If You’d Like to Help Support This Blog

So I’ve been doing this blog for a little over a year, and hopefully you’ve found what I have to say about history and film worth reading. Because blogging takes time and effort and money (going to movies these days ain’t cheap, especially given my popcorn habit), it would be nice to get some return on my efforts. But I hate the idea of putting up useless ads that just distract my readers and offer little value to them.

Instead, I want to do something that will help my readers pursue things they find interesting from this blog as well as offering me a little financial support. So I’ve decided to join the Amazon Affiliate program. I’ll be including links to Amazon items you might be interested in, specifically versions of the film and series I’m reviewing as well as books about the related subjects for those who want to learn more about the topics I’m exploring. So if you want to do some further reading about a subject or just want to help support my blogging work, go to the bottom of the page and click through to Amazon to look at some of the books I’m recommending. I get a small percentage of anything you buy on that visit (including things I haven’t recommended).

I’ll do my best to include only quality works that I think are worth your time and money. Most of what I’ll include will be by professional scholars, rather than popular works by non-scholars (unless I think they’re of high quality). I’ll also include editions of the primary sources if I think they’re worth it and easily accessible. If you disagree with a title I’ve selected, I’ll reconsider my recommendation. And please report any broken links or mistakes you run across.

I hope this is a good way to help you learn more about historical subjects you’re interested in. Let me know what you think–I’m interested in your thoughts. And feel free to offer your own recommendations. If they look appropriate, I’ll include them.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Things I Have Learned from This Blog

Tags

Miscellaneous

This week is the 1-year anniversary of my blog. Huzzah for the blog!

I figured that in a spirit of reflection, I would talk about a few things I’ve learned from blogging about medieval movies. WordPress gives me a variety of statistics about the traffic on my blog, including the search terms that get people here, where they’re from, and which posts they look at. And that gives me food for thought.

My top five most popular posts, by number of views:

300: Beautiful Straight White Guys vs. Everyone Else                           6,089

Disney’s Robin Hood: A Bit More Medieval Than You Might Think            5,649

Dracula Untold: Don’t Go See This Movie                                             1,908

Braveheart: Why Braveheart is Actually a Porn Film                              1,537

Braveheart: How Not to Dress Like a Medieval Scotsman                       1,418

Clearly, there is interest in analysis of big-budget historical action films. Maybe all those bro-dudes secretly care about history after all.

On the other hand, my 5 least popular posts that are about specific films:

Vision: The Difference between Historians and Film-makers                    55

Amistad: What It Gets Right                                                                 65

Amistad: Joseph Cinqué and All the Other Nameless Blacks                     67

The Imitation Game: Thoughts on Its Oscar Win                                     76

The Duchess: What We Don’t See                                                          80

Apparently films about 12^th century German nuns don’t have a large constituency.

Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Somalia, and Greenland apparently really don’t like analysis of historical films, because they’re some of the only countries that I haven’t gotten any traffic from. Also, there’s a place called Mayotte that has internet access. Who knew?

Search terms reveal some rather interesting things about what gets people to my blog. The most important search terms that get people to my blog are mostly variations on “300”, “300 Spartans” and “300 movie”, apart from “Reign”. They’re all in the top 10.

It turns out there’s quite a bit of interest in Commodus’ political skills (all search terms reported exactly as phrased and spelled):

“Why was Commodus a bad emperor”

“5 reasons commodus was a bad emperor” (at least three people got to my blog with this one, so apparently some high school teacher gave an assignment on this topic)

“Emperor commodus good or bad” (as well as “ commodus good or bad”, “was commodus good or bad”, and “was commodus a good or bad emperor”)

“Why was commodus bad”

“emperor commodus bad things” (as well as “commodus good points”)

Some people have really good questions:

“An historian or a historian” (at least 45 times!)

“What was Commodus problems”

“Was king Philip of France gay”

“Did babington actually shoot Elizabeth 1^st”

“guy de lusignan in Jerusalem same in ironclad?”

“Where did the jannisaries go”

“What if commodus does not become emperor”

“Russian ark movie explain”

“Was William Wallace speech real”

“Why is Hercules year 358 BC” (I really don’t know the answer to this one)

“Who is Joseph Cinque and what did he accomplish during the middle passage”

“What might have happened if Columbus crew had convinced him to turn around?”

“What is a magistra of nuns”

“Did the Normans use forks”

“Did Scotsmen were leggings under their kilts qhen it was cold”

“What was the purpose of christopher columbus voyage”

“Did gladiators wear groin protection”

“In the movie 300 did the spartans queen really stab the one guy that had all the coins”

“marriage as apolitical tool in lion in the winter”

Was sir francis drake a hero or a villain?”

And some people are a little confused:

“Why didn’t hildegarde von bingen ever marry?” (Because she was a nun sworn to celibacy?)

“Robin hood movie name of fox in animation version” (Ummm…robin hood?)

“impact of winter on lions”

“13th century film actors”

Some people have a little trouble distinguishing fact from fantasy:

“Dracula untold inaccurate” and “Dracula untold historical accuracy” (this is a film about a 500 year old vampire, people!)

“Gladiator did it really become a republic after the death of commodus”

“Why did Commodus declare marriage illegal”

“Why did artemesia hate greece”

“Did the endless pit in the movie 300 actually exist”

“Where is Ragnar Lothbrok buried”

There’s definitely interest in film stars’ physical attributes:

“Sullivan stapleton penis size” (and also “Sullivan stapleton panis”)

“Allen Leech butt”

“mel gibson penis porno free”

“gibson cock kilt”

Also, it turns out that there is some untapped interest in historical porn films:

“Braveheart porn” and a couple misspellings thereof

“historical scottish adult movies”

“Hot guys in 300”

“Porn gladiator” (as well as “gladiator porn emperor” and “gladiator porno film”)

“porn film” (as well as “film porn” and “pornfilm”)

“darakula.rape.sax.movy” (at least, I think that’s expressing interest in porn…)

“monk and nun in love in films”

“did antonio banderas have sex on the 13^th warrior”

“Actually a porn”

“film porno on faithful”

“historian porno film”

“prima film sex”

“up a scotsmans kilt porn”

“artemizja sex”

“place they had sex in a film called ironclad”

“alex kingston porn”

“xxx pic in the movie brave heart”

“Movies,wilyame,walas,sex”

“history porn full movie.medieval”

“movie 300-2 sex part” and “300-2 sex and fuck”

“braveheart penis scene”

“plot in details of the porn movie ‘conquest’ (please tell me there isn’t a porn film about Christopher Columbus…)

“a film called ironclad any sex”

“300 roman soldier porn”

“inquisition torture methods porn”

“greek warrior women porn hd movie”

“historical princes porn”

“avenge him 300 rise of an empire porn hot”

“Themistocles throwing his dick into artemesia” (twice!)

“how to look up porn using hoplites” (is there supposed to be a hyphen after ‘porn’?)

“Helen Mirren in bondage”

and my personal favorite (although it has serious competition): “300 part1 the king is fighting for spartan but queen gorgo was having sex with theron so sad for the king leonidas”

And then there are the searches that baffle me, both in what they want and why they got to my blog:

“torture a robust woman soldier porn”

“queen fuck gradians tent in jungle movie”

“bow babe sexy”

“mother you were wrong”

“Make sissy boys screen porn”

“filad your filam.pron”

“enlightenment propaganda middle ages babies died nero’s shadow”  (Perhaps the best word salad ever!)

“isabella loves to get completely” (Completely what? I need to know! Is this another porn search, or is it something else?)

And then there’s this little gem, which makes me wish I could give a prize to the person who searched for it.

“british principle of prima gentalia in Scotland”

To get serious for a moment, what some of these search terms (and others I haven’t mentioned) indicate to me is that there really is interest among the general public in knowing how accurate the historical films they watch are. It’s common for historians to lament that people aren’t really interested in knowing the truth behind an action film like 300, but I don’t think that’s the case. A search like “historical accuracy of Braveheart vs the real world” demonstrates that people understand that Hollywood films aren’t reliable and want some help separating the fact from the fiction. It’s a big part of what I do on this blog, and it’s gratifying to see that so many people think it’s worthwhile enough to read. Thanks for a good year, everyone!

Why There Is No Such Thing As “Just a Movie”

Tags

Miscellaneous, Movies, TV Shows

Periodically, people disagree with my analyses of various films and respond that “it’s just a movie.” My post here about Dracula Unbound has gotten a couple comments of that nature, and sometimes my students have said that about my views on Braveheart and 300.

IJAM isn’t really an argument on its own; it’s merely an assertion. But it’s shorthand for an implicit argument that if something is “just” a movie, then it can’t actually have any deeper level of meaning. Put differently, the assumption seems to be that if a movie is entertainment, it must have no other meaning or function.

As a historian, I’m skeptical of IJAM in part because my training makes clear that anything that plays a prominent feature in a society must in some way have meaning for that society. And it’s pretty obvious to us that movies play a major role in American (not to mention Western or world) society. On a basic level, the movie industry is a huge factor in the economy; when a film studio decides to make a major film, it sinks an enormous amount of money into the film and that money goes to pay thousands of people for their contribution to the film as directors, actors, camera-men, caterers, prop-makers, costumers, and so on. Where these films get made is such a big deal economically that states compete with each other to see who can offer the biggest incentives in the form of tax-breaks and other goodies. The film is then marketed in theaters and sold in DVD or streaming form in shops and online through Amazon, Netflix, and so on. Americans shell out an estimated $20 billion on movies each year. That’s a lot of money to spend on Just A Movie.

Beyond the immediate economics, consider how much of our culture revolves around film and television. Our media provides substantial coverage of new films, their making, and how they do at the box office. An enormous portion of our media is devoted to coverage of actors and their sex lives, public appearances, social and political views, and the award shows they attend. The 2015 Oscar Awards ceremony was watched by 36.6 million viewers, down from 2014’s 43.7 million viewers. That means that around 10% of the entire US population watched the Oscars; in an age of fractured media consumption and narrowcasting, very few events can claim that many eyes simultaneously. And that’s not even factoring in the international viewership.

And we argue about our favorite and most hated shows and films. We care when a movie we like does well, and many people will passionately defend shows and movies they like and passionately attack shows and movies they dislike. Sean Hannity tweeted his anger over American Sniper failing to win Best Picture, and many other conservatives agreed with him, taking it as a sign of the Academy’s liberalism and lack of patriotism, while many liberals were angry that Selma failed to earn even a nomination for its director Ava DuVernay, viewing it as a sign of racism and sexism in the Academy. And those are just two of the most recent film controversies; Twitter recently exploded with outrage and counter-outrage over a gay kiss on The Walking Dead.

IJAM is often raised by people who are clearly angry or upset about a critique they disagree with. But the fact that they are angry is itself proof that IJAM is false. If it’s just a movie, then why get upset when someone sees something to criticize in it? If 300 is just a movie, why does a discussion of its hostility toward physically deformed people matter?

If It’s Just a Movie, why do people care enough about these characters that they want to see more of their story? Why would a housewife somewhere want to see Buffy Summers in action one more time badly enough to sit down and write a new story about her? Why do comic book geeks argue about whether Batman could defeat Superman in a fight? Why is there talk about resurrecting Ripley for yet another unnecessary sequel? Why do so many people insist that Han shot first? Why did Star Trek Into Darkness irritate so many fans with its shitty re-imaging of the conflict between the Enterprise crew and Khan Noonien Singh? Why do we debate about which actress can be Wonder Woman the way she’s supposed to be? Because we care about these characters and what happens to them. They may not be real, but they still matter to us, and we want to see their stories told right.

All of this demonstrates that IJAM is simply untrue; people think that movies and tvs are about much more than simple entertainment. We perceive film and tv as moral statements that certain things are ok or not ok; when a film reflects our values we take it as confirmation and when they contradict our values we take it as evidence of moral decay or regressive values.

IJAM asserts, as I said, that if something has entertainment value, it does not have any other meaning. If it’s just a movie, it can’t be a statement about politics or race or women or whatever else it might be seen as. But that’s a rather shallow argument. Just because a film might be a political statement doesn’t mean it can’t also be a thriller or a comedy. One of the things that makes Captain America: the Winter Soldier a cut above many other action films is the way that it examines the political risks of data-mining. Joss Whedon’s films and shows often actively seek to deconstruct cinematic clichés; The Cabin in the Woods is a very smart critique of horror films (and horror film fans) and their interest in mindless violence. And films often unintentionally explore issues because they can be read as metaphors; the various Aliens movies all seem to explore the fear of reproduction in different ways, even though it’s unlikely that there was a conscious choice to make that a theme of the series.

IJAM is a way to reflexively deny the possibility of meaning. Years ago, when I was just starting out as a teacher, I wound up teaching a freshman writing course. One of the assignments was to analyze a film that said something about family or gender. To get the students ready for this, we spent a little time talking about soap operas and what they might say about the women who watch them. Partway through the discussion, one of my students, a typical freshman, suddenly put her hands over her ears and said loudly, “Stop! I don’t want my soap operas to mean anything!” Apparently, the idea that a simple soap opera might have deeper significance was disturbing to this student, perhaps because it implied that the world was a lot more complex than she had assumed; if her soap opera might have meaning, anything could have meaning, and therefore she didn’t understand the world as well as she thought she did. I often think of that moment when someone brings up IJAM. If 300 or Dracula Untold has meaning, maybe that lands the viewer in a far more complicated world than he lived in before.

To me, that world is exciting and fascinating, a playground of ideas that I can romp through. But to some people, that playground of ideas must look more like a dark and menacing circus where terrible things are lurking just around the corner. It’s easier for these people to cover their ears and shout “It’s just a movie! It can’t mean anything!” But to me, the idea that a movie doesn’t mean anything robs it of all interest. I’d rather spend my life watching films and shows that mean something, even if I don’t always like the meaning I find in them. Why would I spent $10 on a film and almost as much on the popcorn if for two hours my life won’t mean anything? When a film has meaning, I leave it chewing over all sorts of issues, fighting with it like a Rubik’s Cube, trying to make sense of what I’ve just seen and figure out the patterns in it. So one movie can give me hours of interest, like a dog gnawing on a bone. That’s a major reason I write this blog; it gives me a chance to watch movies and spend some time trying to understand what I think about what I just saw and then putting those thoughts into words to share and see what other people think. And I think most of my fellow academics are a lot like me. We love to play with ideas and see where they take us.

And perhaps that’s my real objection to IJAM. It’s not just false; it’s boring. I’d rather play in my playground of ideas, because I never run of things to play with. So come on, IJAMers; put down your IJAM and come play with me. I promise you things are way more interesting over here.

My Pick for Best Movie of 2014

Tags

Miscellaneous

Gabriel Valdez of Basilmarinerchase.wordpress.com kindly asked me to contribute a short essay about what I thought the best movie of the year was. After some thought on the matter, I finally settled on what most of you will probably think is a rather odd choice. Jump over to “The Movies We Loved in 2014–By Friends of the Blog” to see how I and a number of other bloggers answered that question.

And if you don’t know Basilmarinerchase, by all means spend some time looking around. There are a lot of interesting posts about a range of intriguing topics, like the regular feature on Best Fight Scenes, and Best Movies Never Made (it seems the world suffered a loss when the Marx Brothers didn’t get to make Giraffes on Horseback Salads with Salvador Dali). If you’re a fan of film, I guarantee you’ll find something to like about this blog.

I Have No Movie, but I Must Blog

So I’m an historian who goes to the movies. But I’m also an historian who goes to conferences. So since Wed evening, I’ve been at the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress, the largest gathering of medieval scholars on the planet, which happens every year in May at Western Michigan University. Unfortunately this means I haven’t had much chance to write a post for today. Sorry.

Normally, in the evenings, there is a group that shows medieval-themed movies. I was hoping to watch something I could blog about. But this year, for the first time since I’ve been attending this conference, this group failed to get its act together and so there are no movies this year (at least that’s the story I was told). The historian who goes to the movies is very sad because he has no movie to go to.

So all I can offer you is a short update to my very first post, including a few new details I recently learned about Spartan warfare. Scroll down to the bottom of the post.

I should be back on Monday with a regular post.

Why Historical Accuracy in Film Matters

Tags

300, JFK, The Battle of Kosovo, The Lion in Winter, The Wolf of Wall Street

Recently, Sam Adams wrote an essay for Criticwire titled “Please Kill the Expert Review: A Modest Proposal”. Gabriel Valdez of Wednesday Collective called the article to my attention by kindly offering me as an example of an expert review done right (thanks for the compliment, Gabriel!). The article made me think about what I do on this blog and why, so I thought that instead of discussing a specific film for today’s post, I’d share a few of my reactions to Adam’s piece. If you haven’t read it, hop over to Criticwire and read it; it’s not very long.

In the essay, Adams takes issue with what he calls Expert Reviews, such as “What ‘Noah’ Gets Wrong About the Bible” and “What ‘House of Cards’ Gets Wrong about Money in Politics”. He objects to the Expert Review because it is often “a half-step up from the goof-squad niggling of cinematic and televisual trainspotters who derive a puny sense of superiority by pointing out that a license plate has the wrong prefix or that particular style of telephone wasn’t available until the following year.” In other words, these reviews aren’t much better than the ‘Goofs’ notes in an IMBD entry. (Did you know that in Captain American: The Winter Soldier you can see highway signs for Cleveland on highways that are supposed to be in Washington DC?)

Wait–Captain America didn’t help us win World War 2?

Adams then discusses Silicon Valley in specific, and argues that as a work of satire it is not meant to be realistic. By this, he seems to mean that any factual errors or misrepresentations of how tech start-ups actually operate aren’t important because the series is not really about Silicon Valley. What it’s really about he doesn’t tell us. He argues that while details can enrich the world of a fictional movie or tv show, what matters most is the story and that when the story and the facts conflict, the story ought to win out. Small errors in shows like “The Good Wife” or films like The Wolf of Wall Street are unimportant because, as Adams puts it, “drama is life with the distractions pared away.”

To some extent, I think Adams is right. The scriptwriters of tv shows and movies need to have the creative freedom to tell the story they want to tell, and sometimes historical facts get in the way. If James Goldman had scrupulously adhered to historical facts, he probably couldn’t have written The Lion in Winter because several of the events depicted in the film had already happened before the start of the film. I’m not so much of an historical purist that I will get upset if small details are wrong, such as when Shakespeare has one of the characters in Julius Caesar says that “the clock hath stricken three”, even though clocks won’t be invented for about a thousand years. He’s frickin’ Shakespeare! Who am I to tell him how to write his plays? And a small error like that doesn’t affect the story he’s telling in any significant way.

Adams’ essay also points out that one problem with the Expert Review is that the reviewer often isn’t an expert. He or she is just some person doing a few minutes’ worth of internet research before writing an article that might be little better than click-bait.

But there are a few problems with Adams’ argument. Sometimes a lack of historical accuracy renders a film’s plot problematic. 300’s depiction of the Battle of Thermopylae is so wildly wrong, it renders the entire story incoherent and transforms Leonidas from a brave general to a raging moron. Zach Snyder apparently didn’t bother reflecting on how the historical inaccuracies rendered his version of the story nonsensical.

What? I got my men killed for nothing?

But historical train-wrecks of the magnitude of 300 aren’t that common (although I have a decent supply of them for this blog). More seriously, Adams’ argument fails to take into consideration the effect that movies and tv shows have on a viewer’s perception of the facts. Television and film are not just momentary distractions any more than a bottle of Coke is just a momentary distraction; both have lasting effects on the person who consumes them, often in ways the consumer isn’t fully aware of. Movies and tv shows shape the viewer’s notion of what the world around them is like and how they think history played out. I have a good friend who is an assistant district attorney, and she has mentioned a number of times how juries increasingly view a lack of DNA evidence as evidence that the government’s case is weak largely because shows like CSI place such a heavy emphasis on DNA evidence as proof of guilt or innocent. In reality, DNA evidence is often unnecessary to prove someone’s guilt, and running DNA tests is expensive and time-consuming. In the American legal system, the standard of guilt is reasonable doubt, but shows like CSI are changing what reasonable doubt means to average citizens, which raises the government’s burden of proof.

Similarly, I’ve long thought that the various crime and legal dramas on current American television are tending to lead viewers to think that over-zealous prosecution is a good thing, since on these shows, the government characters are always acting from good motives and the people they are pursuing are always the criminals.  So the message of these shows is that we should allow law enforcement and prosecutors to bend or break laws, because in the end, their motives are good and it only hurts the bad guys. The legal system is often presented as an obstacle to justice, not a tool to achieve it. In all the years of Law and Order that I watched, I only once saw the show address the possibility of an innocent man being convicted and sent to prison. Usually Jack McCoy unravels the truth before the sentence is handed down.

Moving to the realm of historical film, Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, often identified as the most historically inaccurate film Hollywood has ever made (although 300 gives it good competition, I think), has been credited with having a very substantial impact on Scottish politics in the mid-1990s. It was released in 1995, and two years later Scotland overwhelmingly voted in favor of a proposal to establish a Scottish Parliament. It has been credited with significantly encouraging Scottish nationalism and has been accused to encouraging Anglophobia in Scotland. The film’s relentlessly negative depiction of the English as vicious rapists is wildly wrong, but very effective.

So the Scots didn’t wear make-up like modern sports fans? D’oh!

Here in the US, Oliver Stone’s JFK presents a version of the facts intended to persuade the audience that Kennedy’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy. Stone carefully blended actual historical footage with invented footage in ways that make it appear that there is actual film footage proving that a conspiracy happened. Stone felt that although the footage proving a conspiracy didn’t exist, it should have, and so he manufactured it. That approach has more than a little in common with Jack McCoy’s notion of how to achieve justice

A number of polls and small studies have found that JFK has tended to persuade viewers that the Kennedy assassination was the result of a CIA conspiracy. If that’s true, this is a case of a historical film helping to shape the historical consciousness of the general population. (One specific study polled viewers before and after watching JFK and found a very marked increase in the number of people who believed in the conspiracy only after watching the film. Unfortunately, I’m relying on memory for this; I read about the study back in 1992, and I wasn’t able to track it down for this post, so take that with a grain of salt.)

Perhaps the best example of how historical films can influence people’s perceptions, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic reported used showings of the 1989 film The Battle of Kosovo as way to whip up Serbian support for his brutal treatment of the Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s. I don’t know enough about Serbian history to know if the film was particularly inaccurate, but Milosevic was able to use the film to remind Serbians of a particular historical grievance as a way to drum up political support for his policies.

For a different take on the problem, consider Christina McDowell, the daughter of Tom Prousalis, the so-called Wolf of Wall Street. In an opinion piece about the film, she accuses Martin Scorsese and Leonardo diCaprio of distorting the events around her father by glorifying him and making his crimes seem trivial when, in fact, they are part of a widespread problem at the heart of the American economy. As she says, “Your film is a reckless attempt at continuing to pretend that these sorts of schemes are entertaining, even as the country is reeling from yet another round of Wall Street scandals. We want to get lost in what? These phony financiers’ fun sexcapades and coke binges? Come on, we know the truth. This kind of behavior brought America to its knees.”

I haven’t seen the Wolf of Wall Street yet, so I can’t speak to how it presents its narrative, but McDowell’s essay is an important reminder that historical events happen to real people. Tom Prousalis’ victims were and are real people; they deserve to have a say in how society remembers the events of their lives. McDowell, at least, feels that facts critical to her life have been badly misrepresented, to her detriment and to the detriment of the American public and its understanding of the Wall Street banking scandals.

Historical films matter, because for most people, such films are where they get much of their knowledge of history from. After 300 came out, I noticed an increase in the number of my students who thought that Thermopylae was the reason the Persians lost that war, and Braveheart has certainly given people the idea that medieval Scots wore great kilts, when in reality the Scottish kilt is a late 16^th century development. Small historical inaccuracies probably aren’t too serious, and I doubt that it really matters that many Americans think that the kilt was a medieval garment, but how a film presents history can have very powerful affects on how people understand the past and their people’s place in it.

Like this blog on Facebook!

I’ve set up a Facebook page for people who want to get notifications when I post a new blog, but who may not want to or cannot follow me through this site. I’ll probably post occasional articles about history or film, as the interest strikes me.