Week 49: What are your thoughts on the National Treasure franchise?
gotta keep it light after last week!
part 1: an origin story
The family that served pick-up duty for my elementary school carpool had one of those vans with the backseat DVD-screen player, so every Monday to Friday afternoon, September to June, from the ages of eight to eleven, in 17-minute increments, I watched National Treasure.
For those of you unfamiliar, the 2004 film National Treasure is a historical fiction action-adventure bonanza starring Nicolas Cage as Benjamin Gates, the descendent of a long line of treasure hunters tipped off by one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence to a grand treasure carted into the North American British colonies by the Knights Templar, the Founding Fathers, and the Freemasons (none of whom are real). Gates dedicates his life to learning everything he can about American and European history so that he can solve the clues left behind to track down the treasure.
Here’s the basic chain of events: Ben Gates has a clue handed down through the generations that reads “The Secret lies with Charlotte.” Charlotte, it turns out, is a boat buried in ice in the North Pole, and the secret is a pipe carved with another riddle. The riddle’s key is, logically, hidden in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Independence, housed in the National Archives in Washington, DC. Ben-Gates-Nic-Cage’s partner/treasure-hunting-bankroller Ian—played by Ned Stark himself, Sean Bean—declares in the lowest deck of this ice-moored ship that to acquire this map, they will steal the Declaration of Independence. Ben-Cage-Nic-Gates refuses, there’s a kerfuffle with a gun and a flare and some gunpowder, a getaway! an explosion! and then we smash cut to Washington DC, where we meet Diane Kruger as the head of the National Archives, who (reasonably) scoffs at Nic-Gates-Ben-Cage and his sidekick about the imminent threat to the Declaration of Independence (famous last words, Dr. Chase-Kruger)! Finally, we head to the National Archives itself, where, within earshot of armed guards and dozens of roving schoolchildren, Ben-Nic-Cage-Gates determines there is only path to protect it (and the invisible map) from his now former bankroller-turned-rival Ian-Ned-Stark and declares in a low, dramatic voice, with the conviction of a man who has already won his Oscar, “I’m going to steal the Declaration of Independence.”
We are currently 27 minutes and 53 seconds into the movie.
And so he does. Bunch of fun chemistry and Photoshop. A shoot out over the bullet-proof glass shielding the Declaration. A car chase. The invisible map on the back of the Declaration reveals a cypher that links to a bunch of letters by Silence Dogood, a penname for Benjamin Franklin, gifted from Ben Gates’s dad (not really) to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Those letters reveal where an “ocular device” (it’s a pair of glasses, Nic) are hidden inside a brick next to the original Liberty Bell Tower. The glasses reveal a SECOND MAP on the back of the Declaration of Independence, leading us to Wall Street in NEW YORK, NEW YORK, BABY! And then the treasure is buried hundreds of feet below the subway in Manhattan Schist.
Written out beat for beat, National Treasure is one of the most absurd films of all time. And Nic Cage was in Face/Off.
With all that in mind, the most unrealistic part of this film is the depth of the tunnel and treasure room dug into the ground underneath Trinity Church (yes, the one on Wall Street). I cannot emphasize enough how hard Manhattan Schist is. That rock is, really, no pun intended, hardcore. The rest of that stuff with splitting up the clues and hiding all those tchotchkes in the Northwest Hemisphere (but mostly along the Amtrak Northeast Regional line)—I can dig it. That hole? Less so.
What else is there to say? Hijinks ensue. History is poorly told, if it’s told at all. Nic Cage and Diane Kruger flirt. Documents are handled time and again with white cotton gloves, which is not proper handling procedure. Gloves interfere with your dexterity and risk more damage!
Not to mention the fact that the Declaration is written on parchment, which, while resilient, probably wouldn’t respond well to being rapidly rolled up like those wrapping paper rods we bash our siblings over the head with? The Declaration is held in very stable conditions with a whole regulated humidity setting, I’m sure, but I’m still 67% positive it would crack, especially if it was given zero time to acclimate as Nic-Ben-Cage-Gates hurriedly stuffed it into his tuxedo pocket inside of an elevator. As I write this, I’m staring blankly ahead trying to remember all of the parchment I have ever worked with and…I really don’t think rolling it up is the move.1 I know there are medievalists & book historians who read this newsletter, so please advise.
(Update 1/30/22: Bookish Book Club watched National Treasure for a movie night last night and let me tell ya! Totally different experience watching this movie with a bunch of book history and rare book practitioners. Anyways, I posed this question to the group and was advised that the parchment cracking would depend on 1) the environment it is kept in and 2) the thickness of the parchment. So, open call to the National Archives for those two details, please! It’s for //research//.)
The summary here is that National Treasure consists of a bunch of glamour shots of people severely mishandling documents2 and then Diane Kruger and Nic Cage make out surrounded by cobwebs.3
My bigger beef with the movie, besides the impenetrable rock and the gloves and the rolled-up parchment, is the absolute groveling that Ben-Gates-Nic-Cage lavishes upon the Founding Fathers throughout the film. A lot of, “They were the cleverest, most judicious, forward-looking people in the world!” This undue praise recalls to me my 10th-grade US History teacher who said every single day for an entire school year (180 mandated days in New Jersey) that “never again will a group of people as smart as the Founding Fathers gather in a room all at once.” I remember looking around at my classmates the first time he said that and thinking to myself, “There are smarter people in this room right now, and none of us can legally vote, drink, or drive.”4
As a slight detour, the Founding Fathers were very good at protecting their money, their land, and their necks, all of which required the exploitation of enslaved humans and dispossessed land. That sick brand of savvy is one we would be better off without. If, however, we take National Treasure at its word (which we shouldn’t, but we are), it’s no wonder the Founding Fathers made utterly vile choices while plotting the United States. They were too busy trying to dig up Manhattan Schist.5
My biggest beef of all, however, is at the end, once Nic Cage finds the treasure (of course he does. And guess what? That pipe he found in a barrel in that boat above the Arctic Circle was the key to the secret treasure room all along!), he says that it should be “returned to the people.” Hell yeah, man! But then he says, “The Smithsonian, the Louvre, the Cairo Museum,” which is a…narrow view of museums, let alone of the people. I guess he named three institutions in three countries on three continents. But redistribution to the people would go a lot deeper and wider.
I realize it was 2004 and this is a fictional conversation on the altar steps of Trinity Church between Nic Cage and long-time Martin Scorsese-collaborator Harvey Keitel, but if this is the only exposure a casual viewer gets to repatriation, it does not do wonders for the imagination. After all that creativity—the maps, the cyphers, the glasses, the magic pipe, the inconceivably difficult yet still extant tunnel dug into Manhattan Schist—the best you could come up with to return these mounds upon mounds of world heritage to their rightful homes was…three museums?
2/5 stars for Diane Kruger’s inscrutable accent and sidekick-Riley’s snark.
the sequel: a descent into delirium
Until last week, I had never once seen National Treasure’s 2007 sequel, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and that was the right choice. If National Treasure teeters on the edge of inanity, National Treasure: Secrets of Future Book plummets into the abyss before it even begins.
I did not follow this film. Admittedly, my focus was not aided by the fact I watched it on my first night cat-sitting for a new cat who, without mincing words, wanted to murder me in cold blood,6 so it was difficult to concentrate on the finer plot details. Here’s what I can tell you about this film, from what little I recall, interleaved with the live commentary from my one (1) watch of National Treasure 2: Too National, Too Treasure, with my best friend Jeremy:
We open in a beautiful lecture hall, where Ben-Nic-Gates-Cage lectures about how his great-great-grandad Thomas Gates managed to stop a subsect of the Confederates from locating a hidden treasure that would have funded their Civil War efforts.
A man interrupts the lecture. He reveals he has a missing page from a book that proves that Thomas Gates was actually PRO-Confederacy.
jeremy: is that ed helms?
(it was Ed Harris)
shira: i already do not like him
shira: i think it is ed helms??????????
(it was absolutely Ed Harris)
Ed Helms (nee Harris)’s great-great-great-grandfather (that’s one extra “great” for the folks at home keeping track) was a Confederate general and this is a big deal to him and presumably the impetus for this gutter trash of a film.
shira: you're a DIRECT descendant of a confederate general???????/ "he was a great man" no he was not?!?!
jeremy: I wouldn't go around telling people that my guy
Ed Helms (Harris) then goads Nicolas Benjamin Cage into finding the City of Gold to clear the name of Nic Cage’s great-great-grandfather from being a Confederate conspirator. You’re not quite sure how finding a lost (and fake) city, built by an unnamed Native tribe, clears Nic Cage’s great-great-grandfather’s name? Neither did we. What I do know is that this totally-normal-and-not-at-all-racist-challenge took Nic Cage (&co, Diane Kruger is back, kids!) to Paris to look at one of the three Statues of Liberty, to Buckingham Palace to steal a slab of wood from the Queen’s private desk,7 then back to the United States to see if Nic Cage’s mom, an “expert in ancient Native American” could read the slab of wood.
shira: also "ancient native american" is not a language
shira: is nic cage's mom cher??
shira: HELEN MIRREN?????????????/
Clearly National Treasure 2: Chamber of Treasure invested the entire budget into their expensive talent and not any other aspect of filmmaking or fact-checking or even disinterested Googling, because this is where things go off the rails. Nic Cage sneaks into the Oval Office to try to steal a second slab of wood from the Resolute Desk. It is not there. He determines that to find what was in it, he must obtain the eponymous Book of Secrets, a literal book of secrets passed down from one president to the next, and to steal the book, he decides:
shira: how did we go from "let's go to paris and take a picture of a statue" to "i'm going to kidnap the president of the united states"
jeremy: I do have to respect that these movies waste literally no time
shira: we gotta get the action moving baby! no time for exposition. we'll exposition on the way
Hijinks ensue. They kidnap the President (he’s fine). They find the Book of Secrets. Where is it but a secret shelf in the “Rare Books” section of the Library of Congress, which looked to me more like a reference section. No rare books holdings I know have the call numbers laminated directly onto their 1970s cloth-bound spines.
jeremy: you should get a secret shelf someday
shira: i will do my best
Though we seemingly made progress towards the ultimate goal of the film (which remained muddled), we still had a long way to go until the credits rolled, and we were struggling:
shira: i can't believe there are another 42 minutes in this
shira: i cannot believe i have to watch 36 more minutes of this
jeremy: there are still 20 minutes
Neither of us had any clue how finding this treasure would prove Great-Great-Grandad Gates’s innocence, and I was preoccupied with Helen Mirren making it out alive. But, with the book finally in hand, we were on our way to South Dakota to find that lost city under…where else? Mount Rushmore!
This is where I started yelling somewhat incoherently in the chat. Mount Rushmore is carved into (defaces) the sacred cliffside of the Lakota Sioux, the Six Grandfathers (Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe) or "Cougar Mountain" (Igmútȟaŋka Pahá). National Treasure 2: The Book Tower’s asinine explanation for this defacement is that Mount Rushmore was actually carved to protect the lost City of Gold underneath it by throwing treasure hunters off its scent. And yet, the stench that remains is one of overwhelmingly patronizing colonialism.8
After locating the entrance by haphazardly pouring water on rocks (sure, fine, whatever), the squad (including Ed Helms-Harris) makes it through all of the obstacles in the underground caves until—whoopsie daisie!—they set off a disastrous chain reaction:
shira: oh and now it's an indiana jones type thing where everything gets flooded
and no one can see [the city] again
and ed helms dies saving everyone else
i just figured out the end
and we don't even have to watch
jeremy: you're so right
And I was! That’s pretty much how it ends.
jeremy: also I still don't understand how finding the city clears his ancestor's name
shira: i don't either
shira: anyways i copied & pasted our chat into a word doc and it's 56 pages long
I love National Treasure. It’s just absurd enough to be unrealistic but not so absurd that every turn towards the unhinged pulls you out of the story. Even with my legitimate and well-reasoned gripes, I respect that balance. National Treasure: The Treasure Strikes Back offers no such balance. We get no gems of pithy dialogue, no dumb yet endearingly goofy discoveries. Stilted and dry, alternatively insensitive then outright offensive, there is no national, no treasure:
jeremy: you can tell nic cage knew this was bad
jeremy: that's why he had so much fun
shira: nic cage made his mouse money and said "let's rock boys"
And yet, for the sake of the upcoming Disney+ direct-to-streaming television series, Nic-Ben-Gates-Cage was once again cleared of his federal crimes, this time kidnapping the President, skirting the law in the name of anti-historical revelations and endless cash-grabbing sequels.
0.5/5 stars for Helen Mirren.
epilogue: post credits
shira: ED HARRIS
jeremy: lol whoops
shira: WE CALLED HIM ED HELMS THE WHOLE TIME
shira: ED HELMS IS FROM THE OFFICE
jeremy: omg
shira: OMG
jeremy: make sure you get this part in the transcript too
shira: i already copied and pasted it
jeremy: ed harris is great in apollo 13
jeremy: mediocre here
Fin.
Housekeeping and birdseeking
house
What I’m currently reading: Love Is an Ex-Country by Randa Jarrar
This issue is part one of two of “things that have been bothering me recently.” Next week will be more succinct. Thanks for reading!
bird
More later.
I am a paper person.
And I didn’t even talk about when they squeeze lemon juice onto the Declaration!!!
This isn’t relevant to my analysis, but Nic Cage, Sean Bean, Diane Kruger, and the actor who plays the sidekick Riley (I’m saving you some trouble here, you wouldn’t know him by name) have had thirteen marriages between the four of them. That’s an average of three point three marriages per person. I hope they splashed out every time.
Also, the smartest people in the world aren’t gathering in a room all at once right now because we are in year three of our pecorino! All my smart babes are on Zoom or conference calls, and the smartest of us all have simply gone off the grid.
When I fact-checked this, I realized that Wall Street actually sits atop Hartland Schist. The joke stands.
We became friends by the end and I miss him dearly. Also he was angry with me because I was sitting in the wrong armchair, which is fair.
In a distressingly inaccurate sequence in which people mill about a great hall which is never ever open to the public?! You can only go into the State Rooms at Buckingham Palace during ten weeks in the summer. There is no way Nic-Ben-Gates-Cage, even with his wackadoodle brazenness, would ever be able to find his way to the Queen’s private office. If anyone watched The Crown, you might recall the episode where the man breaks into Buckingham Palace and has a private, impromptu visit with the Queen. That was based on a true story, and that man was imprisoned. I realize of all the things to suspend my disbelief for in this franchise, this should be one of the easiest, but it grated on me.
Update, Jan 27, 2022: The email version of this issue lacked this paragraph about the defacement of Mount Rushmore because I neglected to migrate it over from an earlier draft.
Wild from start to finish and a much needed break from my marathon studying/night shift sessions.
Loved thinking of you watching National Treasure in 17 min increments in back of the A's minivan. Those were the days, baby!