A Film Canon

Young Mr. Lincoln condenses the president to his participation in a democratic laughter- space: the (fictional) trial of two small-town boys accused of murder. To this end, Ford presents him as an irreverent, demotic descendent of King David, his tongue embodying the entire carnivalesque prelude to the trial, while tempering it with the restraint of a dignified heritage, such that every comic utterance is shot through with gravitas, and vice versa. This may explain the absence of Lincoln's own family, relegated to a past that has become mythical even within his own lifetime, and is only capable of being represented indirectly, whether through a surrogate, or the passage of the omniscient Mississippi. That said, Lincoln's speech is ultimately subordinated to his face and profile, which, thanks to Henry Fonda's uncanny resemblance, assume the grandeur of a living icon - a paradox encapsulated in his ability to generate the nexus between casual and universal poses; or, alternatively, to translate the balance between the demotic and dignified directly into bodily terms: "When I'm standin' up, my mind's lyin' down; when I'm lyin' down, my mind's standin' up." The result is a subtle decentralisation of Lincoln - a sense that he contemplates himself just as he would another fragment of the USA ("Where's your office, Abe?" "In my hat.") - and, concomitantly, a collapse of him with his immediate environment, culminating with the final shot, which reduces him to a silhouette against a summative landscape. From this perspective, Ford's fictional portrait is a mere strategy for evoking a far more realistic presence, if only by subscribing to Lincoln's own notion (foregrounded in the film) that storytelling can be the most effective way to make a point.