Mediacy Articles - Volume 18, No. 2
Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies
Edited by Mark C. Carnes
Henry Holt ∓ Company, 1995
ISBN 0-8050-3759-4
Your editor has long been interested in analysing Hollywood “docudramas”, movies that dramatically recreate historical events for the purpose of broad entertainment. The term “docudrama” is a hybrid of “documentary” and “drama” and these films combine elements of both genres.
Hollywood’s most popular sources for film adaptations are novels, followed by actual historical events. Most of our students’ awareness of history comes from popular movies and many history teachers use these films the same way that English teachers use films that are literary adaptations. As usual, when any media text is used as an unproblematic reflection of reality, there are problems of concern to any media savvy teacher. When I was a student, we had a history teacher who was so fond of El Cid, I ended up seeing it twice. I even thought that Charlton Heston was Spanish and felt that his Oscar for Ben Hur was well deserved, since it was obviously such an acting stretch for this Spaniard to portray an Israelite. Later, while viewing Orson Welles’ classic Touch of Evil in university, I couldn’t understand why everyone else heaped scorn on Heston’s Mexican characterisation.
The problem with this is that many students consider the docudrama to be more documentary than drama because, as usual, Hollywood takes considerable liberties with the source material when adapting a movie.
This year’s Oscar winner Braveheart illustrates the classic docudrama conundrum. Scottish resistance hero William Wallace, a shadowy historical figure of whom little is known, was vividly recreated by Mel Gibson. Wallace spends much of the movie spouting off about democracy, a concept completely foreign to anyone in the 13th century. Gibson also manufactures a fictional romance with the English Princess of Wales, a blatant attempt to capitalize on public awareness of the marital difficulties besetting Britain’s royal family. Furthermore, Gibson uses the film as an opportunity to display his well documented homophobia, when the King of England kills his son’s gay lover by tossing him out of a window (apparently to the cheers of many audiences). In short, a contemporary filmmaker uses a 700 year old historical event to perpetuate a his own ideological agenda and, for this reason, it is important that students learn the skills necessary to deconstruct the docudrama.
The ideological dimensions of this skill come into sharper focus when looking at a more modern interpretation of history like Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning, which purports to illustrate the criminal investigation of the murder of three civil rights workers in the American south during the integration struggle of the 1960’s. Parker would have us believe that the struggle was spearheaded by two white FBI agents, vividly portrayed by actors Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe. A black FBI agent also plays a minor role in the film which ignores the fact that there were no black FBI agents at the time. In fact, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover hated the civil rights movement and devoted much of his agency’s efforts to discrediting civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
Similarly, there is now a whole generation who believes that Oliver Stone’s interpretation of the murder of John F. Kennedy is fact. However skilled JFK may be as a film, as history, it is bunk. Past Imperfect is a collection of sixty essays written by noted historians. The topics deal with over a hundred films and cover the historical range from Jurassic Park to Malcolm X and examine the relationship between movies and historical record. The tone of these essays is not shrill, with each historian showing a fondness for their chosen films, but carefully explaining the historical discrepancies.
This is one of the most enjoyable media texts I’ve read in some time. It’s a handsome volume with hundreds of movie stills, archival photographs, maps and historical illustrations.