Chesterton on the danger of historical films
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Over the weekend I made an unexpected 36-hour trip to Texas and back. On my way home I listened to the latest episode of Bill Simmons’s Rewatchables podcast, a two-hour discussion of Oliver Stone’s JFK. The two hours was more than welcome in the pre-dawn flatlands of northern Louisiana where I listened to it, and fully the first hour turned out to be a thought-provoking discussion of a topic that has been on my mind for weeks and that I’ve been generally concerned about for years: falsehood in historical films.
Simmons and his guests spent a lot of time discussing and comparing the streamlining and condensation inevitable in a historical film with the outright fabrication—especially of major characters—that Stone does throughout, but what really caught my attention and got me thinking was a description very early in the episode of JFK as “provocative, if not wildly irresponsible.” How much responsibility does a filmmaker have, whether to the facts, his audience, or both?
All of which brought to mind the following passage, from “On the FIlms,” a newspaper essay collected in As I Was Saying in 1936, the year of Chesterton’s death:
The second fact to remember is a certain privilege almost analogous to monopoly, which belongs of necessity to things like the theatre and the cinema. In a sense more than the metaphorical, they fill the stage; they dominate the scene; they create the landscape. That is why one need not be Puritanical to insist on a somewhat stricter responsibility in all sorts of play-acting than in the looser and less graphic matter of literature. If a man is repelled by one book, he can shut it and open another; but he cannot shut up a theatre in which he finds a show repulsive, nor instantly order one of a thousand other theatres to suit his taste. There are a limited number of theatres; and even to cinemas there is some limit. Hence there is a real danger of historical falsehood being popularized through the film, because there is not the normal chance of one film being corrected by another film. When a book appears displaying a doubtful portrait of Queen Elizabeth, it will generally be found that about six other historical students are moved to publish about six other versions of Queen Elizabeth at the same moment. We can buy Mr. Belloc’s book on Cromwell, and then Mr. Buchan’s book on Cromwell; and pay our money and take our choice. But few of us are in a position to pay the money required to stage a complete and elaborately presented alternative film-version of Disraeli. The fiction on the film, the partisan version in the movie-play, will go uncontradicted and even uncriticized, in a way in which few provocative books can really go uncontradicted and uncriticized. There will be no opportunity of meeting it on its own large battlefield of expansive scenario and multitudinous repetition. And most of those who are affected by it will know or care very little about its being brought to book by other critics and critical methods.
I find Chesterton’s cautions here compelling. Movies, being visually stimulating and, of necessity, simplified, go down easy. People believe them. Furthermore, movies borrow liberally from each other, meaning that a successful but inaccurate movie’s falsehoods will be reproduced indefinitely. (Think, for example, or the trope of medieval longbowmen firing unaimed volleys into the air as indirect fire, an absurdity that started with Laurence Olivier’s Henry V and continues right down to the present.)
And that’s also assuming a good faith effort on the part of filmmakers to tell what they think is a true story. But filmmakers both then and now often feel no obligation to do so. One odd trend that I’ve noticed in recent years is taking a real historical figure and giving them wholly fabricated homosexual love lives, as with baseball player and renaissance man Moe Berg in The Catcher Was a Spy, Queen Anne in The Favourite, and paleontologist Mary Anning in Ammonite. In the latter case, the director made it explicit that he had appropriated a real person’s life story as revenge for “queer” stories that had been “straightened.” There’s not much an artist with such a sense of grievance won’t do to score points against them, whoever “they” are.
But real people are not just counters in a game artists play to make a point, or elements in a composition that can be rearranged to suit the artist’s taste. They’re real people. And real things are intractable. Toy with them too much, bend and twist and reshape them to fit a prefabricated plot arc or accepted genre conventions, and they may end up unrecognizable—and fatally cliched. (Here’s one notable case.)
Furthermore, a “doubtful portrait,” a Chesterton puts it, of a real person isn’t just inaccurate, it can damage real reputations. Four cases I happen to know about:
Boxer Max Baer, a kind-hearted man bothered by the deaths of two former opponents due to head injuries, was depicted in Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man as a pompous thug proud of killing two men in the ring and who makes sexual advances toward James Braddock’s wife. Audiences, oblivious to the character assassination, “whooped and hollered” when Braddock took Baer down at the end. Baer’s son, Max Baer Jr. (of “The Beverly Hillbillies” fame), responded to the movie with “If Howard and [Russell] Crowe were sitting here, I’d hit them.”
In the 1964 film Zulu, Private Henry Hook, who earned a Victoria Cross for his actions at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, is depicted as a drunk, thief, and shirker who makes good in a moment of desperation—a screenwriter’s invention purely for dramatic purposes. The real Henry Hook was a Methodist lay preacher and teetotaler with a spotless disciplinary record. His elderly daughters walked out of the film’s premier.
American Gangster, a 2007 movie directed by Ridley Scott (whose presence should always sound warning sirens for historical accuracy), softened drug lord Frank Lucas to make him more palatable and invented adulterous affairs and a bitter child custody battle for detective Richie Roberts, who in real life did not have kids—and was still alive when the film came out.
William McMaster Murdoch, First Officer of the Titanic, is depicted by James Cameron (more warning bells) in the 1997 film Titanic as shooting passengers during a stampede for the lifeboats before turning his gun on himself in remorse. The evidence this is based on is sketchy, and, like Henry Hook above, Murdoch had living relatives who took exception, not to mention a hometown with an educational fund in Murdoch’s memory. Cameron and his studio never formally apologized but threw £5000 to the memorial fund. (Titanic made $2.2 billion worldwide.)
Public ignorance and mistaken or outright careless filmmakers are threats to the truth, but I think Chesterton is right in pointing out that it is film’s monopolistic effect that is the gravest danger. The kinds of films audiences flock to and, more importantly, remember are too complicated and expensive to make competition—correcting the record—viable. And so a Zulu comes along and the handful that really know and care about the memory of Henry Hook spend the next sixty years trying to get the real story out.
Of course, anyone who enjoyed the movie can always be directed to a more detailed, comprehensive, and accurate book on the subject. I’ve done this a thousand times if I’ve done it once. But how many people actually take those recommendations? I’m guessing one in a thousand is optimistic. How many people are going to read Andrew Roberts’s 700-page biography of George III when they can yuk at him in Hamilton instead?
Per Chesterton, immediately following the passage quoted above:
“A false film might be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had never read the books but only seen the film.”
This is something I think about a lot, but I’m not sure I have any answers or solutions to the problem beyond a renewed commitment to truth and a sense of responsibility among filmmakers. Because telling a true story well is not impossible, and those films that successfully fit a true story—inevitably streamlined and simplified but in such a way as to hint at the real story’s complexity—to the medium of film are my beaux ideal. (Here’s one I’ve written about before.)
As for the guys on the Rewatchables podcast, they concluded their deep, thoughtful discussion of Oliver Stone’s paranoid, grievance-driven tissue of distortions and fabrications by agreeing—emphatically—that LBJ and the CIA were behind Kennedy’s assassination. So much for that.
