Napoleon and The Crown are travesties: there is no ‘artistic licence’ to distort history
We’ve made a great movie. It’s called January 2021 and it shows how Donald Trump really was cheated out of the White House and Joe Biden really did tamper with the Georgia ballot boxes. In one amazing scene you see it was Mike Pence who encouraged the march on the Capitol to discredit Trump.The pope then tells Trump he won. We got the guys from The Crown to make it and it’s really moving.
Don’t believe it? Come on. It’s based on real events. Only bits are fictionalised to add some colour. Besides, since the movie came out, half of Americans think the events it depicts really happened. And we’ve made millions. Yippee.
Deliberately telling lies about the living or the deceased – whether they died recently or centuries ago – is simply wrong. It is worse than wrong: it is cruel and an offence to history and potentially to democracy. Those defending the practice argue that The Crown, Napoleon and Oppenheimer are good clean fun, true to life, based on real events, hugely popular and, anyway, are OK because the filmmakers have artistic licence.
Napoleon clearly contains some nonsense designed by its director, Ridley Scott, to depict the emperor as a sort of Adolf Hitler. No one but Hitler is Hitler. But Napoleon is long dead and his life has been minutely recorded and assessed. As for the biopic of J Robert
Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb”, is the story it tells true? To believe so was vital to enjoying the film, but no one bothered to tell us if it was.
Spotting falsehoods in The Crown has become a national sport. Royal experts Hugo Vickers and Sally Bedell Smith have pointed out many of them; all are gratuitous and pointless. The made-up stories about Prince Philip, the Kennedys, Macmillan, the Queen,
Prince Charles and what Diana said about her father seem casually derogatory. Had the films told the actual truth about this odd family it would have been just as dramatic. If you are not intending to tell the truth, why go to such expense to make the actors and sets so “accurate”? The effect is that the audience is often deceived into assuming the narrative is accurate too.
When art is so short of inspiration that it has to steal from history, it should at least respect history’s sole essence, which is truth. Distant history – as of Richard III, whose sins were reassessed once more in last Saturday’s Channel 4 documentary The Princes in the Tower: the New Evidence – can look after itself. I imagine even the royal family can survive these distortions. That is not the point.
This is dangerous territory. Much can be learned from journalists, who are like historians in that both occupations require a commitment to accuracy. Both are reporters on the past and present, and expected to search for the truth. To lie is serious. If errors are made, efforts must be made to correct them. No journalist is proud of being wrong, or boasts “artistic licence”. A film that portrays and dramatises historical events should be no different.
These are sick times for anyone wanting to keep the truth at the heart of public debate. Were Trump to be elected next year, it would be in large part because of the falsities of Fox News, and the lies that spread on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Falsifying events inflames emotions, reinforces hostilities and fuels grievances. At such a time, there is no place for “art” that arrogantly claims the right to ignore the truth.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
“Everyone has to sleep. If we can add a bit of entertainment to an aspect of daily life you have to do anyway, there’s an opportunity there,” laughs Utsunomiya, when I put this to him. “Pokémon is at its most popular in the Americas, Europe and Japan – and if you combine all those populations, it’s around a billion people. So, there are still more than seven billion or so people outside those territories. We really want to have the rest of the world become passionate Pokémon fans. So we need to learn to incorporate those values and cultures around the world.”
It may surprise those outside the Pokémon phenomenon – or those who have fallen off the wagon since the turn of the millennium – that these collectible critters are morepopular than ever. The original Game Boy games remain the series’ bestselling, at over 46m units, but 2019’s Pokémon Sword and Shield on the Nintendo Switch have already shifted 26m, and the games as a whole have sold over 460m in total. Pokémon Go still has an estimated 80m active players. There is clearly something enduringly appealing about Japan’s most successful entertainment export. Where Tajiri started out on a catch-em-all quest to capture bugs, the Pokémon Company is now on a quest to capture the world.
“That there is something that is just universal about Pokémon,” reckons Utsunomiya. “When the first games came out in Japan, it was typical to look at video games as something that are just for boys, but we [soon] realised a much more diverse audience were playing them. We soon found that the games were very appealing to the rest of the world as well … It would make us very happy if, through Pokémon, people can connect with each other – regardless of where they are, or who they are.”