MICHAEL WOOD’S VIEW
17
There’s a scene at the end of the old John Wayne–James Stewart western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in which we discover the hero’s whole reputation was built on a fiction. But the newspaper editor responds: ‘‘This is the West, sir – when the legend becomes fact, print the legend!” This story came to mind recently as I was reading the debate about historical accuracy in The Favourite and Mary Queen of Scots. Does it matter that film-makers play fast and loose with history and just make up the facts? After all, Shakespeare did it – and his Richard III is the one we all know today.
The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins, for instance, thinks film-makers have an obligation when dealing with history to get the basic facts right. Historian Greg Jenner, on the other hand, offers a different take. He thinks we all know that these are “just stories”, and it is up to historians to give us the real facts. Meanwhile these films promote wider public interest in history.
I agree with Greg. But I still have a question. Sometimes the impact of a film can transcend the mere facts of history and, like Shakespeare, end up creating its own legend. We might ask how long it is until poor Queen Anne’s reputation escapes The Favourite – but does the real responsibility for film-makers come when addressing recent events? Does the bar get higher then?
A spate of recent films raise the same issues, and suggest there is more of an obligation when handling current events, such as Iraq or Brexit, where it is vital the public are well informed about the history. This is especially true in our era of fake news – what one might call the first rough draft of fake history.
Take Vice, a scathing polemic on Bush and the Iraq War. Here, historians and journalists agree that whatever the disastrous chain of events that led to the invasion of 2003, the film-makers’ idea that Dick Cheney engineered the war for his oil friends owes more to Mad magazine and Dr Strangelove than to history.
Then there’s 2017’s cluster of Second World War films: Darkest Hour, Churchill and Dunkirk. All are laced with questionable fictions. When Gary Oldman’s Churchill takes the tube and talks to ordinary folk, well, the jaw drops.
Churchill, of course, famously said: “I will leave judgments on this matter to history – but I will be one of the historians.” His six-volume The Second World War was got out fast, with a team of researchers plus the advantage of all the military and diplomatic papers on his desk. It helped create the image of Churchill as our saviour in the war, the greatest Briton – a powerful emotional matrix still active now in our current debates, which are surely as much about national and English identity as the European Union.
Churchill, of course, was writing with his own spin, not just to cement his place at the centre of the narrative of the war, but with the bigger message that the “Englishspeaking peoples” had a unique historical destiny. That was a message for the times, written just as Britain was losing its empire and adjusting to its new status as a former world power. And looking at our own day, films on Churchill, Dunkirk and the Few do the same thing: they hit the zeitgeist in an almost Jungian way. Though planned long before the referendum of 2016, they are part of a long-term mood of national introspection in postwar, post-empire and post-industrial Britain.
So, sure, let’s not mistake movies for history. The goal of film-makers is to use history in a creative way. The triangle of Queen Anne, Sarah Churchill and Abigail Hill is fantastic fun, and based on real relationships, but as director Yorgos Lanthimos tells us at the start, it is not history. On crucial current topics, however, it is important that we understand what really went on. And that is where the historians come in – whether in schools and universities, or in the media.
And as for films like Darkest Hour or Vice, they will be fascinating sources for historians of the future – but about the time they were made, not about the time they depict. For they are really about us.