{"id":53876,"date":"2015-02-16T12:33:46","date_gmt":"2015-02-16T12:33:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=53876"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:26:05","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:26:05","slug":"oscars-make-history-so-hollywoods-war-stories-need-to-be-true","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/02\/oscars-make-history-so-hollywoods-war-stories-need-to-be-true\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscars Make History, So Hollywood\u2019s War Stories Need to Be True"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Zero<\/a>

Zero Dark Thirty Photo: Sony Pictures<\/p><\/div>\n

When the Academy Awards are handed out, history will be made.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not referring to the Oscars that particular films might win, but our embrace of their narratives of history. If \u201cAmerican Sniper\u201d gathers a fistful of statues, even more people will see a film that presents a skewed view<\/a> of the Iraq war. If the \u201cImitation Game\u201d gets lucky, a lot more people will watch a movie that erroneously<\/a> portrays Alan Turing as a social idiot. If \u201cSelma\u201d catches some of the limelight, more people may believe that Lyndon Johnson wasn\u2019t<\/a> entirely supportive of Martin Luther King.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s controversy over films and history has led to a dismissive shrug from cultural critics who wearily tell us<\/a> that movies are just movies, you shouldn\u2019t take their versions of truth to heart, just enjoy the show. \u201cGoing to a Hollywood movie for a history lesson is like going to a brothel for a lecture in philosophy,\u201d wrote Esquire\u2019s<\/em> Stephen Marche<\/a>. \u201cYou\u2019re in the wrong place.\u201d A.O. Scott<\/a>, the New York Times<\/em> film critic, tweeted for the hard of understanding, \u201cFEATURE FILMS ARE NOT HISTORY. THEY ARE HISTORICAL FICTION.\u201d<\/p>\n

They are right \u2014 Hollywood is not a classroom. The problem, however, is that movies, despite the bonfires of distortion in many of them, can shape our understanding of political events just as much as think tank reports or Pulitzer-winning books. For instance, a lot<\/a> of major<\/a> movies<\/a> are taught in schools. It is disingenuous for the screening room cognoscenti to pretend that films are of no political consequence and shouldn\u2019t be critiqued for historical accuracy \u2014 and that\u2019s particularly true for war films.<\/p>\n

As Don Gomez, a soldier and blogger, wrote<\/a> about \u201cZero Dark Thirty,\u201d which portrayed torture as playing a crucial role in finding Osama bin Laden, \u201cFilmmakers can always deflect criticism by saying \u2018It\u2019s a movie, not a documentary,\u2019 which is true. But that ignores the reality of how it will be consumed \u2014 how they know<\/em> it will be marketed and consumed.\u201d And guess what \u2014 opinion polls show a majority<\/a> of Americans think torture worked, just as ZDT said it did, even though an exhaustive Senate report concluded it did not<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A recent study conducted by Notre Dame researchers Todd Adkins and Jeremiah J. Castle indicated that movies are more effective in shaping political opinion than cable news or political ads. In the study<\/a>, different audiences were exposed to different films and the evolution of their political beliefs was tested before and afterwards; there were statistically significant shifts. \u201cViewers come expecting to be entertained and are not prepared to encounter and evaluate political messages as they would during campaign advertisements or network news programs,\u201d the authors wrote \u2014 meaning that viewers are not aware they are being targeted with political messages, so they are more likely to be persuaded by what they see on the screen.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not really concerned about \u201cThe Imitation Game\u201d or \u201cSelma\u201d or for that matter, \u201cArgo\u201d or \u201cThe King\u2019s Speech,\u201d because nobody is going to die from the wrong lessons they might impart (and it\u2019s not clear<\/a> that \u201cSelma\u201d was wrong). It\u2019s probably true, as The Guardian<\/em> said of \u201cBraveheart<\/a>,\u201d that it\u2019s a \u201cgreat big steaming haggis of lies\u201d \u2014 but the present-day costs of its liberties with the truth are negligible. However, when it comes to blockbuster tales about our ongoing wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, the wrong lessons are deadly. If, as \u201cAmerican Sniper\u201d suggests, people believe that Iraq was filled with crazed savages who had no reason to attack the foreign army in their midst, we risk engaging in more warfare in the region, because fighting sub-human Muslim fanatics is far easier to justify than killing and maiming innocent civilians, which is a lot of what actually happened.<\/p>\n

There is another problem with the \u201ccalm down it\u2019s just a movie\u201d attitude \u2014 it is chiefly used to protect narratives that confirm our prejudices. When Oliver Stone\u2019s \u201cJ.F.K.\u201d came out in 1991, it received coast-to-coast jeers for suggesting a conspiracy behind President John F. Kennedy\u2019s assassination. \u201cWhat is fact and what isn\u2019t is not always easy to tell,\u201d Vincent Canby wrote<\/a> in the Times<\/em>, calling out the movie\u2019s \u201cunsubstantiated data.\u201d Director Oliver Stone, deeply at odds with conventional wisdom, was eviscerated for his \u201cparanoid fantasy,\u201d as Charles Krauthammer wrote<\/a> at the time. Yet Clint Eastwood, whose \u201cAmerican Sniper\u201d conforms with traditional notions of patriotism and heroism, gets a pass from historical scrutiny because, as his defenders say, it\u2019s only a film.<\/p>\n

Rutgers historian Richard Heffner noted<\/a> that the furor over \u201cJ.F.K.\u201d showed that filmmakers like Stone had hit a sensitive nerve \u2014 they were becoming \u201cour nation\u2019s leading storytellers,\u201d and the Academy Awards rather than the Pulitzer Prizes were becoming the go-to accolades for our new historians (Heffner wasn\u2019t entirely happy about this). By all means, let movies engage history \u2014 this is a wonderful thing \u2014 but their narratives of violence should not be spared a confrontation with the truth.<\/p>\n

______________________________<\/p>\n

Email the author: peter.maass@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 fistlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cultural critics like to tell us that movies are just movies, but the \u201ccalm down it\u2019s just a movie\u201d attitude is chiefly used to protect narratives \u2014 like Zero Dark Thirty or American Sniper \u2014 that confirm our prejudices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53876\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}