Hollywood Does History (Badly)

There’s an amusing op-ed at the Washington Post on how Hollywood mangles history. A few examples:

• George VI was plain and short (unlike Colin Firth)
• William Wallace was a lowland Scot and didn’t wear a kilt.
• Maria von Trapp didn’t love George when she married him and they married eleven years before the Anschluss
• The Emperor Commodus (Russell Crowe’s antagonist in Gladiator) died in his bath

To these I might add that Lincoln had a high, squeaky or raspy voice (unlike Henry Fonda or Raymond Massey), in Biblical times there probably weren’t a lot of blond, blue-eyed Israelites, Kathryn Hepburn resembles a Chinese woman about as much as I do the Metro-Goldwyn lion, Spencer Tracy’s dialect in Captains Courageous is more Martian than Portuguese fisherman in Nantucket in the early 20th century, and I strongly suspect that Sacagawea looked nothing like Donna Reed. Also, amazing as it may seem, American Indians look quite different from Italians and Jews and Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people don’t all look the same.

For historical inaccuracy it’s pretty hard to beat what is arguably Spencer Tracy’s worst movie, Plymouth Adventure. Don’t even bother watching it. It’s unbearable.

All of this would just be production values or good, clean fun if people weren’t getting most of their knowledge of history these days from television, movies, and, I guess, videogames. If, as George Santayana famously wrote, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, to what are those who only know the past as seen through the prism of Hollywood condemned?

The interrelations between history, fiction, myth, entertainment, and storytelling are complex and emotional. I would have no complaints about myth-making or storytelling if we learned more history not as dragged through mass market entertainment or through the works of people with axes to grind but from original sources on their own terms. What we have now is where reenactments of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis come from.