Discussion for article #232171
No. Though it may seem justified to distort history “in the opposite direction” to correct past perceptions, it’s a bad idea. This doesn’t correct the truth, it ghettoizes it. You can have your truth, and I can have mine, and everybody else is entitled to come up with some reason to bend truth their own way.
You would think that academics on the left would have learned the lessons of the excesses of multiculturalism and post-modernism. The people who today deny global warming and try to inject “intelligent design” and creationism into science curricula use the same arguments. The common refrain "I am not a scientist, but . . . " allows global warming deniers to reject the scientific framework in favor of their own personal truth.
History happened. It can never be precisely measured, but there is no acceptable excuse to distort it.
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“History”, as has been noted by many, “is the propaganda of the victor.”
What benefit do we gain from any history that actively distorts reality to “make a point?”
Robert Caro’s magnificent (and still uncompleted) biography of Johnson is an exhaustive look at a man
filled with many contradictions, but a man who happened to be at the right place in history to achieve what no other
US politician had or could do…get effective Civil Rights legislation through a Congress fully controlled by its most fervent opponents.
Kennedy’s death, Johnson’s assumption of power, his encyclopedic knowledge of Congressional rules and the members of both houses, his awareness of his opponents weaknesses and needs…all were used to win passage.
Both King AND Johnson faced massive challenges and for King it included implacable and often violent resistance from supporters of segregation, rigged legal systems, and vigilantism, not to mention calls by many in the black community to fight back with counter violence.
I would argue that had Kennedy lived, he would not have been able to get a Civil Rights bill through Congress…at least not without the help of Johnson, who had been walled off from any meaningful input until Kennedy’s death. And without King, Johnson would not have had the actions which helped swing public opinion to “do the right thing,” finally…
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Thanks for these comments. What I would stress in reply is the way I’m seeking to define (or re-define, given its general usage in such conversations) “distort”–to connect it back to the original sense, of how something looks different from one perspective than from another. From a Johnson-focused perspective, much of what dweb said seems quite accurate; from a King- and Selma-focused perspective, I would argue, Johnson was at best a reluctant accomplice in need of serious pushing and prodding, and to worst tied to Hoover’s FBI and the worst side of 1960s US government.
Ultimately, or rather cumulatively, the goal it seems to me is to get as full and rounded and comprehensive a picture of history as possible–which will never be precisely “what happened,” in some absolute sense, but rather that full picture. And so my main point here is that this film offers a very important new perspective that can help us move toward that full picture.
Thanks,
Ben
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It’s hard to condense accurate history into a two hour movie. When the movie U-571 came out Jeremy Clarkson said “by the time the Americans captured an Enigma machine the Germans were practically giving them away.” I laughed and told my British friends “Well, you guys should’ve made the movie then.”
I saw Selma over the weekend and thought they did an excellent job of portraying the high drama of the three marches on the Edmund Pettus Bridge which was the focus of the movie. If I were to offer any criticism it was that they tried to be too accurate, they had to get a lot of characters in. For example they have to give Amelia Boynton some depth so the audience would care that she was laying unconscious on the bridge.
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The difference between distortion because of the demands of the medium and distortion to serve an agenda is crucial. The first is unavoidable. The second does more harm than good.
Note that I haven’t seen the movie and am responding only to the argument presented in this piece.
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I don’t rely on movies for an accurate history lesson. If I’m interested enough I’ll read a book and avoid the historical fiction section.
I watched Hidalgo on HBO again last night. Total bullshit but great fiction.
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The thing that is lacking in this piece is any actual connection between the pile of premises (other films have distorted history in other ways, need to condense a story for dramatic presentation, etc) and the ultimate conclusion that distorting history in the manner in which they chose to do so was a good and necessary thing.
Just because they might have needed to oversimplify the relationship between King and Johnson does not mean they needed to falsify it in the process. Have you listened to the Johnson tapes? In his conversations with King, it is clear that Johnson very much likes King and very much feels the injustices which need to be corrected. Johnson did not select Selma specifically, but he’s the one who gave King the suggestion that focusing on the VRA was more important than fighting to get an African American nominated to a cabinet position, which was what King was pushing him for at the time.
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Catharine Maria Sedgwick writes that her “design … was to illustrate not the history, but the character of the times.”
Reminds me a bit of Colbert’s concept of truthiness – history by zeitgeist.
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You use “distort” here in two different and incompatible ways. Distort as making “fundamental choices of emphasis and perspective” on one hand and going against the scholarly consensus on the other hand.
The first is, again, inevitable, and highlighting a previously neglected perspective yields the benefits you suggest. Portraying African-Americans as the owners of their struggle for civil rights in America corrects the misperception that benevolent white people were the primary agents of change.
Portraying events in a way that is contradicted by the best available evidence, though, opens the work to criticism that the perspective presented is based on falsehood.
@Doremus_Jessup: Me neither!
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I hate distortions of history because the distortion becomes the focus.
In the film Salvador, Oliver Stone puts the assassination of Archbishop Romero after the election of Reagan when it occurred seven months before the 1980 election. (March 24, 1980). The point Stone was trying to make that Reagan’s election was a signal to the right in El Salvador that death squads and other human rights abuses would be tolerated and no longer criticized by the Reagan administration. While the general premise of what Stone was saying was true, including the high profile assassination of Archbishop Romero as part of the Reagan change of policy on Central America was a ridiculous distortion that the far right was able to beat back based on the facts.
I think if she was worried about too much focus on LBJ, she could have avoided the conflict by omission (you can not cover everything in a historical event), than to deliberately distort his record.
LBJ was a deeply flawed character throughout most of his life but his stand on Civil Rights plus the War on Poverty was one of the few bright spots in a career that had focused more on the acquisition of power than helping humanity.
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Wow. The author seems to be arguing that making things up is actually more accurate than relying on the historical record. A recommendation from someone with an attitude like that is a bad recommendation.
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It is ok to distort history in a movie. One other commenter discussed U-571. Another discussed Bishop Romero. However, the decision to distort reduces the political and cultural impact of the art on another level. it reclassifies the result to “entertainment” and can even open the result to derision. Various depictions of George Armstrong Custer come to mind. A director that changes a story for entertainment value shouldn’t complain if the result is viewed as entertainment instead of history. You can’t have it both ways.
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My folks taught me that two wrongs don’t make a right. That earlier films have been seen through white eyes even when the stories of African-Americans are being told does not justify doing an injustice to President Johnson, who rose above his background in Jim Crow-era Texas to become a champion of equal rights. The film could have shown that without making him its center. Think of a WWII movie in which historical characters appear without detracting from the protagonists’ importance.
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There are lots of fictional stories. And we don’t rely on historical fiction for the facts–but by the same token, we do expect it to be reasonably accurate. And the more that the fiction relies on specific incidents in history, the more accurate it should be.
You know what I can’t help noticing about this whole thing- that RFK gets off scot free when it was him, and not LBJ, who approved Hoover’s spying campaign against MLK. And this is what I think a HUGE problem is with this issue. What I believe a lot of people miss who are defending the movies characterization is the subject of the smear, LBJ. Hollywood (and other sources of popular culture) have virtually always been relentlessly anti-LBJ and treats the Kennedy’s as saints. LBJ is almost always depicted a redneck rube. For those of us who have a great deal of admiration for LBJ’s domestic accomplishments this has been extremely frustrating. This movie’s depiction hits a real nerve because finally we had a subject where he, in no way, should be depicted in a negative light. Instead it went with the usual stereotype and distorted history once again. For me at least, this felt like a greater disappointment because it felt like this was going to be the one big film that wouldn’t succumb to this simple minded depiction. I expected so much more. If the goal was focus the ‘hero story’ on King then absolutely, go ahead. In no way did they have to smear LBJ to do that. And the argument that two wrongs make a right is, quite simply, childish and awful in every way.
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If reasonable accuracy is your standard for a good movie based on historical events then you should like this movie.
King didn’t know that at the time. What I find interesting is when white folks get all butt hurt over one small aspect of movie and trash the whole thing. In this movie LBJ’s character represented “the government.”
Do we know that LBJ didn’t okay sending recordings of Martin’s adulterous love making to Coretta? Does it matter? We know it happened. We also know Johnson was deeply affected by the events in Alabama.
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I finally saw Selma this past weekend. I thought that it was a great movie, but on the topic of whether former (and, then current) President Johnson was portrayed as a “villain”, I am having a hard time understanding the issue.
Johnson was NOT portrayed as someone who was fundamentally opposed to ensuring that blacks had the right to vote - his issue (as portrayed in the film) was timing. Johnson was showed as someone who would rather focus on the (then) political realities/constraints (there is also an interesting economic versus political approach with Johnson’s stated desire to wage his “war on poverty”).
Additionally, from what I understand from the tape recordings (and I acknowledge that my understanding is based on a second hand account), the portrayal of Johnson in the film does not necessarily conflict with the actual audio recordings. If this is true, what is the actual flak about? Because Johnson wasn’t the “savior” (which, I don’t actually think that he was, anyway)?
I guess what I am trying to saw is that it might be more helpful if commentators talked about the alleged “mischaracterization” of Johnson with a bit more nuance and specificity rather than just making a broad statement that he was “inaccurately portrayed”.
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Precisely. This man rigged elections, destroyed reputations, verbally abused and ridiculed friends and foes, and needlessly escalated the Vietnam War. He was a political animal in the fullest sense of the word, and was often duplicitous and ruthless. However, in the instance of Civil Rights and MLK, his role was indispensable. To deprive him of his finest hour so cavalierly is wrong as well as unnecessary, even by Hollywood’s standards. Caro’s biography is the finest and most meticulous I have ever read, and I found myself despising Johnson’s often cruel nature–but the historical record is clear, and Johnson’s powerful and timely support for King Civil Rights is indisputable.
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