BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Head Shop >

Nice History - Let's Take It!

  
 
Tezcatlipoca
11:57 / 17.09.03
So, after the disgusting - and at times derogatory - mess than was U571, followed closely by further filmed nonsense with The Patriot, Hollywood is gearing up to release another re-edit of history.

Under the working title of The Few, Tom Cruise is to star as Billy Fiske, the American who will be remembered - if Hollywood gets its way - for bravely leading the British planes against the Luftwaffe and all but single handedly removing the Nazi air menace. The actual Billy Fiske, of course, only ever flew three short missions, didn't ever engage the enemy, and died when he crash landed his plane at an allied strip.

James Salter of Cinema Screen has this to say:

"The new film, with the provisional title of The Few, is no less likely to attract just criticism for its willingness to alter history to turn the hero into an American.
What next? A film about the suffering of American cities during the Blitz? Coventry changed to San Diego?"

So does this propensity of the US to leech other nations' history and achievements bother you?
After all, are we not seeing - not only a disrespect those men and women who were actually involved - but a deliberate and potentially damaging trend in altering the way a nation perceives its own history?
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
12:17 / 17.09.03
I find Hollywood's re-editing of history unsurprising and relatively unthreatening. Far more serious historical fictions are being put in place. Consider, for example, Kaplan & Kristol's "The War Over Iraq". The first chapter describes in contemptuous and horrified terms Saddam Hussein's rise to power on a tide of blood. At no time does it mention US or European support for him, our training of his airforce, and our equipping of him against Iran. The book notes that we know Hussein is a terrorist, because he arranged an attempt on the life of Bush senior - apparently, however, this fastidiousness does not extend to Bush junior, who has awarded himself the right to assassinate, and under whose leadership the US has just vetoed UN resolution protecting Arafat from assassination by Israel - something the Israeli cabinet has been loudly discussing.
 
 
Quantum
12:41 / 17.09.03
Yes it bothers me, don't forget Enigma (or was that U571?) and on a related note The Italian Job. Why must the star be a white american man?
Shades of 1984's ministry of truth (1984 soon to be re-released by Hollywood with Adam Sandler as Winston and Madonna as Julia...)

Maybe in a century, when we're all under the yoke of the US, we will have always been americans, and they'll teach us about the colonisation of the UK by pilgrims from New York.
 
 
Morlock - groupie for hire
12:51 / 17.09.03
GRanted there are larger, more immediate lies to be considered, but I don't agree that it is insignificant. As much as any other country, the USA seems to nourish this aura of righteousness, a sense that whatever upright Americans are doing can only be proper and just, simply because it is being done by Americans. Going way beyond patriotism.
Historical rewrites like U571 etc then end up separating anyone without an active interest in history further from the reality of The US' role in world affairs, making it harder to convince people later that maybe, just maybe, not everything is kosher in the land of the brave.

Apologies for any generalities by the way. I'll happily concede that this fervour may be as much a fiction created by political rhetoric as anything else. But since its power and application is in the public face of politics anyway...

And even if that isn't intentional, if the rewriting is purely in order to appeal to a wider (paying) audience, it still leaves rather a bad taste in the mouth.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:11 / 17.09.03
Rather more importantly I think you have to take in to account the extent to which cinema both effects knowledge and reflects that which people already know. Surely this is a symptom of the imperialistic edge of American culture, that cinema will happily wade in, steal heroes and events and make them their own while denying responsibility for bad things. Remember that the villain is often European, that the hero is always American and that the cultural ideal is to step away from the old and in to the new world.
 
 
Linus Dunce
14:30 / 17.09.03
Remember that the villain is often European, that the hero is always American and that the cultural ideal is to step away from the old and in to the new world.

Well, perhaps that is to do with 1776 and all that.

If you like, before we go further, what is your perception of the relationship between Hollywood and the US? Are they discrete do you think? Are Hollywood films an or the expression of US culture?
 
 
Tezcatlipoca
18:41 / 17.09.03
Before we go any further, I should point out that I selected the US - and more specifically Hollywood - for this thread simply because of this film and others like it. I find the practice of editing history abhorrent regardless of the nation doing the editing.

Now that's established, and in answer to Ignatius' post, I perceive the relationship between Hollywood and US social awareness to be largely disassociated, and I don't honestly think that films of this kind are 'an' or 'the' expression of US culture. However, that doesn't concern me so much as the potential effect Hollywood's output may have on US social awareness. There's something unsettling about a generation growing up with the belief that their nation is not only infallible, but almost single handedly responsible for the triumphs of the world, either directly or indirectly, and I guess that's at the heart of what I'm trying to communicate here. The US thing is convenient right now, given the subject matter in discussion, but it could relate to any number of examples by any number of nations throughout world history.

Sure, there are more immediate, and more serious lies to be considered, but I don't think that makes this trend acceptable. More insidious, yes; more acceptable, no.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:01 / 18.09.03
I dunno, you know. It's not as if it's a documentary, is it? I think it's mildly offensive rather than deeply troubling (see also that recent BBC series about the Cambridge spies, etc etc). It's the actual rewriting of the past that claims to be history, cf Nick's example, which is the real problem.

I don't know how people react to this sort of film but I would imagine that most people would view it primarily as entertainment - not 'I saw in that there 'The Few' film that an American won the Battle of Britain single-handedly, so it must be true'. I'm sure people are capable of making the distinction between film and history; and since the purpose of entertainment is to entertain rather than to be accurate, I'm not sure that there's an enormous problem.

Having said that, films which one might class as 'entertainment' have obviously been used for propaganda purposes, but I am not sure whether this counts... It's just a good war story with a heroic American, and as such, aimed at patriotic American audiences. I suppose it reinforces that sort of image. Thinking aloud...

I think, judging by many articles etc. I have read, that quite a few Americans think they totally saved our limey asses from invasion by Hitler anyway (D-Day and all that) so I doubt it will have a marked effect in that dept.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
12:30 / 18.09.03
It's true, on the other hand, that there was a tradition of educative films in American cinema, which has now by-and-large dropped off the map - although the civics lessons of The West Wing are enthralling.

The slightly depressing thing about TWW, though, is that no actual liberal victories are ever scored - lest the series depart too much from reality...
 
 
nedrichards is confused
14:55 / 18.09.03
btw. Enigma was (although based on a novel) actually quite good. Although the Alan Turing based character wasn't gay (but I forgive them for Kate Winslets glasses in the film) at least they got the fact that the Poles had a *significant* part in the origional codebreaking into the forground.
 
 
Mourne Kransky
21:34 / 18.09.03
Interesting, in Enigma, and perhaps relevant that the British Government's lies and cover-up about the Katyn Massacre were so central to the plot. A film about rewriting history on the hoof in time of War rewrites history in a minor way by heterosexualising Turing. They did come up with an attractively tortured and believeable supernerd hero though, running counter to the GI Joe /Tommy Atkins stereotypes. I liked the film on the whole.

Probably a whole thread on its own, the trend for degaying historical figures. The Americanisation is annoying and I would tend towards Kit Cat's point of view were it not for the fact that modern audiences seem to get much of their history directly from action films and to receive this uncritically. But perhaps there's a wider argument there too about how people edit the information that comes their way from soft sources.

I was hearing on Radio 4 yesterday as I plodded home from work that a huge majority of UK and US schoolkids think the Allies were USUK against the rest in World War 2. No conception that we'd never have "won" the damn thing without the Russians.
 
 
Linus Dunce
22:45 / 18.09.03
I think a thread with examples of degayed figures, or even figures that have had their sexuality reinterpreted in cinema in any way, would be most interesting.

But I think it's too easy to do audiences a disservice. Sure, there are unsophisticated elements of any society that receive media uncritically, but how do we know they're anything but a minority? The old cliche, "don't believe what you read in the newspapers," must have roots in popular belief. So what does this say about general attitudes to dramatic cinema? I've never heard of anyone IRL who cannot make the distinction between, say, the historical events portrayed in Titanic and the film's fictional characters of Jack and Sarah. (Was that her name?)
 
 
Persephone
23:57 / 18.09.03
I will never see this, but Tom Cruise also seems to be in a movie called The Last Samurai. If it's a crime to say extremely audibly "Hyeah. I'm sure that the last samurai was some white guy" in a crowded movie theater, please send a police car to pick me up at home.
 
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
00:02 / 19.09.03

My feelings on this are absolutely clear as regards modern films. Things like U-571 really piss me off, perhaps because I’m British and more nationalistic than I care to admit. And yet. . .
Shakespeare’s Henry V completely warps the history of the Agincourt campaign, never once mentioning that the battle took place on a rain soaked field that made the Somme look like the Sahara, or that Henry begged the French for a peace deal before the battle, or (apart from one brief hint) that a large proportion of Henry’s army died of dysentery before they ever got anywhere near Agincourt.
Also, quite a lot of slogans often used in a repugnant + chauvinist way can be traced to it- “Once more into the breach,” “Gentlemen in England now abed. . .” et.c. et.c.
It’s pretty clear that it still exerts a considerable influence on national psychology- viz. tabloid headlines any time we have a football match with the French.
But the thing is, that if you’ve actually seen the play, it’s certainly not unambiguously pro-war. William Hazlitt was convinced it was a straightforwardly anti-war piece. At times it does a pretty good job of representing Henry as an out and out psychopath. Here he tells the Governor of Harfleur what will happen if he doesn’t surrender immediately:

If not then in a moment, look to see,/ Your naked infants spitted upon pikes

There is also a scene where Henry goes out incognito in the camp and has a (prose) conversation with some peasant soldiers, who ask some very pointed questions about the justification of the war, which Henry doesn’t answer very well.. He then goes away and wibbles in blank verse for a bit about how hard it is to be a king, before charging off to fight the French

So, as KCC says above, it’s not an easy call to make- it . Where the art in question is dreck, as in U571, then it should probably just be slammed. When it’s higher quality then one has to balance historical distortion against what the artwork says about its themes more generally.

Btw- Quantum- are you serious about the new film of 1984- I’m too out of touch to tell. If you are, then it’s (ironically enough) probably ok to have Yanks playing the main roles, since in the novel the UK is part of a superstate that includes the US- it’s not inconceivable that the cultures might homogenize quite a lot after 50 years of rule by a language manipulating totalitarian superstate.
 
 
Thjatsi
03:50 / 19.09.03
...quite a few Americans think they totally saved our limey asses from invasion by Hitler anyway...

Actually, I was under the impression that up until that point it was a deadlock of trench warfare where lots of people were dying, but little was being accomplished on either side. Am I wrong here?
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
07:47 / 19.09.03
Well, yes, but only because you're thinking of the Great War rather than WWII.

I was joking, btw, though as Xoc has said above an alarming number of people do seem to think that WWII was 'USUK against the rest'. I have read several blogs etc. that have definitely given the impression that the US was solely responsible for the victory over Hitler's Germany in Europe, and that had it not been for them the UK would have been invaded and conquered. It's just not a very nuanced view of events, if you see what I mean.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
09:27 / 19.09.03
Picking up what Pointless was saying, is it only recent history being broadly rewritten that irks?

I mean, Gladiator was hardly a faithful depiction of the gladiatorial arena, where in fact men being mauled by tigers and running each other through were actually some of the least horrific things to occur (unlike, say, covering naked adulterous women in the mentrual blood of cows and letting horny, enraged bulls loose to rape them).

Ridley Scott had every opportunity to educate his audience as to the "thumbs up / thumbs down / thumb sideways" significance of the mercy / no mercy gesture, but chose to just go with the flow and have thumbs up as mercy - since it is understood widely to be positive as a modern gesture.

But this is historically inaccurate.

So does revisionism in the name of entertainment matter across such large timespans? If not, or not as much, then why not?
 
 
Tezcatlipoca
11:10 / 19.09.03
Now MoneySh@t makes an interesting point here. Is it more offensive to rewrite history within the living memory of those who were present than it is to inaccurately portray historical events that occured long before our time?

Actually, as a subpoint to this, I think the relative impact of the event(s) in question has to be taken into consideration. To go back to the subject at hand, for example, the Battle of Britain is an important subject to a great many in this country - myself included - because it represents our struggle and eventual victory over the Nazis on so many levels. The victory is social, it is military, and it has - in many ways - defined the English. On reflection, that might well be why the prospect of this film is mildly offensive to me, whilst I can put my knowledge of ancient history to the back of my mind for a few hours and enjoy Gladiator.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
11:42 / 19.09.03
It is more offensive to rewrite recent history because most people watching those films will have some connection to people involved in the events. Films like U-571 erk a little but the small moments really get me. The American survivor talking over the graves at the end of Saving Private Ryan made me cry with anger the first time I watched it. I'd been on a battlefields trip around France a few months before and his response felt like a horrific misrepresentation of the way veterans react.

I hate holocaust films because they always, without fail, focus on the Jews. If they're going to do this than they should make films about the Shoah and not the holocaust. As a third generation member of the Polish exiled community I am constantly disgusted by Western civilisation's ommission of the destruction and encampment of gypsies, homosexuals, communists and a large part of the Polish Catholic community from popular history. People argue that the numbers were smaller yet completely fail to take in to account that no one knows how many gypsies were murdered or even the community numbers. No one covers the fact that they get none of the reparation that the Jews do.

Our conception of history is completely askew, why shouldn't Hollywood trivialise it further when our culture and the law itself shows no respect for those who have been traumatised beyond belief.
 
 
Morlock - groupie for hire
11:45 / 19.09.03
Or perhaps it has to do with the fact that the Roman Empire isn't still stomping around the countryside making a nuisance of itself.

Mind you, being Dutch, not British or American, means my perspective is somewhat different. Only a few weeks ago I was told of my grandparents crawling around their backyard for fear of snipers.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
11:49 / 19.09.03
/rot

Money Sh@t??

/rot over
 
 
Baz Auckland
13:14 / 19.09.03
This, I think, only a big problem when the film tries to come across as being historical. 'The Last Samurai' is complete fiction, and isn't even remotely based on anything, and thankfully, they don't pretend it is... Braveheart or The Few are different matters.

(Although the worst offence out there is the Anastatia movie where Rasputin and his talking bat Bartok lead the Russian Revolution with his sorcery)
 
 
Tezcatlipoca
13:55 / 19.09.03
/rot

Sorry, no offense was intended. I glanced very briefly at your name before starting my post and my brain, remembering that at least part of your name was a special character but not remembering which part automatically used the AT symbol for some horrible, horrible reason. An honest mistake, for which I apologise.

/rot over


Our conception of history is completely askew, why shouldn't Hollywood trivialise it further when our culture and the law itself shows no respect for those who have been traumatised beyond belief.

A good, if depressingly accurate, observation. Although I'm not convinced that a lack of regard for an event by part - whether the greater or the lesser - of society pardons the production of such films. I, for example, have spent years studying the First World War, and for me it's very important to remember - and remember as accurately as possible - the sacrifices made during that period. Now my partner has no interest in the subject whatsoever, which is fair enough. If she did, however, it pleases me to think that she could teach herself about the subject from the wide resources available. However, my gripe with films of this ilk is that they purposefully set out to misinform and misrepresent what occurred, thus clouding the waters, and thus clouding any lesson - social or otherwise - said events might have to teach us. Sure, we expect the cinema to deal with fantasy, but I think there is most definitely a marked effect that these films can have on those members of the population who - for whatever reason - aren't able, or willing, to cross reference historical media with other sources and so get a balanced picture.

Anna makes a great example here with her talking about the plight of the gypsy and Polish community who were slaughtered during WWII. Because of film - much of it US - representation, the focus has not only been placed pretty much solely on the Jews, and thusly the others forgotten, but that focus has to a great extent cosmeticized the event to such a point that the Holocaust has taken on an almost unreal quality, which I personally feel makes it dangerously easy to disregard altogether.
 
 
Tom Coates
11:34 / 20.09.03
I have a massive distaste for films that rewrite history - not because we are unaware of the fact that the events in the foreground have been turned into a story, but because the assumption (even my assumption half the time) is that the context that they're being used as vessels through which to communicate the events around them. So i don't believe in the characters in Titanic, but I eat up the 'sense' of the ship, how it was destroyed, the social networks and class systems - all that tends to get eaten up with a spoon subconsciously. And when i think of that period, then that movie's texture is right in there - woven in with all the other material I've experienced.

I think the horror of the American rewrites of these things tends to lie in the sense of patriotism that it engenders. I don't really like patriotism but I do - however - also think that an individual member of a country should be able to feel proud of what their country stands for and what the actions of their country-men and women have fought for and achieved in every field from science and art through to architecture, city planning and - if necessary - war. I think America should feel proud for having (finally) stood up for what was right in the second world war. And the British should feel proud for being one of the last bastions of resolute determination in Europe. And the Russians should feel proud for the epic battles in the East. But the idea that a country should try and colonise those events - and all those deaths - fifty / sixty years after the fact - to inspire patriotism, seems disgusting to me.
 
 
Morlock - groupie for hire
10:09 / 21.09.03
And why would Hollywood want to inspire patriotism?
 
 
Tom Coates
10:40 / 21.09.03
Two reasons - firstly because the companies and individuals that make films have political agendas that they want to forward throught their work (which actually I don't mind too much, as long as there's diversity of opinion represented) and secondly because going to see a movie is often about coming out feeling good about something, and if you go to a movie and it makes you feel good about your country - even if it's had to deform reality to do it - then some film-makers will have no compunction using it - just like politicians appeal to people's idea of what it means to be a member of a country to get elected rather than actually have any policies. I think the worst film I've seen for things like this was the Contender which has this terrible scene at the end where someone says something incredibly jingoistic about America and someone in the auditorium I was in (in Los Angeles) actually shouted "Right on!". Needless to say the film didn't sell very well abroad...
 
 
Linus Dunce
11:31 / 21.09.03
But is it a ideologically-driven agenda, or a sometimes clumsy reiteration of US identity (which can only ever be political), or merely a set of cheap tricks to make the movie popular?
 
 
Tom Coates
20:34 / 21.09.03
I think the only answer to that I can think of would be "yes".
 
 
Linus Dunce
20:56 / 21.09.03
Of course, it's possible it's all three, but I've yet to be convinced here that Hollywood is an organised propaganda machine. That Hollywood is controlled by dark forces has been a recurring story for a long time -- how is this theory different from the one that said "the jews" ran the show?
 
 
Saveloy
10:17 / 22.09.03
[mild rot] Is there any evidence that this film, which as far as I can tell hasn't actually been made yet, will show the Cruise character to be a great hero and single-handed winner of the Battle of Britain etc? Are there any plot or script excerpts knocking about? All of the accounts or articles I've heard/seen about this say that the film "will probably" re-write history. I'm not saying it isn't likely etc, but, well, it's generally frowned upon for critics to have a stab at things they haven't seen or read yet. (This isn't a criticism of this thread, btw, which I understand is about Hollywood re-writes in general, hence the 'mild rot' disclaimer). [/mild rot]
 
 
Tezcatlipoca
12:10 / 22.09.03
Of course, it's possible it's all three, but I've yet to be convinced here that Hollywood is an organised propaganda machine. That Hollywood is controlled by dark forces has been a recurring story for a long time -- how is this theory different from the one that said "the jews" ran the show?

This might just be me being naive here, but whilst I don't think that Hollywood is intentionally a propaganda machine, or is even aware of the effect of its output, I do think that that output can and does have a marked effect on the way history is remembered.
I think that the jingoistic tosh spawned from Hollywood is - to a degree - a reflection of US national identity rather than it's cause, but it seems reasonable to me to assume that the continued production of entertainment that deforms reality can only perpetuate that sense of national idenity, rather than alter it by educating.

Which has just put me in mind of a second aspect to this discussion. To what degree do people take these films as being a handy pocket-version of world history, and, more importantly, absorb this information as being fact? After all, I think it's fair to say that a many people are inherantly lazy, and it's much easier to watch Gladiator than to read Gibbons.
 
 
Linus Dunce
13:44 / 22.09.03
I think Grand Panjandrum touched on this in bringing up Shakespeare and saying it's OK to adapt historical events to illustrate contemporary or universal issues ... but only if it's quality art and the right issues, caveats I find hard to accept on the grounds of their subjectivity.

Tom brought up something else, saying (as I read him) that he didn't like the way Titanic told the story within the context of the class structure on board the ship. Well, of course, any culture that defines itself on the principle of democracy is going to find a story of social stratification by birth being a life-or-death matter very engaging and bring it to the fore. And why not? Perhaps the idea could do with some examination. It seems a little unfair that Brits should be allowed such flights of fancy as Dambusters, the original The Italian Job and The Full Monty to illustrate British creativity and resilience while the US must stick to the bare facts at all times and never reiterate its own identity.

And why should Hollywood in particular be charged with re-educating society? They just make movies, some clever, some not so, to make money. Unless you're saying that all art should be controlled and for re-educational purposes, which is a different and older argument altogether, and possibly more honest, given that the assumption appears to have been made that US culture is a priori a bad thing. Their art may seem jingoistic to outsiders, but they don't have aristocracy, Hugh Grant or the thwack of willow on leather and old maids cycling to church in the mist to shove on screen to evoke their identity. All they have is a flag and a system of government.

People aren't lazy -- many work very hard -- and they're rarely stupid. We could make more of our own movies about our own concerns to "improve" them, but why don't we? Because they're not profitable ... enough. What does that say about us?
 
  
Add Your Reply