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Speech by Antony Beevor

2008 S.E.A.Write Guest Speaker

 

Fiction, Faction and Truth – The Dangers Today 

Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen. It is a great honour to have been asked to speak to you this evening.  

A few years ago, there was a debate in Britain over historical fiction and the new popularity of history. One writer complained strongly that so many novelists preferred historical settings for their novels and did not tackle contemporary issues. Another writer tackled the same subject, but entirely from the opposite direction. He argued that it was no wonder that novelists preferred the past, or that so many readers today were fascinated by recent history. This was because moral dilemma forms the basic element of great drama. These days, he argued, contemporary Western society feels obliged to be ‘non-judgemental’ and has therefore much less to offer the writer and the reader in the way of moral choice. 

            In theory, we have reached a moment when historians, novelists and film-makers are finally at the right distance in time to be able to recreate the reality of subjects like the Second World War without the distortion of propaganda and myth. We also have a far wider variety of sources on which to draw. Yet national propaganda and the need to mythologize for commercial reasons are still often far more powerful than we realize.  History, even contemporary history and current events, is being fictionalized in a way we have never seen before. 

The frontier of fact and fiction is a zone of huge commercial potential and thus also of huge potential corruption in historical terms. We have recently been seeing a great increase in what I would call ‘faction-creep’ both in documentary and feature films. One of the reasons for this is that we have moved into a post-literate world, where the moving image is king.

The need for striking images and a visual narrative drive, has created a major temptation for film-makers. And of course the pressure on documentary film making comes from the visual and dramatic expectations aroused by feature movies.

The danger is that ‘entertainment history’ is now the main source of supposedly historical knowledge for more and more children and young adults. Histo-tainment, as the cynics call it, is superficial to say the least and lacks all context. Its defenders claim that even if it distorts the material, it at least gives a taste for history. But this is sophistry of the worst kind, as a brief glance at Hollywood’s legacy will show. 

A fascination with evil is deep-rooted in the human psyche. It is perfectly normal to want to understand the enormity of it all, the horrors of the Eastern Front, the war in South East Asia and the Holocaust. But even when Hollywood directors think that they are providing a moral lesson about the atrocities of Nazism and fascism, they fail to acknowledge that the portrayal of power can offer a dark, almost fetishistic, glamour to ill-educated and unemployable young males who feel humiliated, if not emasculated in an increasingly fragmented society.

Over the last decade, Hollywood fell in love again with the big war movie. Saving Private Ryan, Enemy at the Gates, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Thin Red Line, and Pearl Harbour were just some of the big-budget productions. Hollywood tries to claim that its version of history is ‘based on a true story’ even when it is a complete travesty of the truth.

Some movie-makers now no longer seem to be content with the claim ‘based on a true story’. They want to make their movie look like news footage. Brian de Palma describes his new film about Iraq, Redacted, as a ‘fictional documentary’ and he filmed it as if it had been made with a camcorder. The Battle for Haditha by Nick Broomfield, also about the Iraq conflict and which also came out earlier this year, is one long dramatised reconstruction also shot in documentary style. Broomfield’s film certainly tries to understand rather than condemn, but the pseudo-documentary format remains disturbing.

The central problem is that the needs of history and the needs of the movie and television industry remain fundamentally incompatible. Hollywood has to simplify according to set formulae. Its films have to have heroes and of course baddies. There are seldom shades of grey, and endings always have to be upbeat.

Movies also have to have a whole range of staple ingredients, if they are to make it through the financing, production and studio system to the box-office. One element is the so-called ‘arc of character’, in which the leading players have to go through a form of moral metamorphosis as a result of the experiences they undergo. The industry’s needs are bound to distort any useful historical perspective.

Hollywood’s compulsion to claim that a movie is somehow true, even when almost completely fictional, is a comparatively new development. In the past, studios never pretended that major films set in the past were anything other than a good story. Now it seems that they have to be marketed with a claim to historical authenticity. The false impression of reality is increased from time to time by throwing place names and specific dates on the screen, as if the audience is really about to see a faithful re-enactment of what happened there on a particular day. This is particularly regrettable with young, historically illiterate audiences, because their only contact with the subject is through cinema and television fiction.

The entertainment industry’s retort to this is: ‘But what about Shakespeare? He used real characters from history.’ Well, the answer to that is simple.  The classical theatre, with the proscenium arch, and all the cast taking a bow afterwards is part of a dramatic ritual which puts an end to the suspension of disbelief. And in Shakespeare’s day, there was the Prologue, then, right at the end, all the slain victims even reappeared on stage to dance a little jig.

But there are no saving conventions in television and film to show that what you have just seen is fiction. They relentlessly try to create a fake reality in every way possible, with special effects, and dates on the screen, to say nothing of the claims about a ‘true story’, all to trick audiences into believing that what they are seeing is the real thing.

The Australian writer, Inga Cledinnen, declared in a debate at the Sydney Writers’ Festival a few years ago: ‘faction is the truly bastard offspring between fact and fiction’. This was in response to a German novelist who had taken real people – in this case the murdered children of Josef and Magda Goebbels – and invented characters for them. One can of course argue that a novel is different. All sorts of invention and genre-bending are permissable, because we know that it is fiction, but if the historical novel is made into a TV play or a movie, we once again we have faction-creep.

 

The European approach to historical movies is on the whole more scrupulous. The German film Downfall about Hitler’s last days in the bunker goes to perhaps the greatest lengths yet to replicate historical events accurately. Yet while feature films move towards a quasi-documentary approach, we see documentary film makers adopting the techniques of Hollywood. This comes from the new film-making technology of computer generated imagery – and combining it with dramatic reconstructions played by movie actors.

The most extreme example of the computer generated imagery approach was called ‘Virtual History’, a programme screened by the Discovery Channel about the July Plot against Hitler. The faces of key characters, such as Hitler, were transposed from old newsreel film, using CGI onto the bodies of live actors. This was creating entirely new film which is almost indistinguishable from the newsreel of the time. It is worrying that this brave new world of faction entertainment should have a free hand when it coincides with such a widespread ignorance of history.      

 In Hollywood, there is also a propaganda element of pure American nationalism, albeit for commercial reasons. In fact, Hollywood is rewriting history as shamelessly as any Stalinist. This is bad for America and bad for everyone else. A country which does not respect its own history is unlikely to learn from it, or to respect the history of others.

Saving Private Ryan is often voted the best war movie ever made. It is a work of intriguing paradoxes. Some seem to be intended, others clearly are not. Steven Spielberg said that he saw the Second World War as the ‘defining moment’ in history. One also suspects that he wanted to see this film as the defining movie of the war. If so, it is a uniquely American definition of history, leaving out the central role of the Soviet Union.

Spielberg’s basic storyline had great potential. It shows the tension between patriotic and therefore collective loyalty, and the struggle of the individual for survival –  those mutually contradictory pressures, which in  many ways lie at the heart of war. Yet after a truly extraordinary opening on Omaha beach, probably the most realistic battle sequence ever filmed, everything becomes formulaic. And the climax combines just about every war movie cliché in the book. The redeemed coward and the cynic reduced to tears – both ticking the ‘arc of character’ box – are straight out of central screen-writing. The US Air Force arrives in the nick of time just like the US Cavalry in 1950s cowboy films. And to cap it all, the final frames are of Private Ryan, standing in old age amid the rows of white crosses in a military cemetery, saluting his fallen comrades as tears run down his cheeks.    

            So what was Spielberg really trying to do? Was his revolutionary approach to realism simply an attempt to conceal a deeply conservative message, as some commentators claimed?  I don’t think it was as simple as that. There were touches of brilliance. For example, he portrays death on the battlefield as the final reflection of childbirth, showing an utterly vulnerable pale grey creature covered in blood, crying for his mother.

Amid the horror of war, Spielberg seems to be trying to rediscover American innocence, that Holy Grail which existed only in the Rousseauesque imagination yet was virtually incorporated into the Constitution. Spielberg, like several Hollywood moguls, is from a generation scarred by the moral quagmire of the Vietnam war. He understands the national need in the post-Cold War chaos to reach back to more certain times, seeking reassurance from that moment in history – the Second World War – when the fight seemed unequivocally right. ‘Tell me I’ve led a good life’ says the weeping veteran in the cemetery to his wife. ‘Tell me I’m a good man.’

            ‘You are’, she replies, and the music begins to swell. This representative of American motherhood appears to be reassuring the United States as a whole. She seems to be speaking to a nation unable to come to terms with its own role in a disordered world, to a nation which, for all its power, can be bewilderingly naive abroad because it so badly needs to feel good about itself at home.

 

I am deeply concerned about the irresponsibility of the entertainment industry, especially at a time when so many young people have an increasing difficulty in distinguishing between fantasy and reality. As I mentioned earlier, one danger is the portrayal of Nazis in most of these films. It lends them a seductive glamour, even when they are shown to be evil. For boys who are frustrated by their powerlessness in a fragmented society, the attractions are obvious. Electronic games zapping an unidentified enemy produces a depersonalisation of violence not that dissimilar to what Goebbels and Stalin achieved with their propaganda.

We have seen the video generation, the space invaders generation, the nintendo generation and now the Second Life generation. The entertainment industry does not hang around. We are now not that far away from the sale of virtual reality kits. The implications, in my view, are pretty frightening.  

 

But now to the last and most important aspect of all. I have talked about the blurring of fact and fiction and its dangers from a purely historical point of view. But there is a far greater danger lurking, in fact it is already with us. This is called Counter-Knowledge.

Counter-Knowledge includes the propagation of totally false legends and conspiracy theories, including  satanic ritual abuse, abduction by aliens, and medical conspiracies for nefarious racist reasons. There can be an element of commercial gain. It can also be used for political purposes or for some form of fundamentalist religious propaganda. It may well stem from a completely unbalanced person, who genuinely believes in a conspiracy – usually a government one – and then through the internet makes it sound plausible to tens of thousands, even to millions of others who also have  grievances and are eager to believe the worst. This is done by seizing upon one or two minor discrepancies in a government report, then joining up all the wrong dots to create a monstrous fable which runs completely counter to the facts. One of the main branches of counter-knowledge is pseudo-history, in which the pseudo-historian creates his or her theory, then cherry-picks the evidence to support it, all the while ignoring or dismissing any facts which contradict the thesis.

Outstanding examples of counter-knowledge include the notion that Aids was created in a CIA laboratory, that Princess Diana was murdered by the Secret Intelligence Service, and of course the big one: that the 9/11 attack on New York was orchestrated by the Bush administration. One of the most frightening phenonomena of our age in the West is that the dramatic decline of traditional, moderate forms of religion, has resulted in a spiritual void and thus a desperate need to believe intensely in something.

This has coincided with what one might call the Wikipedia age. A populist notion has grown that any individual has the right to correct or change the truth according to their own beliefs. It is, of course, the democratic ideal taken to its most grotesque extreme. But in reality it is the opposite of democratic. It is the easiest way for the demagogue to exploit gullibility and ignorance. Who was it who came up with the slogan: ‘If it’s true for you – then it’s true!’? The Scientologists I believe. And why are they so interested in extending their power in Hollywood?

 A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing, above all when it is superficial, totally unstructured and lacks all context. That of course does not stop obsessive people from convincing themselves that they are somehow omniscient simply as a result of instant access to the internet. But the key point is that counter-knowledge rejects the most basic standards of evidence and deduction. These are attacked as elitist/ patriarchal / authoritarian /sexist / and even racist, depending on the version of history which is being overturned. 

To make things even more alarming, the boom in counter-knowledge has coincided with probably the greatest leap forward in visual techniques ever known. The home-produced computer-generated movie Loose Change takes the ultimate conspiracy theory approach to 9/11. It is now said to have been seen by more than 100 million people on the internet. Loose Change is also going to come out in feature movie form, which will lend it even greater credibility. Just think what Goebbels or Stalin could have done with today’s technology.

Studies of internet sites reveal an unholy alliance between left-wing 9/11 conspiracy theorists,  right-wing holocaust deniers and Islamic fundamentalists. Many Muslims throughout the world now believe that no Arabs were involved in 9/11. Significantly, Islamic websites have also been learning from American Creationists and have eagerly embraced the theory of Intelligent Design.

Never has the responsibility of  a movie-maker been greater. Science-Fiction fantasy may be perfectly harmless, but when cult movies, such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind,  lead people into the world of Counter-Knowledge, then they cease to be pure entertainment. In a post-literate society where more and more people have trouble distinguishing fact from fiction, the scope for mischief  is almost without limit.

I suspect that it will not be long before we see a major holocaust-denial movie. It could easily take the form of a Da Vinci Code style thriller, and be packaged as straightforward entertainment. The commercial potential for such a project is huge, above all in the Middle East. Even if sold as fiction, without any claim to be ‘based on a true story’, it would almost certainly be banned in several European countries under Holocaust denial legislation. Yet the more that governments try to ban such a film, the more that millions of holocaust sceptics out there will want to see it. This will also prompt claims that attempts to suppress the movie proves that the Holocaust is a Zionist exaggeration, if not invention. In British schools, some teachers have stopped mentioning the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslim students. This is because, according to one major survey, only 29% of Muslims in Britain actually accept that the Holocaust took place as western history books describe it.

Political correctness is so very easy to exploit. Even universities in the United States, supposedly the guardians of intellectual rigour and scientific proof,  have been cowed into accepting some courses that clearly fall within the definition of counter-knowledge, i.e. rejecting normal standards of evidence.  All this is perhaps the logical extreme of the anti-hierarchical revolution begun in the 1960s and now taken to a ridiculous and dangerous degree.

It may sound alarmist when one talks of these attempts to fragment proven reality. Yet the effects of counter-knowledge and pseudo-history might even develop a bigger threat to liberal democracy than the authoritarian onslaughts from both Stalin and Hitler. This new insidious power to produce intellectual and scientific chaos is all too easy to underestimate.

It should be the duty of not just every scientist and historian, but also of every writer, publisher, movie-maker, TV producer and ordinary citizen to fight all attempts to exploit the ignorance and gullibility of   audiences. Today’s silly conspiracy theory in the West, can easily become tomorrow’s article of faith in the world at large. Quite simply, we play with facts at our peril. From selling fiction as truth in movies to peddling the big lies of counter-knowledge is not such a very big step after all.