Distorting history for entertainment
BBC, Viewpoint November 18th, 2007
I’ve just read this on the BBC website. I ought not to be shocked, but then I’m only so far in my BBC desensitization course:
The preamble:
It doesn’t matter if films play fast and loose with historical facts. What matters is to convey the spirit of the age – and its players.
No of course not. Especially if you want to propagandize them.
There have been murmurings of reproach over the film’s breaches in historical authenticity, with commentators expressing their anxiety at its tampering with the facts, and the liberties taken in the plot, in terms of what can only be described as moral dismay. Ought I as an historian to share the critics’ disapproval? The fact is, I simply don’t.
Because after a career spent poring over the surviving documents from the 16th and 17th centuries, clutching at any emotional straw in the form of an overlooked manuscript jotting or a recently-discovered folio of contemporary eye-witness observations, I find the heroic confidence of Blanchett’s portrayal of Elizabeth I positively exhilarating.
Exhilarating.
Here is my response:
So there you have it. It’s OK to teach people a false history because although its false, its entertaining.
“…ought we not self-confidently to revel in the universal appeal of the story of an underdog nation triumphing against the odds, and the creative retellings it continues to inspire?”
That’s what Goebbels did as a pretext to the persecution of the Jews of Germany – produce historical dramas which portrayed Jews in a continuously bad light. The German people got the message.
Its astonishing to me to have a historian approve of deliberate historical inaccuracy in favour of entertainment. You would have thought that historians, of all people, would realise that distortions of history are political propaganda and are the pretexts for civil strife and war.
Clearly not all historians have learnt much about history, it appears
I am reminded of Leonard Nimoy’s prologue at the start of an episode of “The Simpsons” which featured the actors from “The X Files”:
Hello. I’m Leonard Nimoy.
The following tale of alien encounters is true.
And by true, I mean false. It’s all lies. But they’re entertaining lies.
And in the end, isn’t that the real truth?
The answer is: No.