The "History" in Movies

When I was young and naive I thought for sure that if you watched a movie and it said "based on true events" it was, well... true. Even if the movie didn't say true events, I was still waiting to find Gremlins in the upstairs closet and was truly hoping that if I left enough Reese's Pieces out, E.T. would come to my house. However as I grew and had to at least push these childish thoughts to the back of my mind, I realized that movies are not necessarily factual, and when they use the word "base" it really means, "one thought sounded good, now let's make a two hour story out of it."

I'm not sure when this revelation first came upon me, but I know "Titanic" was a big eye opener. I had been truly captivated by the story of "Titanic" since I was in elementary and had studied it as much as I could. I saw the movie the day after it came out in theaters and was captivated by Rose and Jack and the awesome power of watching the boat from true majesty to heap at the bottom of the ocean. Then I began to read the articles, and reality started to sink in - most of the inaccuracies were little. Like it was to cold for ice to have formed in the people's hair in the water and the song that they sung at church hadn't even been written yet. Some bigger ones are the way Jack was allowed to jump between decks and the way Titanic was named. And so I began my look for "truth" in the movies.

A while back I looked up a childhood favorite movie of mine, "Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken". It is a wonderful story of a girl in the depression who leaves her aunt's house to dive horses, find love and eventually learns to dive blind. That short little sentence is about all that's true of that story too. Everything else that came in the movie was either an exaggeration or just completely false. Why would Hollywood mislead us in this way? Why can't we have the straight up truth? Well, in the famous words of Colonel Nathan Jessep (A Few Good Men), "YOU CAN"T HANDLE THE TRUTH!" People go to the movies to be entertained, and watching a girl jump on horse day after day, without falling or having personal challenges and just falling in love because you're with the same guy every day would not entertain the audience.

Maybe we should try to entice Hollywood to be a little more truthful, especially in cases when movies are touted to be historically correct. "Titanic", "Public Enemies" and "Valkyrie" are a few of the movies that may come close, but don't quite make the cut. "The Assassination of Jesse James

by the Coward Robert Ford" was noted as being the most historically accurate portrayal of Jesse James and Robert Ford, though I'm sure a historian could still find some inaccuracies. You also run into movies like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" that are using the false document technique. This is a technique which works on blurring the lines of truth and fiction. "Texas Chainsaw" used this technique because they thought people would be more inclined to watch something so truly horrifying if it was thought to be true. And you know what? They were right.

In the end, don't cram for that last minute test by watching a popular movie or quoting it in an essay, you might look a fool to your history professor. I also challenge you that when you do watch a historical based movie, to read about it before or after to find the inaccuracies listed, so you yourself will not be misled. Even the simplest of misconceptions can change the history of the world.