Nat Turner's Confessions

The Birth of a Nation is a melodramatic revenge saga.

- David Edelstein

ON AUGUST 21, 1831, Nat Turner, a slave who saw himself as a prophet, led a brutal revolt in Virginia’s Southampton County. He and his fellow slaves hacked up, beheaded, and shot not just white slaveholders but also their wives, mothers, and children. After the marauders were killed and/or captured, bands of white men took revenge by roaming the countryside, shooting and stringing up blacks willy-nilly. It was an unholy bloodbath. The “peculiar institution” would endure for three more decades, but slaveholders could never again be certain that the blacks who were their “property”—and whom they regarded, in some cases, as “family”—would not someday turn on them.

This is the story that the writer- director Nate Parker sets out to tell in The Birth of a Nation, but his audacious title tells you something else. He’s not just taking on the Confederacy and a legacy that’s still cherished in parts of the South. He’s taking on D. W. Griffith’s seminal 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, which sought to portray the aftermath of the Civil War—the “Reconstruction”—as the assault of lawless darkies on both the South’s social order and the virtue of its women. Griffith’s movie was also the most influential argument for vigilantism ever made. The Ku Klux Klan— a spent force by 1915—was reinvigorated by a scenario that had its members doing what officers of the law would or could not. The Klan was a holy cavalry.