Hayley: On September 22, you tweeted: "'historical accuracy' is honestly kinda fake!!" and I have been wanting to revisit this ever since.
I used to always be a stickler for historical accuracy. I have spent the last 15 or so years of my life screaming at people who attribute the quote, "Let them eat cake!" to Marie-Antoinette. Not only did she not say it, it would have been completely uncharacteristic of her to say something like that, mostly because the Marie-Antoinette that exists in the public consciousness (lush, wicked, flirtatious) is a fabrication that is much more compelling than the one who existed IRL (teetotaler, gentle, kind of prude).
With Marie-Antoinette as my introduction into this world, I have started thinking about the narratives we create around certain historical figures and periods. And in terms of art, I liken historical accuracy to adaptation in a lot of ways: it doesn't need to be perfect, it needs to be compelling to its form. I also used to be super harsh on movies that had been adapted to books for changing or omitting different things, but now I can appreciate what things should be modified to make a good adaptation.
Sometimes, though, I feel like too much is changed or omitted in a way that doesn't really serve the story — real or fictional. I have a lot of thoughts on the ways in which The Tudors has taken its liberties with things that could have easily been just as compelling if they kept it a little more accurate!
How do you feel about historical accuracy? What inspired your initial tweet about it?
Victoria: I just tried so hard to figure out what inspired my tweet about it, but I don't know! There are a lot of tweets from the same time about the new Mulan movie and whether it's accurate, but I know I wasn't talking about that.
But Mulan is a good chance to walk back my tweet just a little. Some level of accuracy is of course important. Movies, TV shows and books that aren't at all accurate are incredibly harmful: I'm talking things like Disney's white-washed Pocahontas. Way too often people who have made the art and culture that becomes most popular are white people, and everything they portray comes from that very white-washed perspective. Also, in grad school I took a class about historical films, and one of the things my professor told us is that the main way Americans learn about history is through movies. Making shit up to vilify or glorify groups of people is bad.
But! Making a movie that is actually "historically accurate" is impossible. It's a fake goal. If you're making a movie about fictional people, you can research what things were "actually like" and use all the correct lampshades and dresses or whatever, but it's still always going to be imbued with your perspective as a person in the present! I remember hearing people complain for years about the 2005 Pride & Prejudice because "Darcy and Elizabeth would never kiss before they were married." Yeah, sure, Regency decorum would dictate they wouldn't lock lips. But it's 2005 and the way we show romance in western films is with kissing, so they have to smooch!
If you're adapting something about real people, you're doing just that — adapting. Even if you have a historical record of the events, you're still choosing their motivations, what parts of their lives to emphasize, how to frame them. A great example is Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell — usually Thomas More is portrayed as the hero, and Cromwell the villain who cosigns his death. In Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Cromwell is the hero. I don't think one is more "accurate" than the other. Even if you made a new Marie Antoinette movie that showed her as "a teetotaler, gentle, kind of prude" (would watch!) it would, by its very nature, be a response to what the depiction of her has been in the centuries since she lived.
While writing this, I googled the least "historically accurate" movies, and whew. The first list I found included Shakespeare in Love, which really illustrated the issue I have with "historically accurate" discussions. Shakespeare in Love in no way is trying to be an "accurate" depiction of Shakespeare's life! You're holding it to a standard it didn't ascribe for itself. What's more interesting to discuss in any historical film is why filmmakers made the choices and changes they did, and if those choices work, not if they ever should have made them at all.
Hayley: I think you bring up a good point about the whitewashing of pop culture depictions of history and how it plays into what is deemed "accurate." A frequent —and racist — refrain I hear a lot when period movies and TV shows don't cast any Black actors or portray anyone of color in roles other than minor (and mostly subservient) ones is "but back then Black people weren't in X location/didn't do X job!" Like, that's not the point! There are thousands of stories to tell that don't focus on (or even feature) white people. But the people in charge are making a decision to continue telling white stories, and then using the "historical accuracy" line of defense when challenged. It makes me angry and it's also really boring to keep telling the same stories over and over again.
Part of why I love period dramas so much is that they're just intensive human behavior studies. We're watching how people interact with each other and the world around them, but because we've placed them in an unknown time, with different socio-political codes and environments, we're able understand more underlying themes about ourselves than we would be able to if we were just watching a show about me, like, going grocery shopping and texting some guy from Tinder. The basic needs are the same, but it's much more interesting to take a step back and watch how my 17th century avatar tries to obtain food and a mate. And like you said, it's fascinating because there is no version of a fictional historical person that is accurate because it's all based on modern interpretation from writers, directors, and actors.
Maybe this is just my writer brain talking but I find nothing more satisfying than good character development, which is often stunted by the desire to remain "accurate."
Victoria: Yep I definitely agree about bad faith "X people wouldn't have had that job back then," especially because a lot of the time it's not true. For example, the cast of Dunkirk was completely white, which completely erased the African and Indian soldiers amongst the British ranks during WWII, as well as African men who fought for the French! Deeply fucked!
One of the things I like most about historical dramas is how much people haven't changed. It's what made Amy Hecklerling write Clueless, right? Emma's circumstances might be different, but her know-it-all behaviors are timeless. The scale might be larger than real life, the consequences more dire, but the whole point is that humans don't actually change that much.
I was struck by something you said in your Medici review last week, about how you hate when men in historicals are too sexist, which I definitely agree with. As you might have guesses from my constant referencing of Jane Austen, I love a Regency romance. Last year, I was reading some of the Bridgerton series of romance novels, which are set during that time period, too (one of the characters even mentions reading Austen). But the thing that kept taking me out of it was that the men were such sexist dicks. It's a romance novel! Give me fantasy! I don't want to think about how this woman is being forced to marry this man because they got caught making out in a hedge maze! That's depressing. Give me leading men with historically inaccurate views about women having brains! (Coincidentally, Netflix just announced that their series based on the Bridgerton books and produced by Shonda Rhimes is coming out on Christmas day! I am excited!)
But yes, good character development is more important than "accuracy." Of course, there are great moments where the two things meet! Emma (2020) has a moment of Harriet playing this weird flour-based pudding game that apparently was very popular during the Regency era. The scene marries together something unique about the historical era with a deeper characterization of Emma and Harriet. I love stuff like that!
Hayley: This is why Outlander was so fascinating to me: because they let the male lead have anachronistic attitudes about women! It's hot! And if you're going to have a show about being able to time travel through rocks you should obviously make it fun and sexy because accuracy has no place here. Anyone who is going to "well, actually in 1743..." Outlander can GTFO. This show is not trying to be a stand in for your AP European History class. I think that historical fiction in any form can serve as an entry point for people who want to learn more about a certain point in time, but it can’t be where you expect to get reliable facts. (I mean, reading the Marie-Antoinette Royal Diaries in middle school is what got me hooked on French history and I ended up writing my undergrad thesis on the role Marie-Antoinette played in the French Revolution.)
I also want to talk about The Crown, which I love but has also caused a lot of talk about historical accuracy. My strongest belief is that they made The Crown too soon. They should have waited until after The Queen died, and then probably about 10 more years (at least!). But we're about to start the fourth season, which introduces Princess Diana into the royal family. I think when you try to adapt history to fit a narrative before it's had its chance to run its course, you run the risk of being both too sympathetic and/or too critical of your subject matter. Yes, Diana's accident was over 20 years ago, but the rest of her family is still alive, still very much in the mainstream consciousness, and it still feels too new or in-progress to cover. I love that I can watch The Crown now, but what would a version of it look like if it was made 20 years from now instead? What about 50 years? The British royal family isn't going anywhere (unfortunately), and I'm sure that plenty more biopics and other dramas will be made about them for years to come. I just wish there was more time to let reality settle in before adapting it.
I think there is an overwhelming and frustrating trend in pop culture to capitalize on things that happen almost immediately, without any breathing room. True crime documentaries paved the way for dramatized HBO miniseries and now everything becomes something you can watch immediately.
[ID: A still from the upcoming season of The Crown with Emma Corrin’s Diana in her wedding dress]
Victoria: The Crown! I actually wrote my undergrad thesis about depictions of the Queen in pop culture, so I love discussing this.
I totally agree, the show came out too soon! Also it’s become a sort of like … docuseries? There’s so much pressure to portray the way things “really” were. That’s much less interesting to me than something that takes artistic license and boldly claims the lens it is using. With the Diana seasons coming, I feel like all the coverage is just going to be “well this is what really happened” or “this is what Diana really looked like,” which are probably the least interesting conversations to have about any work of art! In striving to represent the “truth,” they lose all the things that could actually be compelling. (The biggest exception to this belief is Forrest Gump. God, I hate that movie).
I often think of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a novel about a platoon of soldiers in the Vietnam War. One of the stories in the book is basically him just saying, “Hey, the stories in this book are made up. This is not exactly what happened. But something fake might actually be more emotionally true.” I think this is why I’ll always be more interested in something like Daisy Jones and The Six than a Fleetwood Mac biopic. The screenwriter and director are making things up anyway — just go all the way!
What Victoria Loves Right Now:
The GQ profile of Timothée Chalamet (who loves a period piece) was delightful.
These apple cheez-it bars continue to rule.
For some reason my song of the season is Miley Cyrus’ cover of Bob Dylans “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.”
This article about the rise of white supremacy and covid conspiracies in yoga.
A Few Recommendations from Hayley:
I started a Patreon! You can pledge just $5 a month and get access to my yoga videos, my recipes, and more of my writing. Yay!
Anne T. Donahue’s book of essays, Nobody Cares, is so good and so fun to read, it’s the perfect thing to take your mind elsewhere right now.
The new Olive & June Winter Collection has arrived, and I’d be remiss not to mention it, I have a brand to maintain here.
This article talks about how much Jane Austen influences there are in Succession was a really fun read.
Gold-Plated Girls comes out twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays! Don’t forget to check out Victoria’s piece on voting!