Zoe STRIMPEL
Even five years ago, it would have been hard to argue with a straight face that a film about a 19th-century lady fossil scientist stood as a symbol of one of the great and most menacing social ills of our time. Well, welcome to 2021, a year that – while promising in other ways – seems destined to build on the horrors of its predecessor where woke hegemony and its penchant for ceaseless propaganda, distortion and revisionism are concerned.
It has long been obvious that we are living in an age in which historical accuracy has been superseded by the demands of a raging fixation with identity politics and political correctness. But what is becoming freshly apparent is the growing role that television and film – most of it made by people who have drunk deeply from the trough of woke Kool Aid – are playing in distorting the past.
The order of the day seems to be historical dramas, based just enough on real figures and events to lull audiences into believing they can rely, broadly, on what they are seeing. But their makers have different ideas. The latest example of this troubling revisionist impulse is the film Ammonite, starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan, which began streaming in the UK on Friday on Amazon Video. It received gushing praise, especially in the Left-wing press. The film is about Mary Anning, the 19th-century paleontologist (played by Winslet) who made groundbreaking fossil discoveries on the Jurassic Coast. She is a fascinating woman, the story of whose discoveries alone could easily have carried a brilliant film.
All of this was ignored by Francis Lee, the film-maker, who chose instead to focus not just on Anning’s sex life but on an entirely speculative, seemingly fabricated lesbianism with geologist Charlotte Murchison (Ronan). Lee is smug about the “storm” this decision has caused, proud of how he has put one in the eye of homophobic Western culture and historical tradition. Odd, then, that he seems blind to the fact that he – a man – has usurped and misconstrued the life of the only significant female paleontologist in history in favour of titillation.
Lee explained himself in the tortuous logic of the progressive, demanding: “Would [critics] have felt the need to whip up uninformed quotes from self-proclaimed experts if the character’s sexuality had been assumed to be heterosexual?”
It’s not clear what he’s complaining about, since many reviewers have mooned over Ammonite. But for people like my parents – interested in history, science and extraordinary women – it was a disaster. My father wrote to me after hearing Lee interviewed on the radio. “Who knows or cares what he was thinking?” he wrote. “He has written the fake history and that will now forever occupy the landscape.”
But Ammonite is just the latest in a growing line of such output. Dickinson, a 2019 drama about Emily Dickinson, featured the reclusive 19th-century poet as sexually fluid – she actually twerks in one scene. Meanwhile Jamestown, about 17th-century settlers in America, had young wives demanding an end to rape, and Hulu’s 2020 drama about Catherine the Great didn’t bother with history at all.
Who cares, you may ask? Well, Jamestown or Dickinson alone might not change the course of historical understanding. But other shows will – and have. Take The Crown and Bridgerton, both watched by tens of millions of Netflix subscribers last year. The Crown was based on living characters and real events that most people dimly recognised, so it appeared to be history. Even so, it manipulated reality – and the achievements of Margaret Thatcher – in accordance with the politics of Peter Morgan, its maker. Bridgerton, meanwhile, was a costume romp but encouraged viewers to “learn”, misleadingly, that Queen Charlotte was black and that history has been racist in portraying the Regency court as largely white, which it was.
History is under siege everywhere from university classes to museum exhibits and newspapers. In 2019, the New York Times launched its 1619 Project, an attempt to rescript American history so that it revolves around the date the first slaves were imported, and comes to supersede 1776, the date of American independence. The year 1619 is indeed a terrible and important one, but it’s not where American history starts – and ends.
But it’s film and television that pack the biggest punch. Nearly 30 million people watched the latest season of The Crown the week after it began, while 82 million saw Bridgerton. That’s a lot of people imbibing “history” written by politics. Ammonite is unlikely to reach such figures, but in turning a precious bit of women’s history and science into a leerathon, it’s arguably done just as much damage.
‘He has written a fake history and that will forever occupy the landscape’