“The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”
–Walter Percy, The Moviegoer
“Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.”
– George Orwell, 1984
These are hard times for the truth. Well … maybe no harder than other times. Difficult to know when the truth of the past is constantly being changed. Not eradicated, like the image of one of those Soviet poo-bahs who suddenly becomes a non-person and whose image is, thus, removed from the official portraits. Nothing that crude or Orwellian. Far more effective to edit and improve “the narrative.” To suggest an “alternative history.” One that is more congruent with the way people feel, or want to feel, about a past that they grasp only tentatively. To accomplish this, you merely need to rewrite the script. Remake the movie.
A few months ago, we got Truth, a film that repaired the flawed historical fact that Dan Rather and the people who worked for him, and with him, at CBS News, used forged documents in a report on the National Guard service of George W. Bush who was President and running for re-election when the program aired. Robert Redford played Rather and that tells you what you need to know about the political slant of Truth. The film inverts all the usual rules by making Dan Rather and his team into the little guys and underdogs. They were, in fact, well paid employees of a powerful media operation and brought down by bloggers who were dismissed, at the time, as just “guys in their pajamas.” A story about individual truth seekers bringing down stars of big corporate media might have made a good movie and could have done better at the box office (it wouldn’t have taken much) than Truth, which bombed. But the point, it seems, was to make neither a good movie nor a profit. The point was to rehabilitate Rather and the people who worked with him. To create a new narrative (indeed, a new truth) in which they were both right and victims.
Even if the movie bombed at the box office, it will live on in the database of Netflix (and others) so generations hence may come to believe that Rather and his team of fearless producers and researchers were brought down by powerful forces who were either in the pocket of George Bush or, alternatively, had him theirs. People will believe this because they saw it in the movie and not knowing much else about this story, it will become their emotional truth. These days we all get to have one – an emotional truth, that is – and it often comes out of the movies we see. And like.
We learned recently that Hollywood has plans to repackage the episode known as “Chappaquiddick.” It will be a film we are told, that “… strings together the events in a compelling and emotional way. You’ll see what [Senator Ted Kennedy] had to go through … [after he] becomes entangled in a tragic car accident that results in the death of former Robert Kennedy campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne. The senator struggles to follow his own moral compass and simultaneously protect his family’s legacy, all while simply trying to keep his own political ambitions alive.” (You have to really admire the “simply” in that construction.)
This, again, is a novel sort of take for a movie script. Ms. Kopechne was the little person, here; the innocent victim of powerful forces and personalities and a well-orchestrated cover-up. If you were setting out to dramatize those events, you might think of Ted Kennedy as the heavy (literally) of the piece; not as someone who “became entangled” in something, like an innocent bystander and witness to an assassination who must flee for his life and struggle to get the truth out into the light of day.
This film, like Truth, is an effort to revise history so that it conforms to the Zeitgeist, according to which Ted Kennedy is one of the good guys. One in which Mary Jo Kopechne gets the same kind of treatment she received in the last hours of her real life, where she was too small to matter.
It remains to be seen whether or not this version can survive as drama. One wonders how it will be possible for the viewer to identify with Senator Kennedy and feel that he is, somehow, the victim in a tragedy.
But one knows never to count Hollywood out.
And still, even if the film version of Chappaquiddick bombs it will live on as on a movie and, like Truth, will have an infinite shelf life. There will be people who buy in to its message.
The rewriting of history through movies that are “based on true events” (or some such formulation) is inevitable. There are millions who know about the assassination of John Kennedy only what they learned from Oliver Stone’s JFK. For them, it is settled truth that Kennedy’s death was the work of a conspiracy that included a big chunk of the military-industrial complex that wanted Kennedy killed because he opposed the Vietnam War. Yes, and in the same way that his brother was the victim of Chappaquiddick.
Movies may not be capable of bringing off the grand lie. Might not be able to convince viewers (not all of them, anyway) that Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia. But they can make Dan Rather into the victim when he is caught using forged documents to smear a politician despised by him and those in his orbit. And they can make the Ted Kennedy of Chappaquiddick into a sympathetic figure even as his brother’s brain trust, the men who had handled the Cuban Missile Crisis, come to his rescue and save him from a negligent manslaughter rap.
But, then, that is what Hollywood does best. When the lights go down, it draws viewers into an unreal and infinitely malleable world where the emotions always rule and where, in spite of themselves, people believe all sorts of fantasies and lies.
This is, after all, how Hollywood makes life for many of us a little more bearable.
