I love history, but more than that, I love watching history-based movies and yelling at the screen when they are wrong. Some of these errors are intentional, and some are mistakes due to carelessness. Our understanding of history changes over time. But the errors in historical movies are themselves revealing. Why did the writer or director make that choice when the reality was also interesting, sometimes even more interesting?
Some errors are due to the expedience of storytelling. You simply can't include everything. Timelines get compressed. Characters are morphed into one person because there isn't time to develop all the characters equally. We recently finished (re)watching The Tudors, and this specific tactic was used when Charles Brandon married the king's sister without permission. It's true that this occurred, but the king had two sisters in reality, and in The Tudors, these sisters were merged into one which created a lot of downstream inaccuracies. These weren't significant to the story being told in the series, though.
I recently (finally) watched the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty, featuring Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian. It was better than I expected, but also not as historically accurate as the 1984 film The Bounty, featuring Mel Gibson as Fletcher Christian and Anthony Hopkins as Captain Bligh. I've also been reading about the actual history of the mutiny, so it's fresh in my mind. A few of the errors that leaped out to me in the 1962 version:
Bligh and Fletcher were actually friends before Fletcher was assigned as first mate, which is accurately portrayed in the 1984 film. Bligh actually chose him for the assignment, although Christian was younger than he was and from a higher class. The 1962 movie instead says that Bligh didn't and would never have chosen the foppish Christian and that he resents being forced to take him as first mate. Why is this error made? The 1962 movie apparently wants to make a statement about class that history was ambivalent about. The film portrays Fletcher in a more positive light than Bligh as a result of his superior breeding. Bligh's cruelty is directly linked to his lack of nobility. His spiteful jealousy of Fletcher's higher class is also portrayed as a motive in goading Christian to rebellion so he can exact his revenge on him with a court-martial and hanging. So, basically, the movie wants us to believe that goodness goes hand in hand with being born into privilege. The lower classes deserve bad things because they are petty, cruel leaders.
The botanist, Brown, (who eventually follows Christian) joins the expedition because he is excited to solve world hunger using the Tahitian breadfruit plant which is a miracle plant. That sounds great and all, but the reality (which is only alluded to briefly, and then quickly overpowered by a recitation of these loftier motives) is that England wanted cheap food for their enslaved population in Jamaica, the final destination of the Bounty. That's basically common knowledge to anyone who knows anything about The Bounty, but the 1962 film wanted to cast the crew's (and England's) motives as noble and great, not just a way to ensure the success of slavery and capitalism through colonization and exploitation.
At the end of the film, the mutineers have landed on Pitcairn (which is clearly Hawaii and portrayed as a huge paradise, not the rugged tiny rock in the middle of the ocean with no beaches that it really is), and Christian has nobly decided that they must return to England to make their case to the crown that the mutiny was justified, and to tell the other side of the story so that Bligh doesn't get to lie his way out of it. A rogue mutineer sets the Bounty on fire, and Christian, ever the selfless hero, enters the burning ship to rescue the navigational equipment, suffering fatal injuries in the process. Close up on Brando's suffering face while his Tahitian bride looks on with love and grief, cue emotionally stirring music. This ending is, however, total crap for so many reasons. First of all, the decision to burn the Bounty was not done by a rogue actor; Christian and other had agreed it needed to be done so that they would escape detection. The idea that Christian wanted to return to England to stand trial is utter poppycock! So, again, why is the movie rewriting the story? It appears to be designed to show faith in the British government and systems in general, to illustrate that we as citizens can get justice if only we abide by the rules established by society. And how did Christian actually die? He was butchered in an uprising by some of the mistreated Tahitians that the mutineers treated as slaves, literally calling them "blacks," and whipping them as Bligh had whipped them. The mutineers were hardly the enlightened British citizens the movie portrays. While Christian didn't participate in these actions, he didn't reign them in either.
Lastly, the role of women as portrayed in the 1962 film omits the agency of the women, some of whom were forced to join the mutineers when Fletcher tricked them into coming aboard for a post-mutiny party, then cut the anchor while everyone slept off their drunken revelry. When they awoke, it was too late to go back. Tahitian "brides" were assigned to the men. While Tahitian culture at the time was non-monogamous and promiscuous by British standards, the brides did mostly go along with this, keeping their own sexual affairs secret if they weren't sanctioned by their captors. When one of the women was accidentally gored by a goat, the sailor she had been assigned to was angry that he now had no assigned "wife," and he demanded Fletcher assign a replacement. As one of the women had given birth to a daughter, the sailor said he was unwilling to wait until the girl was ten years old, an age he deemed appropriate. Fletcher's solution was to take one of the wives from one of the Tahitian men, re-assigning her to the British sailor. While he referred to their new society as democratic, the hierarchy was clearly British sailors > Tahitian women > Tahitian men. Only the agency of the British sailors was protected. The film portrays all the relationships as consensual and idyllic, erasing the troubling reality.
I also went to see the biopic Napoleon this weekend, which contained quite a few historical errors as well. Since this is a newer film, I'll limit how much I discuss particulars. Perhaps the best scene in the entire film is the Battle of Austerlitz in which the enemy is forced onto a frozen lake, then bombarded. The scene is gorgeous and memorable, and the battle tactics are devastatingly clever. Unfortunately, it's not true. There is no lake at Austerlitz, just a bunch of puddles. There were no mass drownings as depicted so beautifully in the film. Dang it. Ridley Scott, in directing the movie, was far more interested in beautiful images than historical accuracy, and in this case, I can't really fault him. That scene was breathtaking.
Other historical inaccuracies of Napoleon included Josephine actually being 6 years older than Napoleon, but the film pairs a much much older Joaquin Phoenix, who is not even remotely convincing as an upstart 20-something gunner (his acting is great, but he's no youth) with the luminescent, scene-stealing Vanessa Kirby (who played Princess Margaret in The Crown). The real Josephine had lost all her teeth due to too much sugar consumption growing up in Martinique! I'm not sure any actor is method enough for that level of accuracy, though. Additionally, Napoleon never fired on the Egyptian pyramids, but I did see firsthand when I toured there that he showed little regard for the architectural integrity of their ancient temples, using rooms inside thousands-of-years-old structures to stable his horses, drilling holes through priceless statuary and carvings for the convenience of his troops.
Written histories are often flawed, for all the reasons that are easy to imagine: human biases, nationalistic narratives, misunderstanding historical records, records that are written for political reasons (for example, at the temple of Ramses III in Aswan, Egypt, hieroglyphs claim that he killed a completely implausible quantity of his enemies), gaps in the historical record (did you know that there is no record of the Israelites in Egypt at all, except possibly the briefest mention in the Merneptah Stele?), presenteeism or anachronism (synagogues in the Book of Mormon when synagogues didn't exist until around 500 years after Lehi left Jerusalem), ignoring diversity, cherry-picked sources, lacking context, language or translation errors, and of course, motivated reasoning by authors both contemporary and historical. For this reason, reading (or watching) history is often as interesting as knowing what actually happened; seeing the subjective viewpoint of the author or director is its own type of history.
Obviously, these are all things to pay attention to if you look at the history associated with Mormonism, religion in general, scriptural accounts, and truth claims. Catholics claim that St. Peter was the first Pope. Does this hold up to scrutiny? So many Cathedrals claim they have enough pieces of the cross that you could build an ark. The Coptic sites in Egypt claim that Jesus lived there as a baby, but the gospels disagree on whether he was even in Egypt. The Book of Mormon claims that natives rode horses and used steel, but the archaeological record shows these things were brought by the Spaniards over a thousand years later. While no historian can be completely free from bias, those whose motives are clouded financially or dogmatically should be understood in that light. The worst histories I've read are those that start with the end in mind, which is why I'm not interested in apologist or religiously motivated critics; both start with the end in mind (Mormonism is true / not true) and work backwards from there.
History is subjective in the way that everything related to humans and society is subjective. If you tell a story, someone else who was there will tell it differently. People sometimes just make up self-aggrandizing heroic tales, or conversely, the contrarian butchering of sacred cows. Some events have more evidence than others, multiple accounts from diverse perspectives, for example. The best historians let the record lead them to the weird realities rather than the comfortable narratives required by either the faithful (in religious apologetics), or in the case of 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty, the classist British government.
- Do you enjoy hate-watching historical media to find the inaccuracies?
- Can you think of examples of "bad" histories? What motives do you see behind these errors?
Discuss.
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