Truth, History, Memory and Movies

Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman

Lincoln Colorized

Lyndon Johnson

Among the movies nominated for Academy Awards are three which depict actual historical events: Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty and Argo. 
 Lincoln, based on a history by Doris Kearns Goodwin, has been criticized for getting the vote by the Connecticut delegation wrong; Argo largely omitted the crucial role of one of the true heroes of the rescue of American diplomats, a Canadian diplomat, Kenneth C. Taylor, and Zero Dark Thirty has been criticized for spending a good part of the movie on torture scenes which suggested by their very length torture was as important as diligent field work and observation, in tracking down Osama Bin Laden.

Of the three, the objections to Lincoln seem trivial.  The most objectionable scene in the Phantom's eyes was not the voting in Congress, but the opening scene, which the viewer is not expected to believe as having actually happened, where two Black union soldiers recite, all starry eyed, the Gettysburg address back to Lincoln. This condescending, maudlin, gratuitous scene is a trademark of Steven Spielberg, who has never been able to make a movie without inserting a boo hoo attempt at tear jerking, almost always having the opposite effect.  (Even Band of Brothers, based on Stephen Ambrose's history of E company and its intrepid hero, Richard Winters, which was so well done, had the requisite Spielberg grease stain--a long phony episode in which Winters shoots a young German soldier in the field and then feels all gooey guilty about having shot so young and innocent a boy.  Winters remarked, "Through that entire war, I never regretted killing a single enemy soldier."  Winters, always careful to limit his remarks, was moved to comment out of what was clearly at least annoyance and more likely disgust.)

The temptation to change a story for the sake of intensifying the emotional impact, or to glorify a man who might seem like an unfeeling killer were he not shown grieving over those he has killed is strong.  In The Wire, there is a brilliant, intricate pas de deux story line about a reporter who writes heart rending  stories about the suffering underclass of Baltimore, which are just too good to be true, and of course they are, but they help win the paper a Pulitzer Prize, which is all the editor-in-chief cares about. At the same time, a policeman, McNulty, fabricates a heart rending story about homeless men nobody cares about being murdered by a serial killer.  Having seen the game, McNulty, the policeman, gleefully feeds the lying reporter  the nobody-cares-about these- homeless-men story. That indifference becomes the story,and the newspapers and politicians run wild with it. To McNulty the truth or lack of it is a pointless distinction in a world where standard operating procedure is a lie, where police stage "drugs on the table" photo ops as if they actually mean anything in the "war on drugs" which is itself a lie. Politicians lies. Newspapers lie. What difference does it make if police lie?

In the case of the newspaper, the viewer can see the harm done by the Spielberg-ing of a story. But in the case of movies, there is a suspension of disbelief, and we are supposed to know what we are seeing is not real. On the other hand, if our only images of a world betray the truth, then that lie becomes our perception of reality. The Phantom knows some fictional characters better than he knows most people, and they acquire a certain life, a certain reality in the mind. 

History is in large part about memory, and there have been enough studies by psychologists which clearly demonstrate how people can have very clear memories of events which simply never happened. Memory is a construct and rife with inaccuracy.

Just recently, the Phantom remembered an exchange he heard on the Lyndon Johnson tapes, between Johnson and his good friend Senator Richard Russell, in which Russell answered the President's question about what to do about Vietnam and the chances for success against an inscrutable enemy, and the Phantom clearly remembered Russell saying, "You know we are going to have to leave eventually," and Johnson says, "Yep. I know." And Russell says, "Well, they[the  Vietnamese] know that too."

It was such a terse, succinct and dramatic way of telling LBJ what to do without telling him directly what to do, the conversation was burned into the Phantom's memory and Phantom was eager to use it. The trouble is, that exchange never happened. Going back to listen to the tapes again, and reading the transcripts, the Phantom discovered while that was the essence of what Russell said, it was not what he said. He did tell Johnson the war was a lost cause, but not nearly so poetically.  So the Phantom decided not to use that, at least not as a depiction of what was actually said. The Phantom, writing his blog, had to "kill his darling," as Faulkner famously said about writing.

This is not to say movies and novels should not depict history. Exodus, many Mitchner novels, like South Pacific, were mainly history with a story attached. And   the reader understood what part  was fiction, and what was history, and Mitchner served history and the modern reader well. Gone with the Wind, was wonderful in providing an insight into how slave owners could live with that monstrous evil and call it good.

But distortions which change today's minds into thinking torture works or which depict paratroopers as sensitive souls all conflicted about the tragedy of having to kill those who were mercilessly killing them do not serve anyone well, except perhaps the  Mr. Spielberg's bankers.

Soap opera depictions of how physicians function, think, and feel created a distorted image of what rendering medical care is all about.  "ER" was the first  television show to depict the bitterness, in-the-trenches mentality of hospital doctors and its success showed you could be hard boiled about doctors without losing an audience.  

The idea for "ER"  emerged from obscure hard boiled medical novels like  MD and from the satiric novels M*A*S*H and House of God. Those novels were floating around Hollywood, and M*A*S*H was a successful movie and televison show, and House of God followed that script pretty closely.  The noir MD  was published and optioned to Hollywood before "ER" got launched, exploring the socially unacceptable notions that doctors spent a lot of time angry, resentful and frustrated; MD's hero was McNulty,  in a hospital whites. 

These novels got at a truth which non fiction could not approach because they made you feel what the doctors were feeling. They took you inside the head of the doctors in ways which had been previously unavailable to non physicians. It was an internal life which did not have to be foot noted. Doctors would not have admitted to thinking the thoughts and feeling the feelings depicted in the bleak and dark world of MD. Catch-22, the novel of the air war in Europe, got around the problem of telling socially unacceptable truths by couching its truth in satire, and it was devastatingly effective. 

The only problem with the satiric approach is it lacks the sting and the staying power of the dark film noir  approach of an MD. You can put down Catch-22 or House of God, and go out to dinner, unaffected. But you read One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, The Stranger, or MD, and it ruins your appetite. It stays with you and roils your gut like an unmedicated ulcer. Noir packs a wallop satire lacks.

"ER" got at a truth that non fiction reporting like Hopkins 24/7 could not. Freed from the restraints of reporting, the story could be told more effectively and reach a wider audience. People who would be deterred by the gore were sucked in by the romance, and the hard experience got conveyed. Most importantly, "ER" told stories told from the inside out, where documentaries are told from the outside, looking in.

Hemingway was a reporter for the Toronto Star, and reading his dispatches from Europe you know you are reading something which is very telling. But non of his non fiction stuff approaches the power of A Farewell To Arms. That was fiction because he said it was, but it was truth telling, from memory and from the long dark tea time of Hemingway's soul.  That's a sort and depth of truth only fiction can achieve.

There is a parallel in the colorization of the classic black and white photos of Lincoln, Sherman and others from the Civil war. In a way, adding color actually adds a dose of reality. Black and white photos are, in a sense, more artsty, more distant, and adding color actually brings these icons down to flesh and blood. The Phantom has been fascinated by the effect, and thinks it adds something, as long as it is not accepted without some thought. The emotional impact is worthwhile, but has its own traps, as emotion usually does.

So the Phantom cheers the historical movies.  If American schools use these as a basis for discussion, so the distortions, the "poetic license" is examined, everyone would benefit. For that matter, Band of Brothers, The Wire ought to be taught, alongside selections from the Johnson tapes. 

Let's just hope that most lame of all excuses for getting it wrong, "Oh, well, it's just entertainment" is firmly rejected.  If you use a clip from a real telephone conversation, or if you use the image of Lincoln, you are using the real to authenticate your fiction and you have a responsibility not to put a dagger in Lincoln's hands or a rack in Mr. Obama's basement. 

That old, "Well, it's just entertainment" really means, "Well, it made me more money to do it that way."