“Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies.” General editor, Mark C. Carnes, Henry Holt, 304 pp.; $30
Can anything approximating historical reality survive in a commercial film? If you believe that a reasonably accurate sense of the past is a prerequisite for living meaningfully in the present–and if you have recently been to see Oliver Stone’s Nixon, say, or Jefferson in Paris–merely to raise the subject is to invite despair.
To be sure, Stone’s Nixon is not nearly as psychedelically fanciful as was his JFK. In that earlier film, Stone’s depiction of a conspiracy hatched by LBJ, the CIA, and Big Business to rub out President Kennedy–as also the manic purity of Kevin Costner’s portrayal of D.A. Jim Garrison–were so patently imaginary that one could be forgiven for thinking that Stone intended the movie as a kind of cinematic nightmare. Maybe he wanted to present a grotesquery prompted by, but deliberately unconstrained by, considerations of what actually took place.
By comparison with JFK, Nixon is less wanton in treating documented events. Moreover, Anthony Hopkins’s skill at reciting Richard Nixon’s speeches, and Joan Allen’s technically compelling portrait of Pat Nixon reflect something more than merely promiscuous historical imagination.
Yet you do not have to be Henry Kissinger or one of the Nixon daughters to worry about the general stance of the movie. It is obvious that what most concerns Stone is not a verifiable realm of what President Nixon thought, did, believed, or said, but an inner realm of Freudian connections that explain why Nixon was who he was. Truth in advertising would have left the movie with a title along the lines of “Animadversions on How Richard Nixon’s Relationship with His Mother Dictated the Shape of His Presidency.” But such a title might have hurt the box office–which, however he treats other aspects of verifiable reality, seems to concern Oliver Stone very much indeed.
Another presidential bio-pic, the Ismail Merchant-James Ivory account of Jefferson in Paris, offers genuine onscreen excitement. In fact, as Joyce Appleby has commented in a perceptive review for the December 1995 “Journal of American History,” “Leaving behind all that you know about the putative subject of this movie, you can enjoy some fine performances.” It is the “leaving behind” bit that poses the problem. Ismail Merchant reacted to historically based criticism of the movie by wondering why Jefferson scholars should be more upset with the film’s depiction of a sexual connection between Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings than with Jefferson’s slave-holding itself. Appleby’s response is quietly devastating: “The distinction turns on the different ethics produced by a lamentable truth and a probable falsehood.” By making central in their movie an “event” that probably did not occur, Merchant and Ivory provided a Jefferson much less connected to the historical figure (who, in fact, regretted the effects of slavery even as he upheld the system) than to late twentieth-century sentiments. The result is a lush, powerfully acted, sometimes gripping film, but of a personage Appleby suggests should be called “Efferson.”
Close encounters with such “historical” fictions will leave some dismayed viewers at a loss for words. Fortunately for cultivators of multiple media, however, a fetchingly packaged book is now at hand with captivating reading about the general problem. Mark Carnes’s “Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies” will add fuel to fires of indignation kindled by movies like this befuddled duo. But along the way it also introduces a note of sobering complexity concerning the relationship between film-history and professionally written history. And it offers hints as to why, despite the violence that film has perpetrated on responsible knowledge of the past, cinema may still hold out some hope for responsible history.
Carnes, chairman of the history department at Barnard College in New York City, has enlisted a stellar cast of superbly qualified historians (with a few experts in other fields, like paleo-biologist Stephen Jay Gould) to write short essays on history-related films that touch areas of their expertise. Not unexpectedly, many of the essays feature complaint. Thus, Antonia Fraser can praise Anne of the Thousand Days for getting some of the details right about the short, unhappy career of Anne Boleyn as the wife of Henry VIII, but still attack the movie for missing the whole point concerning royal marriage in the sixteenth century. Stephen Jay Gould likes Jurassic Park as a movie, but condemns it (as a general indictment of what Hollywood does to factual matters) for displaying “insufficient recognition of nature’s complexity” and for purveying “stereotypes of science and history.” Mark Neely does not think that Hollywood has yet come even close to a good movie on Abraham Lincoln, but he does consider Henry Fonda a believable star in Young Mr. Lincoln, even though he holds Abe Lincoln in Illinois in higher esteem, despite the deficiencies of Raymond Massey’s portrayal of the central character. Nancy Cott finds Bonnie and Clyde and Christine Stansell finds Reds more revealing of prevailing social attitudes when the films were made than of the reality of their subjects.
In one of the book’s hardest-hitting, but also most effective, chapters, Richard Marius describes the Thomas More of A Man for All Seasons as “a Catholic Abraham Lincoln, an icon of purity and principle who provoked reverence and affection.” Unfortunately, in order for playwright Robert Bolt and director Fred Zinnemann to make their “drama both a tract for the times and an appealing diversion to audiences” (the film was shot in the wake of the Second Vatican Council that liberalized Roman Catholicism and while the horrors of Nazi and communist tyranny loomed large in the Western mind), they provided “a More who would have been scarcely recognizable in his own time and perhaps a scandal to More himself.”
The most exasperated lines of the book, though, are Richard White’s on the Native Americans portrayed in Michael Mann’s 1992 rendition of The Last of the Mohicans:
The relation of these Indians to historic Indian peoples of the region is, to put it generously, postmodern. For The Last of the Mohicans, history is a junkyard full of motifs and incidents that can be retrieved, combined, and paired with new inventions as Mann sees fit. It is not that all the details are all wrong; it is that they never were combined in this fashion. It is like having George Washington, properly costumed, throwing out the first ball for an 1843 Washington Senators baseball season opener. Sure, there was a George Washington; sure, there once were Washington Senators; sure, the president throws out the first ball; sure, there was an 1843. So what’s the problem?
Past Imperfect has more than enough indictments of this sort for those who have been scandalized by the likes of Oliver Stone (here Stanley Karnow uses his formidable knowledge of the Far East to skewer the assertions about President Kennedy and Vietnam in JFK). Yet it also delivers more. Most important, an introductory opening conversation between historian Eric Foner and movie-maker John Sayles (Eight Men Out, Matewan, dialogue for Apollo 13) highlights enough parallels between filmmaking and professional history-writing to reveal complexities. In particular, Sayles notes accurately that “every historian” as well as “every filmmaker” has “an agenda.” Foner also realizes that “my history is a point of view.” With such an awareness–which appears also in several of the book’s reviews–it is clear that a proper critique of what Hollywood does to history cannot be advanced as if historians–in contrast to cinema moguls–present the simple, unvarnished truth.
Yet filmmaker Sayles and historian Foner think that professional historians write with certain built-in restraints largely absent from the movies. In their view, the key contrast lies in the presentation of history open to critical correction versus the presentation of history insulated from the evidence. So Foner: for historians, “there are limits. If my point of view was completely divorced from the evidence, other historians would know that my views were implausible, and they would point that out because the evidence is there and there are standards.” Sayles sees it much the same way: ‘The difference is that historians read one another, and, because of the academic world in which they live, there’s a little bit more checking up on the facts. There’s a little bit more of, ‘Okay, this is your agenda, but where’s your documentation? Where did you get this? What have you ignored? What have you overemphasized? What have you underemphasized?’ “
Certainly Sayles and Foner are correct in thinking that film-history plays fast and loose with the past in a way that professional history does not. But the difference may not be quite so clear-cut as they suggest. As convincing books like David Noble’s “Historians Against History” (1965) and Peter Novick’s “That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the “American Historical Profession” (1988) have shown so clearly, professional historians are not nearly as free of myth making or of writing keyed to a particular era’s conventional wisdom as they like to think. When history of a more popular sort is in view–whether the fogs of ideology that obscured the recent debate over the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian or the mists of myth that have always engulfed Christopher Columbus–the difference between “real” history and “reel” history is even less well defined.
The awareness that both movies and the books of professional history represent human reconstructions of the past, open to all the influences that affect those who view the past (to be politically correct, doctrinally correct, relevant, patriotic, antipatriotic, “realistic,” “modern,” “postmodern,” as the case may be), should keep all those who are concerned about the integrity of the past from simple, blanket denunciations of “historical” films.
Past Imperfect does more, however, than raise the negative possibility that bad-history-on-the-screen may not be quite as far removed from good-history-on-the-page as critics assume. At least some of its chapters suggest that the movies might actually contribute to better historical understanding. That positive possibility arises from the ability of film to make a powerful impression on a much wider audience than will ever pick up a serious history book.
So James McPherson, author of a best-selling general history of the Civil War, “Battle Cry of Freedom,” describes Glory as flawed in its details about the participation of black soldiers in the war, but accurate in catching the emotional impact when blacks enlisted to fight for the North. Richard Reeves, whose biography of President John Kennedy was anything but a whitewash, thinks PT 109 conveys a convincing picture of the remarkably persistent tenacity that sustained Kennedy, not only after the destruction of his ship during World War II, but all the way to the White House two decades later. Paul Boyer, who has written carefully researched studies about the post-World War II nuclear era, thinks that Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, despite its outre absurdity, nonetheless pictures with considerable accuracy–and great force–“the strategic debates of the day.”
In these and at least a few other chapters, expert authors show that, while almost no historical movie gets all the details right, some at least convey coarse-grained aspects of historical reality as accurately, and much more effectively, than any book will ever do, whether we logophilic cinemaphobes like it or not.
To be sure, the burden of Past Imperfect leans the other way. Its primary focus is on the history-negating realities that govern the production of almost all contemporary commercial movies (Sayles: “I think using responsibility in the same sentences as the movie industry–it just doesn’t fit”).
But by recognizing what makes film such a powerful medium in contemporary world culture (Gould: “I assume that most of the authors [in this book], as children of our time, adore the movies”), and by hinting in a few of its essays how movies can assist historical understanding, Past Imperfect begins a more important discussion than even its capable editor and its expert cadre of authors intended.
Past Imperfect by no means does all that must be done to carry on that discussion. But with its many virtues-a panoply of knowledgeable authors; a full roster of well-known films; crisp, refreshing writing; many well-chosen stills; informative sidebars; and revealing movie lore–it makes a very good start.
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review
Volume 2, No. 2, Page 16
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