A few months back I finally got around to seeing “Hollywoodland”, a sort of biopic from 2006 about George Reeves, who starred in the Superman TV show in the 1950s. Ben Affleck is excellent in the lead role, and the movie is quite stylish and entertaining.
However, even a cursory investigation reveals that some of the most important points of the film are simply made up — they make for good movie making, but they never actually happened. The net effect is that we are given a fictional version of George Reeves, which is presented as fact.
Is it really ok for a movie to do something like this? To me, it all comes down to the implied contract with the audience. In a film like “Being John Malkovich”, writer Charlie Kaufman never expects us to believe that we are seeing the actual John Malkovich.
Rather, we are being shown a deeply fictional version of the man. In a clever ironic twist, this make-believe John Malkovich is played by the real one. Because we are in on the joke, no implied contract has been violated.
But sometimes the contract is not so clear. Oliver Stone’s “JFK” manages to replace any plausible reality about the assassination of our 35th president with some sort of whacked out gay conspiracy.
Do the makers of a Hollywood film that purports to reveal truth have any obligation to actual truth? Or is this a case of caveat emptor? Maybe the audience is simply supposed to know, despite all signifiers to the contrary, that “It’s only a movie.”
…and what about the Coen’s ‘Fargo,’ that explicitly says it was based on a true story?
As a Brit (and more generally as a non-US citizen) I am used to Hollywood rewriting history in a format more palatable to the tastes of the studios. If you weren’t aware of the real history, you’d think the Americans cracked the Enigma code (according to U-571), etc etc.
However, even UK screenwriters are guilty of ignoring history; Downton Abbey is not a story of how things were, but a story of how things Should Have Been, with the nobility respecting the servants and the men listening to the women. And no racism. And so on.
You can’t make people write stories that are historically accurate, but that unfortunately leaves us with a very confused picture of history. And those who do not learn from (real) history…
I think my biggest concern is that this homogeneous view by screenwriters that heroic individuals can make everything right, that the world is and has been a happy place if you’re the Right Sort Of Person, that things are fair, is all we see. We are letting a very narrow view define our mythos and we are losing reality in that process.
Reality is that power corrupts, individuals are less capable than groups, that people are generally selfish and frequently cruel but that we can construct a society (carefully) to deal with these things, and it doesn’t need to revolve around money or being beautiful or karma or self-reliance or gun ownership or worshipping a silly flag. Those are the lessons of history that I wish the films would reflect.
Phil, you should be making films!!!