 30-Jul-2015, www.ihearofsherlock.com).

The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Estate for its part has been particularly litigious in defence of its literary legacy. The Estate has consistently striven to maintain water-tight control over both the Sherlock Holmes stories and the characters. In 2013 it demanded author Leslie S Klinger pay a fee to license the Sherlock character for an anthology he was planning to do. Klinger’s response was to sue the Estate on the basis that most of the Sherlock material was in the public domain. In court the judge upheld Klinger’s position, while reaffirming that some late works were still covered under copyright (‘Sherlock Holmes Copyright: An overview’, Brogan Woodburn, www.redpoints.com). In 2020 it sued Netflix over its upcoming film Enola Holmes. The grounds? The film apparently depicts Holmes as having emotions and respecting women. This, the Estate contends, breaches Conan Doyle’s copyright (‘Lawsuit over ‘warmer’ Sherlock depicted in Enola Holmes dismissed’, Alison Flood, The Guardian, 22-Dec-2020, www.theguardian.com).

‘The Red-Headed League’ story (Golden Press edition, 1963)

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End-note: An additional complication over the Holmes copyright issue is a demarcation between the UK and US laws. In the UK copyright lasts for 70 years after an author’s death (in Conan Doyle’s case, the copyright expired in 2000). Conversely in the USA some copyrights extend for 95 years from the date of the work’s first publication⍟. This has proved a stumbling block for TV series and film-makers trying to adapt one of the Sherlock stories in recent years (‘Sherlock Holmes And His “Copyrighted Emotions”‘, Copyright House, 28-Sep-2020, www.copyrighthouse.org).

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✱ including works for film, music, radio, stage, video games, there are over 25,000 products that are related to the famous detective (Woodburn)

⍟ the last of ACD’s published work expires in 2023

The Screen’s Long Love Affair with the Sherwood Forest Saga: Repackaging the Robin Hood Legend

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Cinema, Creative Writing, Memorabilia, Popular Culture

The story of Robin Hood is one of those enduring English chronicles from the distant past, which like the Arthurian legend has continually provided rich fodder for the screen. The basic story is an all-too familiar one with universal appeal: a virtuous Saxon nobleman in Mediaeval England, fleeced out of his estate and title by powerful villains, responds by mobilising an heroic and effective resistance against the status quo, on the way freeing the poor and oppressed peasantry from their yokes. That the legend is known throughout the Anglophone world and Europe, is testimony to the fact has there been so many film and television goes at retelling the legend – starting with the first silent one in 1908.

It wasn’t until the 1922 silent version with Robin Hood played by the lead Hollywood actor of the day Douglas Fairbanks Sr that the Robin Hood movie achieved serious cinematic recognition. Fairbanks’ athletic prowess and spectacular stunts elevated the movie and captured the imagination of audiences. With a budget of nearly one million dollars (one of the biggest in the silent era) the 1922 Robin Hood helped to establish the ‘swashbuckler’ sub-genre in cinema.

The next version of note, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) is considered by many to be the best movie on the iconic Saxon hero. Errol Flynn in the title role brings the energy and verve to the film that largely accounts for The Adventures of Robin Hood’s standing as one of the great swashbucklers of Hollywood. As one critic observed: “Flynn’s Robert of Locksley, dripping with sexuality, good humor, panache and swagger,  captures not only the derring-do character, but also the more dramatic side of his fight for injustice” (Susan King, ‘Classic Hollywood: 100 Years of Robin Hood movies’, LA Times, 12-May-2010). The use of (Technicolor) colour, still not widely used at that time, added to the film’s freshness and appeal.

R Todd in the Lincoln Green

For most Flynn’s performance and the 1938 classic has remained the benchmark. Of the numerous subsequent RH iterations, none have really stacked up against The Adventures of Robin Hood but some of the efforts do warrant a degree of favourable mention. The modest 1952 low-profile Disney flick, The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men is a sleeper of a movie compared to the  blockbusters above, but it proved popular in the US (good performance by Irish actor Richard Todd in the lead) and was in the main well received by the press: “an expert rendition of an ancient legend”; “as lively as a sturdy Western” (New York Times); a “zesty, colorfully retelling of the familiar story” (Leonard Maltin); and for its authentic English locations.

One of two 1991 feature film versions of Robin Hood was the much hyped Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves which did well at the box office but was not critical well received. Kevin Costner was lambasted for his less than credible impersonation of an English noble as was the screenplay, though Alan Rickman won plaudits for his deliciously hammy Sheriff of Nottingham — “wicked, droll, sly, eye-rolling, witty one-liners and put-downs” (Roger Ebert). The second film entitled simply Robin Hood, starring another Irish thespian Patrick Bergin, tries for more modern touches. The movie tones down the traditional “rob from the rich, give to the poor”, socialist-leaning revolutionary Robin, opting for a more out and out impudent anti-authoritarian (Tom Jicha, SunSentinel, 13-May-1991). Another innovation is the replacement of Hood’s traditional nemeses, the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne, with two new baddies, Sir Miles Folcanet and Baron Deguerre. The Maid Marian role in RH adaptions are usually passive objects of attention, but this film has Uma Thurman attempting to redress this by actively participating in the climactic sword fight, (one critic was dismissive of this as “a contrived nod to present-day feminism”, Tom Shales, The Washington Post, 13-May-1991).

Crowe’s band

Two more recent iterations of RH have sought to give the story a modern twist. Both Ridley Scott’s revisionist 2010 Robin Hood and the 2018 version analogised the time-honoured legend with the post-9/11 West’s preoccupation with the war on terror. The critical consensus was that Ridley Scott’s version was dour and joyless with the essential adventure ingredient of the tale drained out. Russell Crowe playing Hood as a hardened war veteran was singled out for specific criticism by some – too old to play the role, his accent sounded more Irish or even Scottish than Nottinghamshire, etc. The 2018 Robin Hood depicts the Merry Men, clothed in half-modern costumes, as if they are SAS commandos entwined in a Middle East-type scenario picking off terrorists with automatic weapons (’14 Big Scren Robin Hoods’: Ranked’, (Mary Sollosi), 14-Jun-2019, EW.com).

The 1950s was the first decade that television really impacted on the public and popular culture in advanced Western countries…for countless viewers in Britain, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand, this meant a new opportunity to indulge in the perennial classic adventure story of the Lincoln-green set. In those pioneering days in the new medium Associated Television’s Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-59) was compulsory viewing in grainy black and white. Richard Greene was a reassuringly efficient “righter of wrongs” and appropriately English in pedigree. His presence as Hood aided by interesting stories and an enticingly catchy theme song, saw the production through 143 episodes. The success of the Greene “Robin Hood” inspired a new wave of TV series on the Nottinghamshire archer extraordinaire from the Seventies on🅐. The pick of these is probably the 1984 series Robin of Sherwood which had the novelty of two different incarnations of Robin Hood. The ITV series was widely praised as a “gritty, authentic production design with real-life history, 20th century fiction and pagan myth” (‘Robin Hood’, Wikipedia). World expert on Robin Hood literature Stephen Knight described it as “the most innovative and influential version of the myth in recent times”. A haunting soundtrack by Clannad helped the “moody and atmospheric” vibe of Robin of Sherwood. Personally, I’m a bit partial to a more recent Robin Hood series (2006-09), largely for Keith Allen’s high camp, deeply sarcastic performance, replete with a range of exaggerated often incredulous facial gestures as the Sheriff of Nottingham (one episode spoofs the Bob Marley song in its title, “Who Shot the Sheriff?”).
Sardonic sheriff
So deeply embedded in film and popular culture is the Robin Hood story that inevitably someone would lampoon it and that somebody was Mel Brooks in his 1993 parody Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Brooks makes fun of other (serious) iterations of RH like Costner’s Prince of Thieves. In fact Brooks has already roamed into this territory in television in 1975 with his sitcom on Hood and co, When Things Were Rotten. Both were replete with one-liners, sight gags, literal humour and anachronisms (something the non-humorous versions were also very prone to).

One of the funniest alternative iterations of Robin Hood came out of late Eighties children’s television. Creator Tony Robinson‘s Maid Marian and her Merry Men as the title suggests inverts the roles of the legend…Marian is the de facto leader and the brains of the Sherwood Forest outlaws, while Robin, an incompetent ex-tailor (“Robin of Kensington”) is a complete airhead. Another comic inversion of the traditional legend seen here and in Men in Tights is the presentation of Robin as being far from heroic.

Marian’s outfit

Footnote: One of the quintessential personal traits of Robin Hood is his prowess as a master archer which features in all RH screen versions. Given the character’s mythic status this prowess is typically grossly exaggerated –  Russell Crowe manages to hit a fleeing soldier on horseback hundreds of yards away with an arrow flush on the back of his head; Taron Egerton in the 2018 film shoots nearly 20 arrows in the trailer alone! (Max Tenenbaum, ‘The 10 Best Archers From Film and TV’ Screen Rant, 07-Apr-2020).

Postscript: Political Hood
The Adventures of Robin Hood TV series was clearly intended as good fun, a vehicle of commercial escapist entertainment, nonetheless buried in the storyline are snatches of political commentary on contemporary events in the UK during the strait-jacketed postwar decade after 1945. An analogy can be made between Robin’s return from serving in the Crusades to find his property and titles confiscated, and the shabby treatment of British veterans returning from the WWII conflagration. The Adventures‘ political messages were not confined to contemporary Britain. The TV program was the brainchild of a blacklisted US producer Hannah Weinstein. Weinstein hired leftist American writers such as Ring Lardner Jr similarly persecuted by the McCarthyism scourge in the US. Lardner and the others were not slow to draw comparisons between the fictional Robin Hood’s plight and their own ongoing victimisation by the zealous American Right. According to Lardner, writing for the show afforded “plenty of opportunities for oblique social comment on (the assault on liberties in)  Eisenhower-era America” (Allen W.Wright, ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood 1950s TV Series Page 2’, (Sept 2005), Robin Hood: Bold Outlaw of Barnsdale and Sherwood, Spotlight, www.boldoutlaw.com).

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🅐 not to mention the similarly themed 1958 TV series William Tell which might be summed up succinctly as “Robin Hood with a crossbow”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Odysseus Beyond Antiquity: Myth, Hero and Anti-Hero, a Literary Archetype for Contemporary Story-Telling

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Cinema, Creative Writing, Geography, Literary & Linguistics, Performing arts

For scholar and layperson alike, the dawn of story-telling in the West if not the earliest literary text, coincides with Homer and his two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Dating very roughly from somewhere around 700 BCE, Homer (traditionally thought to be a blind Ionian poet – see PostScript) composed his two (very) long poems in hexameter form to be read aloud at festivals and such public events. The Homeric epics were spread throughout the Greek world and beyond by professional reciters of poetry called rhapsodes (sort of travelling bards) [Beaty Rubens & Oliver Taplin, An Odyssey Round Odysseus: The Man and His Story Traced Through Time and Place, (1989)]. 

Epic of Gilgamesh

Homer’s works are generally considered the foundation point of what is commonly referred to as the Western canon※, though the Iliad and the Odyssey are predated by other foundation texts emanating from the earlier Sumerian civilisation, particularly the Epic of Gilgamesh (ca 2,100 BCE), comprising poems and tales, the first known work of fiction [‘What is the oldest known piece of literature?’, (Evan Andrews), History, 22-Aug-2018,  www.history.com]. 

Cattle of the Sun

The second of the epic poems, the Odyssey, deals with the perilous and action-packed 10-year journey of its eponymous hero Odysseus back to his home in Ithaca after the Trojan War (the Iliad). In 2018 a poll by the BBC of over 100 international authors, academics, journalists and critics chose the Odyssey as the most influential work in Western literature. Some of the reasons given for making the Odyssey primus inter pares in such a vast array of august literary texts include: it is “one of the great foundation myths of Western culture…asking what it means to be a hero”; it is “properly epic”; it has “great female characters”; it “forces us to question the assumptions we might have about quests, war, and what it means to return home” (repatriation); it endorses a “streak of individualism”, etc [Homer’s Odyssey is Officially the World’s Most Influential Story’, (Tasso Kokkinidis), Greece. Greek Reporter,(2018), www.greece.greekreporter.com✪.

That the Odyssey has been massively influential in the arts ever since it first emerged in the rocky hillsides of Ionian Greece is indisputable. Other ancient Greek playwrights and poets who followed Homer, like Sophocles, produced their own versions of the iconic tale (and their own take on the elusive character of Odysseus). It has been suggested that the character of Jesus in the Gospel of Markspan class=”s2″ style=”font-size: 19.73px”> draws from Odysseus and his adventures, eg, the “feeding of the 500”, Jesus was a carpenter like Odysseus, who was the builder of the “Wooden Horse” [‘The Odyssey : An Overview, No Sweat Shakespeare,  www.nosweatshakespeare.com].

⍐ 2nd century AD Tunisian mosaic of the Sirens (Book 12)

The Bard’s debt to Homer

It’s widely known that Shakespeare borrowed freely from many sources – plots, devices and imagery from the Bible, Plutarch, Seneca, Chaucer, from Holinshed’s Chronicles, from Boccaccio’s Decameron, etc. [‘Shakespeare’s Source Material’, (J.M. Pressley), Shakespeare’s Resource Center, www.bardnet.net/]. Like any educated Tudor man of the day Shakespeare voraciously absorbed the classics and Homeric influences are discernible in his plays – Odyssean themes like the phenomena of homecoming (Shakespeare’s Romances); the recognition theme from Odysseus’ reappearance in disguise in Ithaca (King Lear); the renewal theme (The Winter’s Tale) (No Sweat Shakespeare)⦿.

The Odysseus-Hamlet connexion

The Odyssey’s imprint on Shakespeare is most noticeable in the Bard’s most famous tragedy Hamlet. Several patterns emerge. Both literary opuses share a preoccupation with a troubled father-son relationship (Odysseus/Telemachus, King Hamlet/Prince Hamlet). Moreover, the Odyssey and Hamlet possess striking thematic similarities. Prince Hamlet and King Odysseus both employ deception to their advantage—the former dissembling madness and the latter physical disguises—to exact retribution against those who have wronged them. Both protagonists reveal a fatal flaw (hamartia)⊞ in the course of their trials and tribulations [‘Hamlet v. Odyssey’, (William Sheng), 12-Apr-2012,  http://docs.google.com/].

⍐ Odyssey-lite Homer (Simpson)

Retelling the Odysseus myth anew

The influence of the Odyssey on various media has been recurring and pervasive, including on novels (Don Quixote: Quixote, like Odysseus, embarks on a ‘epic’ journey and inflates (or distorts) his tales of heroism and survival) or The Penelopiad (Margaret Atwood’s feminist remaking of the myth as told from the point of view of Penelope, Odysseus’ long-suffering wife); on television animation (The Simpsons “Tales from the Public Domain” episode – a satirical travesty of the Odyssey, Homer (Simpson) as Odysseus on a decidedly unheroic journey [‘8 Novels Inspired by the Odyssey’, (Jessica Ferri), Early Bird Books,  www.earlybirdbooks.com ; Economou Green, Mary. “The Odyssey and Its Odyssey in Contemporary Texts: Re-visions in Star Trek, The Time Traveler’s Wife,and The Penelopiad.” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy. 1.1 (2014). Web.]; in poetry (Tennyson’s Ulysses (the Latinised form of ‘Odysseus’) is a kind of pessimistic postscript to the Odyssey with the aged hero unhappily stuck in his island kingdom lamenting the loss of his life of travel and adventure). 

Odysseus by the River Liffey

Easily the most famous literary reinterpretation of the Odyssey is James Joyce’s “stream of consciousness✠ novel Ulysses, a work which tore up the handbook for writing novels in the modern age. T S Eliot summarised the revolutionary impact of Ulysses’ thus: “(Joyce) has made the novel obsolete by replacing the narrative method with the mythical method” [quoted in ‘James Joyce’s Ulysses: Remixing the Homeric Myth’, (James AW Heffernan), The Great Courses Daily, 02-Apr-2017,www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com].Joyce adapts the framework of Homer’s classic to 1904 Dublin, condensing the original’s 10-year journey into a single day, in which the protagonist, the “mock-heroic” and cod-ordinary Leopold Bloom, wanders around his various haunts in the city. In every chapter of Ulysses Joyce matches or parallels the actions of his characters with that of the Odyssey but presents them as banal and mundane. The scene in Homer where a lovely princess Nausikaa assists the shipwrecked Odysseus on the island of Scheria is reworked by Joyce to show the married cuckold Bloom as voyeur, spying on an attractive girl at Sandymount Strand while relieving his frustrations by masturbating [David Norris & Carl Flint, Joyce For Beginners, (1994)]. 

the 1967 film version of ‘Ulysses‘

Sci-Fi Odysseus: Trekking with Homer

Science-Fiction depictions on the screen, big and small, have mined an abundant seam of inspiration from the Odyssey. Kubrick’s and Arthur C Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey repositions the story in the Solar System with a supercomputer named HAL-9000 filling the role of the Cyclops imperilling the life of Odysseus/Dave Bowman. Another cult classic that owes inestimably to Homer’s Odyssey is the long-running Star Trek TV series. The Odyssey parallels are more than translucent  – Star Trek is replete with alien locations and weird and unworldly characters. Captain Kirk is “an intelligent, strong and charismatic leader, struggling to keep his crew together as they sail through the depths of space” [‘Greek Myth and Science Fiction’,  www.greekmythandscifi.wordpress.com]. Kirk & Co leave the known world (Earth) to journey into the unknown (the Galaxy)❂, they “go beyond”, they problem-solve, they vanish aliens and monsters and “re-emerge into the world victorious in quest purpose and with knowledge to better the plight of humankind” (Economou Green).

Odysseus as anti-hero precursor?

Odysseus exhibits qualities that make him seem to our eyes very modern (or even post-modern). He heroically and valiantly combats the monstrous creatures which block his path, but there is another, deeply problematic side to his personality. Odysseus, the personification of guile and cunning (polumetis in the Greek), routinely acts in both the Iliad and the Odyssey without honour or noble intention – a trickster, a dissembler and “con man”, a cheat, a liar, Among his many misdeeds, he sleeps with Circe; he murders innocent maids; he displays arrogance such as in his encounter with Polyphemus (the Cyclops); he misappropriates the armour of the dead Achilles (causing Ajax to take his own life); he fails to protect his crew on the voyage home resulting in them all perishing. You can discern in the ‘complicated’ and ‘ambiguous’◪ character of Odysseus a model for the ascendency of the anti-hero in modern cinema since the 1960s (Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, etc) [Cook, E. (1999). “Active” and “Passive” Heroics in the “Odyssey”.  The Classical World, 93(2), 149-167. doi: 10.2307/4352390].

Footnote: Odyssey, the prototype road movie

Homer’s classic is of course one of if not the principal fount of all subsequent travel/road stories in Western culture. This has proved nowhere more fecund than in modern cinema in films such as Easy Rider, Mad Max and countless others. Other road movies have been even more overt in referencing their debt to Odyssey and Homer – Paris, Texas, where the Odyssean protagonist charts a hazardous course which takes him from ruin and desperation to redemption [‘Wander Forever Between The Wind: A Tribute To PARIS, TEXAS’, (Priscilla Page), Birth, Movies, Death, 23-Sep-2017, www.birthmoviesdeath.com]. The Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou is unequivocally transparent in its pilferings from the Odyssey…the movie is variously peopled by a “Ulysses/Everett”, a “Penny”, a figurative “Cyclops”, “Lotus Eaters”, “Trojans/Ku Klux Klan”, a “Cattle of the Sun God”, “Sirens/laundry ladies”, a “Poseidon/county sheriff” and assorted other Homeric entities – all transposed to a 1930s Great Depression, Deep South setting.

PostScript: Authorship issue

Some scholars over the years have sought to debunk the custom of attributing the Iliad and the Odyssey to someone called ‘Homer’, about who there is virtually zero factual information, no biography to recount. Rather than a knowable or identifiable author this view attributes authorship to the whole Hellenic culture, tracing its genesis in fragments created before the supposed dates that ‘Homer’ flourished [‘Author Says a Whole Culture—Not a Single ‘Homer’—Wrote ‘Iliad,’ ‘Odyssey’’, (Simon Worrall), National Geographic, 03-Jan-2015,  www.nationalgeographic.com].

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＊＊ the books, films, etc referred to above are only a selection of the total works—literary, the arts, music, cinema—informed and influenced by the Odyssey

𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪

※ ‘classic’ works of literature, philosophy, music and art elevated into a band of select ‘membership’ in the firmament of high culture

✪ the claim of ‘official’ recognition should be tempered by the fact that if a different set of experts were asked, they might not necessarily agree with the choice

⊞ in Hamlet it is prevarication and indecision, failing to act when he should, in Odysseus it is hubris, by which Odysseus offends Poseidon with “god-like” arrogance  

⦿ Shakespeare’s borrowings from the Iliad are more overt in Troilus and Cressida, he is indebted to Homer’s tale of Troy for the storyline and the entire Dramatis personae

✠ a method of narration in a literary work that describes happenings in the flow of thoughts in the minds of the characters [www.literarydevices.net/]

❂ cf. Odysseus – the Underworld

◪ Emily Wilson/Erwin Cook

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Filibustering in the USA: Quintessentially American but Not Exclusively American

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Cinema, Comparative politics, National politics, Politics, Regional History

Anyone following contemporary US politics would likely be familiar with the term ‘filibuster’ – the spectacle conjured up is of a politician, bunkering down, holding the Senate floor to ransom in an endless monologue. The object of such stonewalling is to perversely delay the passage of some piece or other of legislation they are opposed to. Many movie fans of the “Golden Age of Hollywood” cinema will recall the idealistic young ‘greenhorn’ senator (played by James Stewart) engaging in an agonising 24-hour, non-stop talking marathon to try to block corrupt legislation being passed…the junior senator droning on about the Constitution and the Bible before dramatically collapsing, exhausted, on a ‘bed’ of protest letters and telegrams (Mr Smith Goes to Washington, 1939).

(Illustration: Diana Morales/MPA)

The right to ‘speechify’: Extraneous and unrelated to the legislative matter at hand
The principle on which filibustering is predicated—that any senator should have the right to speak as long as necessary—has seen real-life politicians resort to reading material just as prosaic as the fictional Mr Smith’s tedious ‘talkathon’. Louisiana demagogue Huey Long punctuated recitations of Shakespeare and passages from the Constitution with readings of his favourite recipes – especially fried oysters and pot-likkers. Ted Cruz read Dr Seuss to his daughters while trying to stymie Obamacare. The negativity of filibustering is neatly summarised in Senate historian Donald Ritchie’s definition: a filibuster “is a minority of Senators who prevent the majority from casting a vote, knowing otherwise the majority would prevail” [‘Whatever Happened to the Old-Fashioned Jimmy Stewart-Style Filibuster?’, (Aaron Erlich), www.hnn.us/].

⇩ Huey Long (Source: www.npr.com)

Reining in its excesses
The impediment of senatorial filibustering—legislation delayed is legislation denied—led to attempts to curb its disruptiveness. Under the Wilson presidency, the Senate accepted a rule whereby a filibuster could be ended on the achievement of a two-thirds majority vote. In DC-speak this device is called invoking ‘cloture’. In 1975 the requirement was amended, necessitating only a three-fifths majority vote (ie, 60 votes out of the 100 senators) [‘Filibuster and Cloture’, United States Senate, www.senate.gov].

The device of the political filibuster, though quintessentially American, is equally a feature of legislatures of other Western democracies such as the UK, Australia, France and Canada※…and it’s a practice that goes way back to Ancient Rome and Cato the Younger’s all-day talk fests in the Roman Senate circa 60 BCE [‘The art of the filibuster: How do you talk for 24 hours straight?’, (Jon Kelly), BBC News Magazine, 12-Dec-2012, www.bbcnews.com].

⇧ The filibuster phenomena continues to provide political cartoonists in the US with endless inspiration
(Image: www.davegranlund.com)

꧂ ꧂ ꧂  ꧁ ꧁ ꧁

The other type of filibuster  

The etymology of ’filibuster’ dates from the late 16th century, it is first used in the sphere of Spain’s imperial possessions in the “New World”. The Spanish term filibustero⍟ described the activities of freelance buccaneers and pirates who plundered the riches of Spanish America (typified by Sir Francis Drake and his raid on Panama in 1573). ’Filibuster’ re-emerges in 19th century United States to refer to North American adventurers and ‘chancers’ who organised schemes and private militias in an attempt to take over foreign countries and territories in Latin America [May, Robert E. “Young American Males and Filibustering in the Age of Manifest Destiny: The United States Army as a Cultural Mirror”.  The Journal of American History, vol. 78, no. 3, 1991, pp.857-886. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2078794. Accessed 10 Oct. 2020].

Pirate gold doubloons from the Americas ⇩

(Photo: NY Post)

Burr, godfather of US filibustering
The first tentative steps of US filibustering in the early period of the republic probably starts with Vice-President Aaron Burr in the first decade of the century. After Burr’s political career imploded in 1804 as a result of his killing of former Treasurer secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel, the disgraced VP is believed to have hatched a plan to invade and seize Spanish territories in the west of the North American continent. The scheme was never implemented, however Burr was subsequently tried for treason but acquitted [‘The Burr Conspiracy’, National Counterintelligence Center, www.fas.org/]◰. Other filibusters followed Burr’s lead…early American adventurers like James Long and Augustus Magee formed expeditions to try to wrest control of Texas from the Spanish colonialists.

⇩ Aaron Burr (Image credit: Bettmann/Getty Images/HowStuffWorks)

Manifest Destiny west and south
The activity really took off after US territorial gains at Mexico’s expense stemming from the 1846-48 war and the discovery of gold in California. In the 1850s filibuster expeditions became a regular occurrence as ambitious US citizens, schemers and “soldiers of fortune”, launched raid and raid mainly on northern Mexico but also Central American lands in an attempt to appropriate territory for themselves or in the name of the US. Venezuelan-born Narcisco López was one of the first, trying unsuccessfully with the assistance of American southerners to capture Cuba from the Spanish on three separate occasions. Most of these filibusters were inspired by (or found legitimacy for their actions) in the emerging credo of Manifest Destiny, the belief that Americans possessed  a kind of “quasi-divine Providence” to expand into new territories (be they held by native populations or Mexicans), annex them and thus spread American democracy to them [‘Manifest destiny’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

 

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※ by no means is it confined to Western democracies

⍟ filibustero – from the Dutch vrijbuiter, meaning ‘freebooter’, ‘pirate’ or ‘robber’

◰ Burr was also largely responsible for the introduction into the Senate of the above form of filibuster, the procrastination ploy