FLUNKING HISTORY
Reality-based films flub facts
Actors are used to playing other people — and not just onstage.
Today’s Hollywood celebrities seem to be UN ambassadors one minute, novelists the next, and politicians every other Thursday. But there’s one role they love to play most of all — historian.
Whenever actors are interviewed about their roles in historical films or plays, they start talking about “all the research” they have done, and how their performances will help people “understand the true story” much better than if it were presented in some dull old book or musty lecture theatre.
The latest celebrity to strut the boards as a Professor of Modern History is none other than Russell Crowe, whom we will shortly see starring in The Water Diviner, a movie about a man who travels to Turkey after the Battle of Gallipoli to try to find his three missing sons.
Crowe — who also directed the film — seems to have decided that this gives him a lectern from behind which he can sound off about the ill-fated Allied attempt to wrestle the Dardanelles from Turkish control in 1915. In Crowe’s eyes, the campaign — which cost the lives of 9,000 of his fellow Australians — has been treated as “mythology.”
In a recent interview, the Oscar winner claimed that “after 100 years, it’s time to expand that mythology.” Australia, he said, “should be mature enough as a nation to take into account the story that the other blokes have to tell. You know, because we did invade a sovereign nation that we’d never had an angry word with. And I think it’s time it should be said. For all the heroism you want to talk about, you know, for me, a fundamentally more im- portant conversation is the waste of life and these things should, you know, we shouldn’t celebrate the parts of that mythology that shouldn’t be celebrated.”
These comments do not, perhaps, represent the actor at his most coherent. But from what can be deduced, Professor Crowe is stating that there are three ways in which Gallipoli is viewed incorrectly. It is mythologized; it is celebrated; and people forget that enemy soldiers — or, to use the phraseology of this august military historian, “the other blokes” — were also killed. The problem is that Crowe’s position is utterly without foundation.
The horrific losses at Gallipoli certainly mean that the event has a special place in the hearts of Australians and New Zealanders — but the event is certainly not “mythologized.” In fact, both nations are fully aware of the true and terrible story of the campaign.
Next April marks the centenary of Anzac Day, which was initially held to commemorate those who had fought and fallen in the Dardanelles. (Anzac stands for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps.) The idea that such a commemoration is a “celebration” is fatuous. As Barry John Clark, the president of the New Zealand veterans association, has said, “from our point of view, Anzac Day isn’t celebrated. Anzac Day is a day of remembrance.”
Of course, this phenomenon of the actor-turned-revisionist historian is nothing new. But much to the chagrin of historians, it isn’t going away. Take the recent example of The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park cryptanalyst and mathematician who is widely regarded as being instrumental in cracking the Ger- man Enigma machine, and perhaps shortening the war by years. In interviews, Cumberbatch has made a great deal of noise about wanting to play the tragic figure of Turing, who was later prosecuted and chemically castrated for being gay, as faithfully as possible.
But ironically, the film is a load of junk history. The catalogue of offences against the truth is too long to list here, but the most egregious falsehood is the notion that Turing covered up the treachery of John Cairncross, the Soviet spy, on the grounds that Cairncross was about to out him. In truth, the men never met. But most of the British public will now believe that Turing abetted treachery. So much for honouring the poor man’s memory.
Of course, the worst offender is Crowe’s fellow Australian Mel Gibson, who has produced a whole handful of films that have as much relationship with reality as the events of the recent Paddington Bear movie. In Braveheart — his biography of Scots patriot William Wallace — Gibson made so many errors that the film has now become a laughing stock.
Battles are fought that never took place. Meetings occur between people who weren’t alive at the same time. The Scots wear kilts 400 years too early.
Gibson’s film about the American War of Independence, The Patriot, is similarly historically dire. Among other sins, it pres- ents a world in which slavery really isn’t too bad, and Gen. Cornwallis somehow contrives to lose a battle at which he was never present. No matter. So long as the Brits get a kicking, the audiences are happy.
But we should take this problem seriously and not just stop listening to actors and directors, but stop trusting the history that they project. The problem with Hollywood’s glib approach is that audiences will develop a completely skewed, and often false, knowledge of the past.
As a historian who spends weeks of his life in archives, it’s maddening when the likes of Crowe, Gibson and Cumberbatch — a Dickensian firm of lawyers if there ever was one — lecture us on the “truth,” because they have done so much “research.”
Although I would never accuse any brilliant performing artist of relying on Wikipedia, I do wonder who assembles the material on which they draw to issue their oracular statements. To be frank, it’s not often I see famous actors at Britain’s National Archives. But maybe I’ve just been lucky.