I’d taking a lot of stick at the comment thread at Movie Morlocks.
If anyone’s in a fisking mood and wants to join me in debunking the various liberal myths about McCarthy (and, yes, the Crusades and the Inquisition), we (there’s another smart person) could use your help.
We have to take back the culture, people. This is one way to do so.
PS: Hilariously, a few days after the original post went up — the usual “Red Scare!! McCarthy!!” stuff — the same bloggers posted this, without irony or parenthetical comment:
During the scriptwriting process, the German Dieterle would send his scripts for notes to his friend Max Horkheimer, the famed philosopher and sociologist of the Frankfurt School. According to David Jenemann’s Adorno in America, Dieterle sent an early draft of the Syncopation script to Horkheimer, who then passed it along to their mutual friend (and fellow member of the Frankfurt School) Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s comments on the Syncopation script survive…
Adorno. You know? The Marxist. But hey, “McCarthy!!!”
This stuff matters. See the outstanding piece in WSJ today about why “fact checking” movies is not only legitimate, it is vital:
Morten Tyldum, the director of “The Imitation Game,” said assessments of a film’s truth were like “fact-checking art”—like suggesting, perhaps, that Picasso’s portraits aren’t very good because noses don’t really look like that.
But if history matters so little, why do so many films insist otherwise? Consider three Academy Award nominees for Best Picture that offer some of the most serious invocations of history this season. At the close of Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper,” a photograph is shown of the Navy SEAL, Chris Kyle, and his wife (on whom the movie is based), who look as if they had been separated at birth from the film’s actors. In “Selma” news footage is interspersed with re-enactments and characters mirror historical counterparts. “The Imitation Game” includes newsreels, historical updates at the end, and was partly filmed at Bletchley Park, where the mathematician Alan Turing worked during World War II breaking Nazi codes.
Actually, if these films didn’t make such claims on history, they would get considerably less attention. History, they insist, matters. But some also claim its mantle disingenuously, in order to give authority to their manipulations. Fact-checking is important because it helps disclose what is being changed and why.
