One Shrug Too Many
Yes, truth does matter, but it can be a hard slog sometimes convincing people of that. An American studies teacher offers some illustrations.
O’Brien violates old novelistic standards; his book is both fictional and autobiographical, with the lines between the two left deliberately blurred. My students adored the book and looked at me as if they had just seen a Model-T Ford when I mentioned that a few critics felt that the book was dishonest because it did not distinguish fact from imagination. “It says right on the cover ‘a work of fiction’” noted one student. When I countered that we ourselves we using it to discuss the actual Vietnam War, several students immediately defended the superiority of metaphorical truth because it “makes you think more.” I then asked students who had seen the film The Deer Hunter whether the famed Russian roulette scene was troubling, given that there was no recorded incident of such events taking place in Vietnam. None of them were bothered by this.
Well I’m bothered by the fact that none of them were bothered. I’m not surprised, but I’m bothered. It’s funny, too, because we’re always being told how ‘media-savvy’ the current generation is (we’ve been being told that for several generations now, I think), and how good they are at seeing through the ploys of hidden persuaders. I’ve never believed a word of it, and Weir’s account hints at why. I’ve talked to too many people who are serenely unbothered by falsehoods in historical movies, who say cheerily that movies are movies, they’re not supposed to tell the truth, that’s not their job, their job is to entertain, if a rewriting of history makes the movie more entertaining, then that’s what the moviemakers have to do. Everybody knows it’s just a movie, is usually the clincher. But that’s bullshit, of course. Just because everybody ‘knows it’s just a movie’ doesn’t mean everybody doesn’t also ingest some (or all) of the falisfications and believe them ever after.
If all these tv generations are so media savvy, why have they apparently never heard of propaganda? The Triumph of the Will is just a movie too; so what? People tell lies during wars and the lead-up to wars; lies about what the North Vietnamese did or did not do mattered a great deal in the real world; Weir’s students should have been bothered.
I mentioned John Sayles’ use of composite characters in the film Matewan. They had no problem with that, though none could tell me what actually happened during the bloody coal strikes that convulsed West Virginia in the early 1920s. When I probed whether writers or film makers have any responsibility to tell the truth, not a single student felt they did.
Matewan is a good example. There’s a very good book about this whole subject, called Past Imperfect, in which a number of historians and other scholars (Steve Gould for instance) discuss the veracity or lack of it in a number of movies. John Sayles and Eric Foner talk about Matewan – and much as I like Sayles, I think he’s wrong about this and Foner is right. I think movie makers do have a responsibility to tell the truth – partly because movies are so very powerful, and have such searching and longlasting effects on our mental furniture.
My O’Brien class came through when I taught the concept of simulacra, showed them a clip from the film Wag the Dog and then asked them to contemplate why some see disguised fiction as dangerous. (Some made connections to the current war in Iraq, but that’s another story!)
Anybody who doesn’t see disguised fiction as dangerous is mad as a hatter, if you ask me.
I know truth is particularly important to you at present Ophelia (Amazon has my advance order), but I’m surpsied to see such uncritical support for a typically smug and po-faced IHE rant. ‘Journal of a Plague Year’ and ‘Robinson Crusoe’ were both novels but we are capable of admiring them for their undoubted qualities whilst knowing that we need to look elsewhere for the full facts. Like many teachers, Weir seems too inclined to take what his students say to him at face value and as a full explanation of their positions on highly complicated philosophical issues – especially if it allows him to write a scaremongering article. His final remarks hint that they are in fact fully aware of the complexities involved.
‘Triumph of the Will’ is an odd example to choose – it was specifically made as a piece of propaganda, not a documentary or work of fiction.
Anyway, Happy New Year to you and to all those others who share with me the pleasure of reading you and arguing with you and each other.
I didn’t endorse the article, Chris; certainly not in its entirety. But I think some of the quotations he gives are representative, and I’ve been disagreeing with what they represent (what they seem to me to represent) for years, not just lately. In fact the causation goes the other way. I’m not particularly interested in truth now because of the book; I was (rightly or wrongly) considered an okay collaborator on the book because of an existing interest in truth.
“‘Journal of a Plague Year’ and ‘Robinson Crusoe’ were both novels but we are capable of admiring them for their undoubted qualities whilst knowing that we need to look elsewhere for the full facts.”
Well, who’s we?
It’s a large assumption to think that everyone is capable of (much less willing to) admire all fictions for their qualities while knowing it’s necessary to look elsewhere for the full facts. And besides, it’s quite possible to know you’re reading or watching a fiction and still wind up (however inadvertently) adding some of the story to your idea of history. I’m pretty sure I’ve done exactly that on myriad occasions. So I think it’s just way too easy to say it doesn’t matter, everyone knows it’s just a story, and let it go at that.
Happy New Year back. Here’s to a 2006 replete with pleasurable arguments!
“specifically made as a piece of propaganda, not a documentary or work of fiction”
Let’s not forget movies that are taken for documentary when they’re actually both propaganda and fiction…
But then you’re getting into issues like: does violence on television cause real-life violence? To grossly oversimplify, you’re then saddled with the problem that if you lay too much blame at TV’s doorstep you’ll end up being asked “so how come there was violence before television?” Or, if you say it has no measurable effect whatsoever you may be asked to explain explicitly “entertainment-inspired” crimes like the Bulger case. Art, even the most reprehensible expressions of it, take something from life. Is there any good reason to think it can’t influence us in return? (Of course, there’s tons of evidence says it can – little things like Beethoven’s Ninth, etc.) Anyone seen or been reading the reviews of “Wolf Creek?” At least some of the critics seem to be saying the limit has been reached. I wonder why a movie like that should be worth worrying about when real decapitation videos are floating around cyberspace.
Thats the problem, that the debate is carried on at such an unsophisticated level.
The evidence is that a very few individuals are affected enough to act. The rest of us are perfectly well able to depend on our upbringing and peers for guidance to do the right thing.
But the measured, verified evidence is there; that is why we have those guidelines on suicide reporting. It applies in Aboriginal suicides in custody, Arab terror bombings, hijacking, sniper attacks, carjacking, school shooters…
Obviously activists who want to ban all violence in media are lost before they start. Rather, we need a nuanced approach where reportage includes a finely tuned dissing of the perpetrators such that people don’t easily choose to identify and act out.
That doesn’t fit with sensationalism; profit requires floggin hype.
Denying terrorists their headlines as a means of making their acts pointless has been talked about, but it’s almost impossible to implement short of really draconian censorship. Then there’s the ridicule tack, which I recall being brought up on B&W. That applies also to cases like Mel Brooks making Nazis looking silly rather than threatening and, I suppose, also to the story that appears in Freakonomics about how the KKK was made to seem childish after their secret terminology was leaked into a Superman plotline.
And long before Mel Brooks, the ridicule debate applied to Chaplin’s Great Dictator. And Mussolini and Oswald Mosley looked hilarious to people who weren’t under their spell.
Quite true. And it’s a source of great concern that no one in a position of political leadership seems to dare to ridicule the religion, or at least the form of religion, that terrorists claim as the inspiration for their acts. And following on from that we have people like Pat Robertson and the Iranian leader making the kind of inflammatory statements with which we’re all familiar and the condemnation, when it does come, is so wishy-washy, instead of the proper response of treating them like raving madmen with whom no civilised person will have any truck.
Yeah, well, not much surprise there. When people ridicule that particular religion, the reply tends to take the form of a death sentence, which is all too often successfully implemented.