“Death By Lighting” is a miniseries, streaming on Netflix, about the unlikely election and unfortunate assassination of James A. Garfield. Whenever anyone decries the state of movies and bemoans that great movies of the past couldn’t possibly be made in the present, it is perhaps helpful to point out a mini-series such as this, which is an example of a very good cinema that would have been impossible to produce as recently as fifteen years ago.
This miniseries is four episodes of approximately 50 minutes each, so around 3 hours and 20 minutes long. It consists mainly of talking (so a focus on writing and acting), there being only one real action scene, which takes place in the last thirty minutes. Before digital and streaming, a running of 3 hours 20 minutes needed to be an epic movie. There needs to be a great deal of spectacle in order to keep an audience in the seats for that amount of time. We can bemoan the decline of movie theaters, but at the same time, this is something that wouldn’t fit in a movie theater. For the first 100 years of movie history, there wasn’t any long form drama outside of television, which was generally an inferior product, interspersed as it is with commercials and prone to inefficient storytelling due to the perverse incentive to maximise the amount/length of episodes and thus the amount of advertisements shown.
The advent of digital/streaming makes a miniseries like “Death by Lightning” possible. It is longer than most movies, but it is also much cheaper than most epics. (Indeed, because of digital movie-making, it is a bit cheaper than a two hour movie would have been in the 1990s). The exception that was HBO has become the rule. You can watch the whole thing at once (if you wanted to), but the product is best consumed over the course of 2-4 nights. And it is as long as it needs to be, no longer because there isn’t a commercial incentive (i.e. the product is paid for by advertisers) to draw it out unnecessarily.
Because it is cheap to film drama (just writing and acting) and cheap to stream it outside of theaters, Netflix is allowed to take chances on a not-so-obvious subject matter. President Garfield was assassinated within three months of the start of his presidency. So, unlike other murdered Presidents (Lincoln, McKinley, Kennedy) there was hardly any accomplishments to remember him by. You likely do not know anything about him. But that is fine, because the audience’s lack of familiarity with the subject matter only lends to the dramatic unfolding of the narrative. The less you know about a historical event, the less spoilers are involved.
There are two main storylines. The first is Garfield’s (played here by Michael Shannon) unlikely nomination as the Republican candidate in 1880. We are introduced to the party’s main players that form the supporting cast. Roscoe Conkling (played by Shea Whigham) and Chester A. Arthur (played by Nick Offerman) represents the influential and well-funded New York faction. James A. Blaine (played by Bradley Whitford) represents the less influential and less well-funded New England faction. Then there is the second storyline which only has one character, the would be assassin Charles Guiteau (played by Matthew McFayden) who is a delusional nobody who has the tendency to show up uninvited in scenes from the first storyline.
As coincidence would have it (and it is a coincidence because Guiteau is a crazy person), Guiteau’s motivations line up with and seemingly comment on the main controversies of this historical era. The Gilded Age (say post-Civil War and before World War I) is a time of weak federal government, mass industrialization, and the formation of unfettered big business. One thing the TV series could have explained better is why the New York faction has the power that it wields. It is mentioned that three quarters of the economic trade of the country goes through the port of New York City, but what is not mentioned is how exactly that results in most of the federal revenue coming from New York City. The reason is because the federal revenue at the time was based not on income taxes but on tariffs upon international goods. I’m not sure why, but the word tariff isn’t even mentioned.
This situation along with traditional wheeling and dealing amongst politicians induced much bribery for the sale of federal offices and federal land out west. Guiteau believes he is entitled to his fair share of corruption. He is a pathological liar and suffers from delusions of grandeur. McFayden is miscast simply because of his good looks, but apart from that, he does a very good job of portraying a person that at first glance may seem sane enough, but upon further reflection is straight up crazy. It’s all in the eyes.
Normally, I would bristle at the idea of giving a real-life assassin such a prominent role in a story, and I especially liked Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” for its example of not taking that route. But here it works, because, well, the character of Guiteau, all nerves and bristle, is a foil to Garfield, who lets face it, is kind of boring. In fact, if the miniseries was mainly Garfield, it would be a boring miniseries. But instead, Garfield is just one character among many men who are either crazy, cynical, or just kind of weak. This has the effect of making Garfield’s presence, when he appears, a pleasant one. Indeed, out of all these flawed men, you would very much want the stoic and serious Garfield to be the President of the United States. When he is picked out of the crowd for an unlikely dark horse nomination at the Chicago convention, you feel, as a citizen, to be tremendously lucky. And when he becomes the victim of a freak assassination, you feel, as a citizen, to be tremendously unlucky. The miniseries makes a strong argument that Garfield could have been a remarkable President.
What is interesting about this story is that its historical constraints inhibit standard character development. Guiteau, because he is crazy, cannot really change as a person. Garfield, because he is assassinated before he can accomplish much, cannot really change either. This leaves a supporting character, Chester A. Arthur, who was nominated as a Vice President because he was part of the New York machine but not the head of it (that would be Roscoe Conkling). Chester A. Arthur is a corrupt soul, beholden to machine politics and grieving the recent death of his wife with more drinking and partying than usual. He is outright disloyal to President Garfield and sees his ascent to the Vice Presidency as a bit of a joke. He is gobsmacked when he is not asked to immediately resign by President Garfield and horrified by the prospect of actually becoming President.
But, and there is historical evidence to this, the good nature of President Garfield apparently induced a moral change in Arthur and when Guiteau kills Garfield under a deluded belief that Arthur, upon ascending the Presidency, would grant him a federal appointment out of gratitude, it deeply affects Arthur. Arthur breaks off his ties with the corrupt New York machine and helps pass civil service reform out of a duty felt to the now deceased President Garfield. So, in a way, Chester A. Arthur is the main character of this miniseries because he is the one that changes. Nick Offerman (typecast as a cynical politician) gives one of his best of many performances as a cynical politician. (A sequel anyone?)
Assassinations are senseless and it is sometimes foolhardy to insist that we can learn anything from them. The motivations of the perpetrators are almost so depressingly irrelevant. Still, “Death by Lightning” perhaps succeeds more than usual, even if in a contrived but forgivable fashion. As Guiteau is awaiting his execution, he is visited by the widow of Garfield, Crete Garfield (played by Betty Gilpin), who gives a great if kind of unbelievable speech about how nobody will remember the assassin because she has exercised her influence to exact her own form of revenge, buying up the manuscript of his autobiography for the purpose of burying it. And we in the audience are also given one last moment of comfort during the execution of Guiteau via McFayden’s performance. The historical reality of Guiteau is that he wouldn’t have come to any late realization of his errors, and the miniseries mainly hews to this reality, except for that one last moment, when we see it in his eyes and we hear it in his last word, “oh”.
This is contrived, but then again, when someone does something terrible because they want to be remembered, sometimes the best revenge, if it is impossible to not forget them completely, is to remember them in the exact opposite way they intended. “Death by Lightning” is a great mini-series and the best anything to be made about our interrupted leader, James A. Garfield,
This miniseries was created/written by Mike Makowsky and directed by Matt Ross, who is best known for playing tech mogul Gavin Belson in the HBO TV series “Silicon Valley.”
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