When it portrays a movie character who’s a slave.
The movie Django Unchained is controversial enough as it is without this fueling more discussion. Then again, the idea does have its supporters.
6 thoughts on “When is a Doll … err, Action Figure … The Stuff of Headlines?”
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The responses to “Django” and “Lincoln” have left me greatly disappointed, not in the film makers and their art, but rather the inability of the reviewers to comprehend entertainment and storytelling. These are fictional retellings of historical ideas, not Ken Burns documentaries on PBS. To bemoan the perceived overuse of the word “nigger” is to misunderstand race relations in the nineteenth century. If the American public is relying on Hollywood for deep, accurate depictions of the past, and if academics and pop culture pundits in the press are bemoaning a lack of scholarly depth and nuance, then we as educators have failed on many levels.
The two movies are different. One pretends to be history. One is a work of fiction. Setting aside the broader criticisms about Lincoln, and stipulating that it is telling a particular story, one wonders why even in the telling of that story there are some curious distortions. Do you think it’s just fine to distort chronology and cause-effect explanations for dramatic effect? The same also happens in Frost/Nixon, which I like, but if you read James Reston, Jr.,’s book on the subject (upon which the play and movie were based), you’ll see that there were serious distortions in the service of dramatic effect. Why not simply throw history out the window altogether and construct a fictional story to make larger points?
The two movies are different, and as you pointed out, neither of them are history. They are both fictions, narratives crafted by story tellers for the purpose of entertainment. If we’re very lucky, some will be moved to pick up a book upon their departure from the multiplex, but that’s not the main goal of the story tellers here, it’s the generation of revenue. My response was to the articles cited in your post that mirror so many others I’ve seen that want some form of whole cloth, organic depiction of raw history, one that especially meets the demands of the writers in question. I’m having an especially hard time with using a “spaghetti western” for the study of historical events, but that’s forest and the trees.
I haven’t seen either movie, so I can’t comment on the use of artistic styles, but yes, the director/story teller has the right to create the narrative they wish to tell as they see fit. I’m not saying that we should dispose of historical fact when being entertained, but we should remember that we go to the movies for entertainment, and not for an education. If I wish to know more about any topic, libraries and lectures are the way to go, not cinema.
But this is coming from someone who wishes he had C-SPAN3.
I see the two movies differently. I really don’t care whether Django Unchained offers an accurate representation of anything. It’s a work of fiction, pure and simple. Lincoln. on the other hand, has pretenses to being history and describing a historical event. I think most of the criticism of the movie … the “that’s not the story I would have told” theme … is besides the point. But the movie sets up a false relationship between the Hampton Roads Conference and the actions of the House of Representatives … and I’d make the case that one could have made a better movie had it been accurate on this score, with much more suspense in the form of a last-minute effort to upset Lincoln’s efforts. In this case, the historical drama was more interesting (at least to my mind) than the fabricated drama. In contrast, I can see why Frost/Nixon shuffled the order of certain events to create a more dramatic effect. I might have tried to keep with a more accurate representation and sought other ways to deal with the drama, but I understand the choices.
Then again, it’s like what I heard when the folks from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter called. They told me they wanted to be as historically accurate as possible … with one exception.
I’d rather see a quality bio of Frederick Douglass. Then let them trivialize his life with an action figure.
I haven’t seen the movie, but some of the reactions to the figures in various editorials seem to assume that they’re toys for kids. I’m pretty sure this is more of a novelty item aimed at young adult collectors. Sounds odd, I know, but there’s a pretty healthy market for that sort of thing. Watchmen was an R-rated movie with nudity and graphic violence, but comic shops were selling novelty figures from that film, too, aimed at teens and adult collectors.
I’m not saying the Django figures are in good taste, mind you, just that they’re not necessarily encouraging kids to play master vs. slave.