Wildernesses and Blood Facials: The Patriot vs The Nightingale, Part 1
I can no longer watch a film that features revenge prominently as a theme without comparing to Roland Emmerich's psuedo-historical epic from 2000. Therefore, it is no surprise that I found myself watching Jennifer Kent's much grittier, much less romanticizing tale of early colonial Tasmania and thinking, "This is what The Patriot should have been."
The Patriot is a guilty pleasure for some, me included, but few would deny that it is an ahistorical, racist, jingoistic mess. However, it is a very influential mess as revenge films go. Imagine my surprise at seeing a direct allusion to the famed unhorsing scene in The Patriot in Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Woman King (2022), not to mention numerous less recent films and shows. While a lot of the comparisons I'm going to draw between these two films may not occur to anyone but me, there is one particular scene in The Nightingale that is very hard to imagine wholly uninfluenced by a similar scene in The Patriot.
I will get into that comparison very soon, but before I start on the two remaining posts in this series, I need to clarify why one important character will be mostly absent from them. Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) is an Aboriginal man who is native to Tasmania and serves as main protagonist Clare's (Aisling Franciosi) guide through the wilderness. While he initial does so under duress, the two discover common ground, and their relationship evolves into something more akin to a partnership. The reason I will not say much more about Billy after this post is he has no counterpart in The Patriot as Clare and the film's villain, Hawkins (Sam Claflin) do.
Like 18th century South Carolina, 19th century Tasmania operated under a racialized caste system with Englismen at the top, Aboriginal people at the bottom, and Irish convicts in between. When Billy initially takes Clare for an English woman, she is appalled, giving him a tongue-lashing in Irish Gaelic to prove her point. Yet she also takes for granted that her Whiteness puts her in a position of superiority over him, and even later when her views start to change, she still draws on her comparative privilege to protect Billy from capture. Apart from some pithy, ahistorical one-liners, The Patriot takes the racial hierarchy of colonial America for granted. It frames the American Revolution as a conflict between two groups of White people. Native Americans are almost wholly erased. Black people, enslaved and free, are part of the scenery, and the ones who do speak do so mainly to confirm the magnanimity of their White employers.
There is one moment in The Nightingale that made me a little afraid it was going to go down a similar road. Clare and Billy are taken in by a kind-hearted Englishman who offers them food. While Clare sits down at the table, Billy takes his position on the floor with his back against the wall. When the man insists that he sit at the table with them, Billy begins to weep. But these are not tears of gratitude. "This is my country," he says, his voice breaking. He has been so disempowered and displaced in his own home that even his ability to eat with dignity is dependent on the whims of immigrants.
The Nightingale is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy for different people in different ways, and the experiences of these characters become a source of empathy where before was only hostility and bigotry. Clare, who first responds to the idea of Billy guiding her with "I'm not travelling with a black. You think I want to end up in someone's stew pot?" ends by considering Billy the only friend she has left. The transformation she undergoes sets her in sharp contrast with The Patriot's Benjamin Martin, who remains the same through all the atrocities, both those done to him and those he commits himself.
