Amadeus: Killing Mozart

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Amadeus, Antonio Salieri, Early Modern Austria, Early Modern Europe, F. Murray Abraham, History, Medical Stuff, Milos Forman, Movies, Peter Shaffer, Wolfgang Mozart

Milos Forman’s Amadeus (1984, director’s cut 2002) opens with Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) loudly calling Wolfgang Mozart’s name and declaring that he had murdered Mozart. As the film progresses, Salieri openly talks about trying to figure out how to kill Mozart, but in the flashbacks that form most of the film we never see him do anything so direct as poison the man (although he does plant a spy in the Mozart household, in the form of a serving maid, who could possibly have poisoned the food). But at the end of the film, Salieri directly says that it was God who killed Mozart, in order to foil Salieri’s plot to steal Mozart’s Requiem Mass for himself. Salieri has only contributed to the death by working to ensure that Mozart would be unable to find work and thus live in poverty. So the film is somewhat coy about exactly what Salieri might have done to orchestrate Mozart’s death. So what really happened to Mozart?

The Evolution of the Story

Mozart grew quite ill late in November of 1791, when he was 35, and he died on Dec 5th. Soon after his death, rumors had begun to circulate that Salieri had poisoned him, driven perhaps by the suddenness of his death. But no one seems to have taken these rumors seriously.  Mozart’s widow Constanze trusted Salieri to tutor her son Franz in music, for example.

Antonio Salieri

Salieri himself died in 1825, at the age of 75. In his last years he suffered from dementia and attempted suicide by slashing his throat; on several occasions when he was in the throes of dementia he claimed to have killed Mozart, but when he was more coherent he denied it. But a few years after his death, in 1831, the Russian author Alexander Pushkin published a short story, “Mozart and Salieri” in which the Italian composer slips poison into the German composer’s drink, out of a profound sense of envy. In 1898, the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov adopted Pushkin’s story into an opera. Pushkin’s story has been adapted three more times, in 1914 as a silent film, in 1979 as a Soviet television mini-series Small Tragedies, and in the same year as Peter Shaffer’s Tony-award winning play Amadeus. Shaffer did the adaptation of the play into a screenplay for Forman’s 1984 film. So the film is based not on history directly but on Pushkin’s short story. Shaffer freely admitted that his work should not be viewed as historical.

Mozart’s Death

Understanding Mozart’s death is surprisingly difficult for a couple of reasons. First, his body was not autopsied, because it was giving off a terrible stench. So instead it was just buried. (Incidentally, the claim, shown in the film, that he was buried in a mass grave is untrue. He was buried in a “common grave”, which does not refer to a pauper’s mass grave; rather it was a reference to a legal distinction made in Austrian funerals at the time. “Common graves” were maintained only for a decade, after which the government had the right to dig the body up and reuse the grave to save space; in contrast “aristocratic graves” were permanent). After the grave was opened around 1801, the gravedigger claimed to have saved Mozart’s skull, but there’s no proof that the skull in question was actually the composer’s.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

To complicate matters significantly, virtually all the descriptions we have of Mozart’s death were written down long after his death. Some of them are based on eyewitness testimony from people such as Constanze Mozart, his son Karl, and Constanze’s sister Sophie Weber. But nearly everyone who wrote accounts of the death had ulterior motives such as profiting from a sensational story, so it is hard to know which accounts are trustworthy. And some of the accounts contradict each other.

His symptoms were numerous. The death certificate says he had a “miliary fever”, meaning a fever that produced many tiny rash-like bumps on the skin. Most accounts say that he had become badly swollen (edema), so much that he could not turn himself in bed, and several accounts say he stank. Sophie’s account of his death says he had a severe fever that a physician tried to bring down with cold compresses, but that the coldness shocked him into a coma he never recovered from (but other accounts claim he was conscious on his last day). A few accounts say that he was bled by a doctor to relieve the swelling. Constanze said that in his last moments, he suddenly produced a massive torrent of brown vomit and died (Forman, perhaps wisely, omits that detail in the film). Other symptoms mentioned in the different accounts include back pain, delirium, and claiming he had been poisoned. A modern examination of what might be his skull found evidence of a chronic subdural hematoma (swelling of the tissue between the brain and the skull, resulting in increasing pressure on the brain), possibly caused by falls in 1789 and 1790.

Was It Poison?

Various people have been proposed as Mozart’s poisoner, including Salieri, the freemasons, the Catholic church, and the Jews (one wild theory has the last three all working in conjunction). A related theory claims that Mozart accidentally poisoned himself with antimony (a heavy metal) or mercury used as a medicine.

Constanze Mozart

The most likely poisons would have been antimony, mercury, or arsenic and lead (a mixture termed acqua toffana, a popular poison that Constanze claimed Mozart thought had been given to him). The problem here is that none of the likely poisons really fits with Mozart’s symptoms. Antimony poisoning is characterized by coughing, arthritis, headache, fainting, facial swelling, abdominal pain, muscle pain, and skin rash. Of those, only the rash is clearly mentioned, although if we stretch things we might be able to fit in the fainting (passing out from the cold compress), and muscle pain (the back pain one person claimed). His edema was not specifically in his face but in his body. He did experience headaches and fainting in 1790, but not around the time of his death.

Mercury poisoning is characterized by tremors in the hands or body, slurred speech, hearing loss, problems with eyesight, memory loss, excessive salivation, and mental deterioration. Of these, Mozart exhibited none of these, unless his claims of being poisoned were a symptom of mental deterioration. But most accounts claim that he was lucid enough to work on his Requiem mass, which would suggest he was more or less ok mentally. Examination of his last manuscripts show no change in his handwriting, so he probably didn’t suffer from tremors.

If it was acqua toffana, the symptoms would have included a metallic taste in the mouth, peripheral neuropathy (pain in the extremities), a burning sensation in the throat, anemia, gastrointestinal distress, nausea, vomiting, constipation, skin problems, breathing problems, seizures, and mental deterioration. This fits slightly better; he had a rash, vomited at least once, and again, might have suffered moments of paranoia. One late piece of testimony said that he could taste death in his mouth, which was perhaps the metallic taste. But he lacked the other symptoms so far as we know, and there is no explanation for the severe edema or stench.

As a result of this, it seems highly unlikely that he was poisoned. His symptoms just don’t fit any of the commonly used poisons. But let’s turn from symptoms to motive. Did anyone have a reason to want Mozart dead?

If we disregard the rather lurid claims of poisoning by evil organizations, the only real candidate for his murder is Salieri. And as noted, Salieri did claim during his delirious moments to have done the deed. If that was true, he must have had a real reason for doing it. Did Salieri have a motive to kill Mozart?

Mozart and Salieri seem to have had a complex relationship. Some of Mozart’s letters to his father Leopold include evidence that he resented the Italian composer. There was a very influential faction of Italian musicians at Emperor Joseph II’s court, of which Salieri was one of the most prominent. In at least two of his letters, Mozart told his father he was being thwarted by Salieri and the other Italians; that might be true, or it might be an explanation Mozart was giving his demanding father for his own lack of progress at court. Leopold Mozart seems to have blamed the Italians for thwarting his son’s efforts to be appointed as music tutor to one of Joseph’s daughters, but whether that’s true or if Wolfgang agreed with that claim is unknown. The Viennese musical world certainly put the two men into competition for a limited number of jobs and patrons. Salieri rejected the libretto that Mozart turned into Cosi Fan Tutte, which might have embarrassed the Italian. He might have resented Joseph II’s decision to favor German opera over Italian, but Mozart was hardly to blame for that.

Emperor Joseph II

However, other evidence points to the two men basically liking each other. They composed at least one piece together, and when Salieri became the Imperial Kapellmeister, he did Mozart the enormous favor of re-staging Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, rather than doing one of his own many operas. Salieri loved The Magic Flute, which Mozart premiered just a few months before his death (not the night before, as Amadeus shows it).And, as I already noted, he agreed to tutor Mozart’s son years later.

Additionally, Salieri was far more successful than Mozart was. He was a highly acclaimed composer for much of his mid-life (although in his last two decades, he stopped composing almost entirely), and his operas were performed all over Europe. He received numerous important offices and public honors, including being made Kapellmeister in 1788. When Mozart died, Salieri was at the height of his fame, influence, and success, while Mozart was struggling financially and enjoying only sporadic success with his operas. And he died a very rich man. So if Salieri hated Mozart, it must have been for some very abstract reason, one not reflected in their relative careers.

That’s the reason that Pushkin and Shaffer make the issue Salieri’s envy over Mozart’s superior skills as a composer. In Shaffer’s story, Salieri wants to praise God but grows envious of how easily composing comes to Mozart compared to how hard it comes to him. This envy turns into a desire to spite God for ignoring Salieri’s earnest struggles to praise God and instead giving a sublime musical talent to a vulgar, childish man. But  it’s hard to see why Salieri would have been angry about his meager musical talents if in fact he was enjoying enormous success that he could easily have attributed to God.

And the real Mozart was nowhere near as childish and vulgar as the film presents him. He was certainly vulgar in private; his letters to family members are filled with dirty jokes. He once composed a piece entitled Leck mich im Arsch, which translates to “Lick My Ass.” But such scatological humor was very common among Germans of the period, and is not remarkable in Mozart’s work. More importantly, most of his vulgarity was shared privately with friends; there’s no evidence that he was vulgar in public or at the imperial court. Mozart had been moving in aristocratic and royal circles since the time he was 6; he certainly understood how to behave around the wealthy and powerful people who controlled his fortunes, and such vulgarity would probably not have been well-received in that circle.

Leck mich im Arsch

So when we consider the whole picture, there is neither evidence for Mozart being poisoned nor a clear motive for Salieri to have done so. No one who has seriously studied Mozart’s death accepts the poisoning theory.

Then What Did Kill Mozart?

No one really knows. Most serious theories have revolved around the possibility of a disease. Suggestions have included smallpox, tonsillitis, bronchitis, pneumonia, typhoid fever, strep leading to kidney failure, Vitamin D deficiency, and rheumatic fever (and those are just the well-known conditions that have been suggested). None of these precisely fits Mozart’s symptoms, but strep and rheumatic fever seem to fit the evidence fairly well. Of particular importance is the fact that there was an outbreak of fever in Vienna at the time Mozart died, so he may well have died during an epidemic. Working against that is the minor point that Constanze wanted to die of whatever had killed her husband, and spent several hours after his death clinging to his body, hoping she would contract whatever had killed him. But maybe she just had a stronger immune system than he did.

Medical malpractice may also have contributed to his death. Sophie Weber said his doctor had shocked him into a coma with cold compresses, but that is contradicted by claims he was lucid in his last hours. Constanze and another source claim he was bled by a doctor, which might have weakened him generally, and could have aggravated any subdural hematoma that he might have had.

A final theory holds that he might have contracted trichinosis, which had not yet been identified medically. While not normally fatal today, it becomes fatal about 20% of the time if left untreated, because larval worms burrow into the muscle tissues and destroy them, and this can trigger a variety of other serious problems including meningitis, encephalitis, and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscles). In a letter 44 days before his death, he mentions eating a plate of pork cutlets; trichinosis has an incubation period of between 8 and 50 days. Its symptoms include fever, rash, vomiting, and edema, all of which he had. Other symptoms include headache, nausea, fatigue, muscle pain, weakness, and sensitivity to light. These are symptoms that fit with the general descriptions of his death and which might not have been mentioned in testimony about it. However, as an explanation, it’s a bit of a stretch, because it requires him to have eaten poorly-cooked pork and to have acquired a very severe form of the disease. And it doesn’t explain the stench that was reported. In fact, none of the proposed solutions clearly accounts for this symptom.

Playwright Peter Shaffer

So we’re left with a puzzle that doesn’t yet have a clear solution. His symptoms don’t fit any of the common poisons of the day, and there’s no clear motive for someone to have poisoned an impoverished musician who was enjoying only sporadic success. But his symptoms are hard to square with known diseases either. Rheumatic fever seems to be the most commonly cited caused these days. I’m hardly a doctor, but my guess is that he was suffering from more than one problem and that his symptoms may have been masking other symptoms or simply not being observed by those close to him. We’ll probably never know for sure what killed him, but it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t poisoned.

Want to Know More?

Amadeus (Director’s Cut)is available through Amazon.

Robert Gutman’s biography Mozart: A Cultural Biography seeks to place Mozart in a wider context and is widely regarded as the definitive biography of the composer.

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Why There’s No Such Thing as an Historically-Accurate Movie, part 3

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Braveheart, History, Ian McKellan, Richard III

Ok, so I’ve explained why the concept of an historically accurate movie doesn’t work, here and here. But this would seem to contradict the purpose of this blog, which is to examine the historical accuracy of films. How can I criticize films like Braveheart for being inaccurate if true accuracy is impossible?

The point I am making is not that there is no reason to be interested in historical accuracy in film, but rather that “Is this film historically accurate?” isn’t really the right question to ask. All historical films are inaccurate; that’s just a given. The question we should always be asking instead is “why is this film being inaccurate about some things and not others?” This question asks us to analyze a film, the intentions of the screenwriter and the director, and the overall message the film is offering to the viewers.

In other words, if all historical films are inaccurate, what matters is not whether they’re inaccurate, but where. What parts of a film does the director care to ‘get right’ and what parts does he not care about, or actively desire to get wrong? There is a big difference between getting the costuming wrong or simplifying a complex series of events on the one hand, and, for example, claiming that a basically patriotic man was in fact guilty of treason and cowardice because he was gay. In the first case, the intent was to appeal to a teen audience, in the second case, the intent was to keep the film from getting bogged down in obscure details, and in the third case, the intent was simply to gin up third-act drama rather than tell the real story.

Braveheart offers an excellent example of the importance of asking the right question. One of its biggest inaccuracies is the decision to introduce Princess Isabella into the story, despite her being 2 years old and living in France at the time of the movie. If you simply ask whether it’s accurate, the answer is simply no. But if you ask why is she included in the story, why the film has chosen to be inaccurate on this issue, you very quickly start realizing that the romance between Isabella and Wallace goes beyond simple romantic window-dressing and is in fact the reason Wallace can die triumphant at the end of the film. Wallace wins by knocking up the princess. And that, to my mind, is the key to understanding the whole damn film. It’s a movie about sexual conquest, not military conquest.

A Simple Thought Experiment

Hollywood has trained audiences to think about historical accuracy largely in terms of costuming, weapons, and sets. They want the audience to think that a historical film ‘looks right’. Let’s leave aside the fact that they usually get a lot of those details wrong; what matters is that they give an impression that the clothing, the locations, and the violence seems correct. For example, one element of Braveheart that got some publicity was how they achieved the stunts during the Battle of Stirling Bridgeless; Gibson claimed (and I see little reason to doubt him on this point) that someone from an animal welfare organization objected to the shots of horses being impaled because the man assumed that the shots had to have been achieved by actually killing horses. On the DVD, Gibson explains that he had to show the man the mechanical horse they used and how they had made the scene look realistic enough to fool audiences. The point of Gibson’s anecdote is that he was extremely concerned with accuracy, and his concern was so great that he was able to fool someone whose job is to monitor animal welfare. In other words, “see this movie, because I did a really good job being accurate.”

I find it very striking that audiences apparently want a sense of accuracy about violence, but not about plot. They cheerfully accept absurd plot developments (like Isabella being way too young and way too far way to have an affair with Wallace), but will complain if the sword fighting looks too fake. (Compare contemporary film violence to that from the 60s, for example, to see just how much effort Hollywood has put into improving the realism of its violence.)

Imagine for a moment a film in which the emphasis was on accuracy of the plot, but not on accuracy of the costuming or weaponry. Picture William Wallace running around in a 20th century British military uniform carrying an AK-47 but engaging in fairly accurate political maneuverings.

Most people would react to that poorly, I suspect, because Hollywood trains us that accuracy means specific things and generally excludes other things. But theatrical and cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare employ this device fairly frequently. Instead of setting his Richard III in the 1480s, like the historical Richard III, or in the 1590s, when the play was first performed, Ian McKellan set his version of the play in the 1930s, depicting Richard as a would-be fascist dictator. A particular favorite detail is the arrangement of 16th century poem “Come Live with Me and Be My Love” as a sort of Swing-era piece. The famous “Now is the winter of our discontent” speech becomes a political speech. It works beautifully, and while the setting isn’t faithful to the play as Shakespeare envisioned it, it works marvelously and offers a wonderful comment on the politics of both the 15th and the 20th centuries while still being true to the spirit of the play. This is a film making careful, clever use of its choices about historical inaccuracy.

So being historically inaccurate is not inherently a bad thing. All films have to do it to some degree. My goal in this blog is to illuminate the various inaccuracies that films employ and then discuss what the choice to be inaccurate means for that film. Hopefully, this can educate people to be more critical film-goers and maybe, in my wildest dreams, to demand a slightly higher calibre of historical film.

Why There’s No Such Thing as an Historically-Accurate Movie, part 2

Tags

Braveheart, History

Last time I laid out an argument that there is no such thing as an historically accurate movie because film requires far too many concessions to literary devices such as plot and narrative and main characters. Film has to be highly selective about which moments it will include and which it will exclude, because to include them all would be too boring to viewers.

But let’s put all those cinematic conventions aside. Let’s concede the need to make our hypothetical historically accurate movie watchable in the short space of 2-3 hours, and to offer a coherent and satisfying narrative to the viewer. Even with all of that granted, it’s still impossible to make a truly historically accurate film. Let’s get back to Braveheart to see why.

In our accurate version of William Wallace’ life story, we’d need to find actors who closely resembled Wallace, or could pull it off with the help of make-up and prosthetics. So we’d need to find actors who were a little shorter than Mel Gibson and who have less than flawless skin, teeth and hair. Of course, less physically attractive stars probably mean less success at the box office, which is why American film stars are always absurdly good-looking people. Who really wants William Wallace kissing with a mouthful of crooked teeth? More seriously, we’d have to actually know what Wallace looked like, which we don’t. So once again, we have to make concessions. We can’t expect our actors to actually look like the people who they are portraying.

Additionally, the script would have to be written at least partly in Scots English, which most audiences would find unintelligible, and the actors would need to use appropriate accents as well. Most Hollywood films employ a subtle convention of having the characters speak English even if they’re supposed to be speaking Old Norse or Latin or French or whatever. Again, it’s a concession to the needs to the viewers, especially since Hollywood assumes that Americans won’t tolerate too many subtitles. Historical films do occasionally acknowledge this convention in some way, but other films can be completely inconsistent about what language the characters are speaking.

The question of what William Wallace looked like is actually a far bigger problem than it seems on the surface. For a film to be truly accurate, it would have to stick to the known facts. But no historical subject is so well-documented that we can actually make a film about him or her without employing an enormous amount of speculation, guesswork and invention. Often we have only a faint idea what a particular person looked like. More seriously, we usually only know a small fraction of what they said to other people, and we almost never know what they were wearing. So in the scene when Wallace has his council of war before the battle of Stirling Bridge, we don’t know how many people were there or where it happened. We don’t know what he actually said. And we don’t know what clothing he was wearing when he said it.

If I sit down to write a historically accurate book on William Wallace, as a historian, I have an obligation to be clear about which facts I can know for certain (or with relative certainty) and which ‘facts’ I’m speculating about and what I’m using as the basis for my speculation. If I have no sources that physically describe William Wallace, I cannot offer a physical description of him because that simply isn’t historical. I have to be bound by the limits of what my sources tell me. And if I don’t know what he looked like, I can simply say that we don’t know what he looked like and leave it at that. No scholar will fault me for not describing him if we have no information about his physical appearance. (This is a common problem with popular history books by non-scholars; they frequently offer descriptions of their subject based on little to know real evidence.)

But a filmmaker doesn’t have the luxury of glossing over the things we don’t know about Wallace. The filmmaker has to decide whether Wallace was short or tall, thin or fat, slightly built or muscular, because he can’t not decide. He has to cast an actor to play Wallace and that requires him to decide which actor will best capture what the filmmaker thinks Wallace was like physically. And when the filmmaker films that council of war, he can’t have all the actors naked because we don’t know what they actually wore; he must clothe his actors in something. A truly accurate film about William Wallace would give Wallace exactly two pieces of dialog, because we only know two things he said or wrote; one is a letter offering German merchants safe conduct in Scotland, and the other is a rather uninspiring battle speech. But a film in which the main character says almost nothing is going to be a very hard sell to most modern audiences, and so the screenwriter has to invent his dialog. All of these are entirely reasonable things to do (which is not to say that Randall Wallace did a good job of making things up), but the moment the filmmaker decides that Wallace was wearing brown at his war council, the filmmaker has abandoned historical accuracy for fiction.

A further problem, which I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is that in some situations, historians have more than one possible way to recreate the historical events. Different sources often give contradictory versions of events. One source says someone was at a particular event, while another source says he or she wasn’t at that event. Or a sources fails to mention the participation of someone who would logically have been involved. When I’m writing an historical work, I have to note the discrepancy in the sources and explain which source I am going to believe and why. If I simply choose one version of an event without explaining my choice, other scholars may rightly criticize me for being sloppy or making unwarranted assumptions. But film-makers can’t do that. They have to settle on a version of events that makes sense narratively, and they cannot tell the audience that there was another way to reconstruct the events, unless they want to get into a Rashomon-style scenario (which would actually be sort of an interesting approach, I think). Murder mysteries sometimes do this, giving us the same crime committed by multiple possible killers as the detective reconstructs the events of the murder. Our historically-accurate Braveheart would have to do this multiple times for no dramatic pay-off.

So my point is that historically accurate movies are impossible, because making films requires so many assumptions about what was said and done and worn that historical accuracy becomes literally impossible, at least in any way scholars would understand the term. Instead we need to think about historical scholarship and cinema as two different ways of exploring the past, both with advantages and disadvantages of their own.

While I complain a lot about the inaccuracies of various films and tv shows, it’s not because I think they need to be 100% accurate. It’s because I think they’re being inaccurate about stupid things they could easily have been more accurate about. Reign, before you say anything, take off those damn high heels and that sequined strapless dress and put on something more period. And wear a chemise under it, for God’s sake! Do you want to chafe your nipples off?

Why There’s No Such Thing as an Historically-Accurate Movie, part 1

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Braveheart, History

So I’ve said a couple times that there is no such thing as an historically-accurate movie, and it’s time for me to start explaining what I mean by that. And let’s use that most irritating of historical movies, Braveheart, as an example to illustrate the issues involved.

Let’s say we want to make a movie about William Wallace’ rebellion, and unlike Mel Gibson, we want to make it 100% accurate. As far as we know, Wallace started his rebellion in 1297 with his killing of Sir William Heselrig, and it reached its final conclusion when he was executed in 1305. To be 100% historically accurate, our movie would have to be 7 ½ years long, because the moment you start compressing the time scale of the film, you’re no long being historically accurate, since you’re omitting a lot of time. You’re editing out an enormous range of actions like Wallace bathing and getting dressed, Wallace have boring conversations about the weather, and Wallace taking a crap. But in doing this you’re declaring that some actions, like Wallace combing his hair, aren’t important enough for the viewer to have to sit through. That’s a reasonable judgment call, but strictly speaking you’re departing from history, because he has to have done all these things, hundreds of times over. So right away, you can see why historically accurate movies aren’t really possible. This sounds like a tiny, niggling issue, and it is. But I think it’s an important issue to acknowledge.

So let’s make a concession to watchability and agree that we’re not going to expect our audience to sit through all the times when Wallace was sleeping and eating, and riding across the countryside and so on. We’re going to compress the time scale and just show the important events, the ones that matter to the story of his rebellion. But here we run into another problem. To really tell an accurate account of Wallace’ rebellion, we need to include everyone’s story. We have to include the actions of the William Wallace and Andrew Moray and all their lieutenants and soldiers and other people who helped them. And we’re going to have devote equal time to all the English players in the events. Remember that historical events themselves don’t have a perspective or point of view. Edward I’s decisions and actions are every bit as important to telling the story as Wallace’ decisions and actions are, and to exclude them is going to fundamentally misrepresent the events. From a purely historical point of view, Wallace isn’t the ‘hero’ of the rebellion. History doesn’t have ‘main characters’ and ‘supporting characters’. His individual soldiers are as much the center of the events as he is, and the same is true for Edward I. Indeed, for the men who died at the battle of Stirling Bridge, that moment is more important in their lives than in Wallace’ life, so an argument can be made that Wallace is far less important to the story of Stirling Bridge than the men killed fighting there.

But obviously we cannot tell all the stories of all the people involved in all the events of the rebellion. That would just be impossible, even if George R.R. Martin was writing the script. So we must again make a concession to watchability. We have to decide to focus on a small number of people, simply to make the material manageable. So now we have to make a judgment call about whose stories matter and whose stories don’t. We have to designate some people to be main characters. Again, this sounds like a small point, but it’s actually a big step away from history, because as I said, history don’t have main characters and supporting characters. Nor does it have good guys and bad guys. Edward I may be a villain in Wallace’ story, but Wallace is a villain in Edward’s story, and in Sir William Heselrig’s story, for that matter. But let’s decide that we’re going to tell Wallace’ story; he’s going to be our main character.

History doesn’t have a plot. That means that even if we omit all the boring moments of Wallace tying his shoe laces, we still have to include everything else that’s directly part of the rebellion. A simple battle, like the battle of Stirling Bridge, doesn’t just happen. It’s made up of dozens of smaller events, like Wallace and Moray raising forces, marching to Stirling, discussing strategy, taking up their position and waiting for the English to arrive. And that’s just the pre-battle stuff. But that’s still an enormous amount of stuff to film, so again we have to make a concession and decide just to film the most important stuff. But in doing this we’re leaving out lots of important stuff, like the military decision-making and the deals Wallace had to cut in order to get the troops he needed. So at this point we’ve deviated substantially from history and what we’re filming is really only a subset of events that we’ve chosen, somewhat arbitrarily, to call ‘the really important events’.

Furthermore, Braveheart illustrates another problem with historically accurate films. In his depiction of the battle of Stirling Bridge, Gibson claims that the turning point of the battle was when Wallace tricked the English into making a cavalry charge into a Scottish pike unit. (That’s absolutely not what happened, but let’s pretend for a moment that it was.) Wallace would have made the decision to use that tactic in a meeting before the battle. And Gibson shows us that meeting, but he cuts the scene off at the moment when Wallace first has the idea. This allows Gibson to give the battle a surprise twist by not telling us the Scots will use spears at the battle (that, and some camera work where the spears aren’t in the scene until they magically appear on the ground just when they’re needed). But the decision to use that tactic would be a “really important event”, because it was that decision that made the difference in the battle. Gibson has skipped that moment because it makes the battle scene more dramatic. (He pulls the same trick in his depiction of Falkirk, where the decision of the Irish mercenaries to switch sides is entirely unforeshadowed.) This is entirely false from the standpoint of historical accuracy. An historically accurate movie doesn’t get to have surprise twists in it, because history isn’t written like a murder mystery. The facts are laid out in chronological or themetic order, not in a way that elicits surprise from the audience. (This is something a few of my students need to learn when they write term papers.)

My larger point here is that even movies that genuinely strive for historical accuracy aren’t anywhere close to true accuracy because they’re trimming out all sorts of stuff in order to make the film conform to a set of rules that we’ve agreed upon as to how movies are going to be made. The Hollywood film style we’ve been trained to accept as natural requires every scene to have some degree of plot advancement in it, and all those scenes of Wallace eating lunch don’t advance the plot. Hollywood has trained us to accept a limited viewpoint that privileges certain characters over others and certain facts over others, and these cinematic rules don’t leave much room for genuine historical accuracy. There’s no such thing as an historically accurate movie, because ‘historical accuracy’ and ‘watchable movie’ require drastically different approaches to the same material. What people are really asking when they ask “Is this film historically accurate?” is “Is this film historically accurate within the arbitrary conventions for making a movie I would be willing to spend time watching?”

Part of the issue here is that most movies conform broadly to the general rules of narrative literature. They have main characters and supporting characters, protagonists and antagonists, plots, and themes. History doesn’t have these things. Every real person is the main character of his or her life story, and a supporting character in the life stories of those around them. To designate one person as the main character is to a considerable extent to step away from history and toward literature (although, obviously, historical biography does have a main character in its subject). To tell William Wallace’ story from his point of view is to make a moral judgment that Edward I was a ‘bad guy’, which inherently privileges one side of the conflict. While that was a popular way to tell history in the past, modern historians generally try to be more even-handed on this issue.

Similarly, plots have to have a clear trajectory, with action that slowly rises toward a climax and eventually arrives at a resolution. But history doesn’t work that way. There is no ‘plot’ to history. Wallace’ story was not a simple linear progression that began with the English brutally conquering Scotland and raping Scottish women and ended with a triumphant shout of freedom during his execution. The story of his rebellion began long before Wallace was born, with the turbulent history of Scotland and England generations before, and his failed rebellion was simply one moment in that long conflict. But it wasn’t a plot; it was a series of events that did not have an overarching plot imposed by an outside power.

So to sum up, history’s ‘rules’ are entirely different from cinema and literature’s ‘rules’, and a movie that honestly tried to adhere to historical rather than literary rules would be entirely unwatchable by most people’s standards.

But even within these somewhat arbitrary rules for how a cinematic narrative is constructed, it’s still not possible to make a historically accurate movie, for reasons I’ll get into in my next post.