Ideology, accountability, and the individual: Ridley Scott’s Napoleon and Media Representation of Populism
Photo Courtesy: Tero Koistinen
Sparking an intense controversy over the issue of representation, ‘Napoleon’, Ridley Scott’s newest epic, has been the subject of heated debate. The film, depicting the rise and fall of the infamous Frenchman, has been attacked by some for its supposedly degrading representation of the French emperor, while others praised its efforts to portray Bonaparte as he “really” was—a tyrant whose instrumental perception of human beings has led to unimaginable suffering. A testament to this effort is the film’s ending, which shocks the audience with a staggering display of the number of people killed in the wars for which, as we are meant to think, Napoleon is to blame. The film’s message is clear; rather than romanticising Bonaparte as one of history’s “great men”, we must see him for who he was: a murderer.
Bonaparte does, of course, bear responsibility for the suffering so lavishly dramatised by Scott. Napoleon had little concern for human life. The problematic aspect of the film’s ideological underpinning, however, concerns precisely where and how Scott’s narrative locates accountability.
Scott’s Napoleon individualises accountability by placing the full burden of blame for the misery shown on screen on Bonaparte himself. The emperor’s insatiable drive for conquest and the deaths that followed are framed as a consequence of a pathological sense of inferiority. Consider, for example, the dialogue between Napoleon and Josephine, where the former hysterically demands an acknowledgement of his importance.
By framing guilt on individual terms, Scott’s Napoleon shamelessly absolves the social whole of which Bonaparte was a product of any accountability. What is concealed is that, although Napoleon did suffer from an instrumental perception of human beings and lust for power, so did Europe itself. Picture the wider European geopolitical context at that time. The institutionalised logic of compulsive pursuit of more and more resources, territory, and power transformed war into the primary means of achieving national, and thus personal, prestige. Napoleon, in turn, internalised and embodied this logic with which the structures constituting most European states were saturated.
Incidentally, the ideology of individualising responsibility in Napoleon mirrors the discourse in mainstream Western media, particularly with regards to the representation of populism. Most centre-left and centrist media outlets are overflowing with articles alerting us to the danger posed by individuals like Donald Trump or Viktor Orban, who are labelled as “threats to democracy." Again, there can be no question that the kind of far-right politicians exemplified by Trump or Orban are strongly illiberal and anti-democratic. The media is right to highlight the threat of neoconservative populism: capture of state institutions, weaponization of the media, and persecution of minorities are real dangers.
The issue, rather, concerns the representation of such politicians. Due to the emphasis on their illiberalism being a result of a corrupt nature and their popularity being a consequence of charisma, the aforementioned politicians are represented as emerging contingently, without any connection to the socio-historical conditions in which they become politically relevant. The Washington Post, for instance, accuses Orban of “continuing to antagonise Europe''. Any consideration of the historical and socioeconomic conditions of possibility for such antagonization is absent.
Such representation, akin to Ridley Scott’s biopic, frames the problem in terms of the individual: systemic conditions are denied any role in producing individuals like Trump and in creating circumstances in which they gain political relevance. “Saving democracy” is thus said to mean opposing those who embody anti-democracy rather than reformulating the way democracy itself is imagined to alleviate the insecurity felt by those who are prompted to turn to populists by the disillusionment with the neoliberal doctrine’s ability to deliver “the good life” and with the capacity of the established political echelon to represent their interests.
The ideological implications of individualising accountability in film and media, as exemplified by Napoleon and the representation of populism, are more than clear: structural flaws that reproduce injustice are cleared out of sight. The individual is to blame. The institutional order must therefore remain as it is. At least, that is what we are told.