hollywood and history, part ii

I've been thinking a little more about what I said in my last post -- that, through our own ignorance, we are allowing Hollywood to control what we know about history. In and of itself, that's a bad thing. But that doesn't mean we should shun Hollywood's take on history -- even if it's blatantly "revisionist" history. Admittedly, the history major in me still cringes a little at the inaccuracies of Braveheart; I'm not saying we should look to Hollywood for factual accuracy. But I do think that Hollywood's reinterpretations of historical events are important to study.

Movies are a reflection of the zeitgeist, and what they have to say about history needs to be taken into consideration. Take Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven as an example. It's a better movie than it gets credit for, both technically and thematically. On the surface, it's a movie about the Crusades. But it's the type of movie that wouldn't have existed prior to 9/11, when the Western world got a radical wake-up call and realized that it knew practically nothing about the nature of Islam. Kingdom of Heaven's commentary on the religious-political relations between the East and the West, and on the motivations of the Crusaders, is unmistakeably 21st-century at times. But that's my point -- a study of the Crusades would be essentially meaningless if it did not address the influence the Crusades have on us today, or our own understanding of the events, or why we understand the events that way. Kingdom of Heaven portrays the Knights Templar in a negative light -- greedy, power-hungry, only nominally religious. It's a portrayal that is probably fueled, at least in part, by our own cultural mistrust of religious organizations that exercise political power. That kind of attitude would have been virtually nonexistent at the time of the Crusades. So while the movie may not be "historically accurate," it certainly sheds light on the way the Crusades have been understood throughout history, and on the ingrained biases of our own culture. Fundamentally, the way our culture understands a historical event is the key to understanding our own times. In that sense, movies like Kingdom of Heaven are invaluable historical tools.

My point is that Hollywood revisionism can be an important element in historical study. Movies cannot provide us with cold, hard facts, and they shouldn't try. Movies, accurate or not, broaden our understanding of the facts. My point is not to negate my previous post. If our culture chooses to ignore its own history, no number of Ridley Scott epics can save it.