I still haven’t seen American Sniper, but some of the discussion around it comes up every time there’s a historical movie. The responses are predictable, because we’ve heard them before and will doubtless hear them again. If it weren’t a discussion about American Sniper, we’d be having the same conversation about Selma or The Imitation Game (I understand we really ought to be having the discussion about The Imitation Game) or one of the other biopics this year, because the discussion will never end. The question that is asked and, probably, cannot be definitively answered is, “What is the movie’s obligation to historical accuracy?”
People who get their history from movies, of course, have a seriously wrong view of history. They’d have to. Especially if they mostly knew it from the days of the Code, when it all got whitewashed because the gritty details weren’t allowed to be depicted onscreen. This is a history wherein the historical fact of Frederick Douglass’s second wife (“My first wife was the colour of my mother. My second wife was the colour of my father”) would not have been allowed to be shown onscreen, even if anyone had done a biopic of Frederick Douglass. Which they probably couldn’t have, because his own birth violated the Code and anyway it wouldn’t have sold in the South.
However, there’s more to it than just that. Things have always been changed to make the story more cinematic. A non-TV example is the series The Tudors, which only showed one of Henry VIII’s sisters. You see, the other was named Mary, and since his daughter was, too, they figured that would be confusing. So they left her out, despite the fact that a substantial percentage of the show’s audience probably already knew about her.
The counter argument tends to be, “So what?” The Tudors isn’t a history lesson. American Sniper isn’t a history lesson. Films are of course first a business, and they’re the business of entertainment. If they don’t interest people, they don’t sell. Not only that, but they have a primary obligation to story. If details need to be changed to drive the story, well, that’s what comes first. If details aren’t very interesting, who cares? Or if they just don’t fit the story that the filmmakers are trying to tell, even if they might be interesting in some other context.
Honestly, I am one of the people who cares. There are movies I have decided not to see because I knew the history would be so bad that it would just make me angry. I’ve never seen the Disney Pocahontas, which might be considered the definition of a film where you probably shouldn’t care. It’s not really a history story, it’s story that they wanted to tell and decided to give to historical figures. But that sort of thing bothers me—why make it about historical figures if you aren’t going to tell their real story? It’s similar to “adaptations” that basically seem to have gotten the name of the book right and nothing else. Why bother?
Other than the “they just didn’t care,” the one that bothers me most is “but it would have been so easy to get it right!” I love the movie Elizabeth, but I’m infuriated by a title card at the end that says Elizabeth never saw Robert Dudley alone again after the events of the movie, because it’s flatly a lie. The statement doesn’t change the plot of the movie, because it’s a title card after all the action has finished. Or there’s the odd fact that movie versions of her father never seem to have red hair, which I just find confusing.
Did Pocahontas make more money by making it about the historical figures of Pocahontas and John Smith? Probably not. It’s Disney. It was going to make money no matter what. I’m not at all sure most biopics make more by being about the historical figure they’re about than they would if they just told the story filmmakers want to tell. So if you don’t want to tell someone’s story, you just want to shove them into a story, tell the story and have done with. Don’t drag, say, Cole Porter into it. Though I suspect that one was an excuse to use Cole Porter songs.
