has Hollywood usurped our history?

Question

films depict history incorrectly, what impact will this have on our younger generations. ie the fact that according to films America won the war all bythemselves and Edward III was the bastard son of William Wallace.

Answer 1

depends how seriously you take it. hollywood always claims america wins everything and the biggest culprit has gotta be bruce willis do you remember armageddon' gentlemen the president of the united states wants us to save the world' laugh i thought i would never start. the best one though was their recent plans to make a film about the battle of britain, and as we all know the battle of britain took place over Kent,England and the english channel, in May 1940 (2 years before the US entered the war), when the RAF (god bless em), DESTROYED THE LUFTWAFFE. but in the new film, the makers wanted to make it american pilots destroying the luftwaffe. when it was pointed out that the americans werent even in the war at this time, the makers said that an american audience wouldnt watch it unless it portrayed american pilots. i think this says as much about the american audience as much as hollywood. another interesting one was, the great escape starring steve mcqueen, again there were no american POWs at that camp and in reality the POWs who escaped were brits,canadians,french and poles , but eh oh as long as you dont put the tea in before the milk , we dont care

Answer 2

Edward 111 was no doubt someones bastard son, but not Wallaces as they were in different countries at the time. Hollywood has done no more damage to history than a lot of the 'factual' references you will read. When did you last learn in school that 'Great' Briton got that way by industrialising a profitable Portuguese pastime and as a result shipped 20 million people around the planet to work and die as slaves so that we could all put sugar in our tea? Like any history there's always a different story if you look at it from another angle.

Answer 3

It has always been the case that not just Hollywood, but every one else in the 'history game' have blundered along mostly telling not how it was.

The problem really is that 'history is a foreign place'. We do not know for sure exactly what happened at a given point in history unless we were witness to it.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Captain George Fishley, a veteran of the American War of Independance [the Revolution], described being at Valley Forge with neither shoes nor stockings. Yet when we see the movie 'Revolution' starring Mel Gibson [an Australian], we do not see any of this. What we get in fact are people clothed much as one would expect of the 18th century gentry and not plain country folk, who may not even have owned a pair of shoes in their entire lives.

People simply do not understand the truth about history and just how poor people actually were.

I was born in 1941 and must tell you that life in London then was entirely different to how it is now. Even notwithstanding the bombing the Blitz and all the rest, the people were entirely different. My school teachers for the most part were Victorians brough back out of retirement due to the shortage of teachers, most of whom had been called up to fight.

I know exactly what a Victorian looks like in real life and I know exactly how strict such people were. No one can even begin to portray such a person in a movie and that's a promise. Unless that is, you see a Charlie Chaplin film called "Easy Street". He was a real Victorian and his intent was to show just how poor many people's lives actually were.

The nearest you will get to real life in a London suburb of the war years, is a movie titled "The Power and the Glory". It is set in the London suburbs, Acasha Avenue or somewhere like that. It is in colour but is as close to the real thing as it's possible to get.

Back then, us kids were running wild, our dads were away in the war and it was only the Victorian teachers mentioned above, who maintained any discipline. Not the kinds of soft spoken words one gets today, but a damn good thrashing if you got out of line. I avoided most of those, thank God.

Read anything by Chas Dickens for an insite into Victorian life. It's all there, the ragged kids, even the 'mudlarks' some of whom still were seen in Portsmouth when I was a very young child; diving in the mud of the harbour for pennies. Cannot believe it ever happened, but it did. These kids were really dirt poor. Nothing like it today; not with the Welfare State and all...

As I Please - The Revolutionary Eyes of George Fishley - Captain George Fishley stares into the camera, his tiny eyes almost lost in gray, ... "Capt. George Fishley is 90 years on his birthday June 11, 1850. ...
http://www.seacoastnh.com/arts/please112402.html

Answer 4

Well there is no doubt that the cinema in general and Hollywood in particular could be used as a very powerful instrument of propaganda...Lets take for example Rambo 2 or 3 I cannot remember exactly, the one with Sylvester Stallone praising the courage and bravery of the Afghan hero who was fighting fiercely the Russian Army... I wander if Hollywood and the Americans have now the same vision and admiration for the Afghan combatants...Sometimes people could be so naif!!!

Answer 5

No, People enjoy having wharped views about the past... Many people long to remember the 'good ole days' of their youth and have always and continue to always remember it as the time when their world (i.e. one town in one country) and their nation (one country) were perfect. The most patriotic people will always claim that they won the war, etc. Conservative in Poland, people believe that Pope John Paul II (the Polish Pope) brought down communism. Conservatives in the United States insist that Reagan did. In the USSR, they claimed that the US was a trite accesory that contributed a very small amount to Hitler's defeat. In the USA the same thing was taught about the USSR, although both were absolutely essential. Afghanastan and many other countries that have successfully combatted an invasion with aid from another power have routinely claimed that the aid from the outside world was worth being thankful for, but that victory would have come regardless.

The opposite is also true. There are always people teaching/believing that the past was worse than it was. My favorite example of this is a "Vampire Slaying Kit" that is on display in a local museum. The kit was invented in the early 1900s as an antique... it was created and sold to people willing to believe that it was a common-everyday item to people who lived centuries earlier when in fact the idea of this kit had only been conceived as a hoax.

History was never written by the people who hung heroes; it has always been written by whoever thought it could sell or whoever was upset enough about something to bother writing down his/her complaints. It's never been unadulterated truth

I personally think that fiction written in the distant past (set in that time's contempory) is a better source of historical knowledge than anything that actually seeks to document the past. (I also trust to some small degree newspaper articles)

Edit:
P.s. I've been reading through the other answers... and think they're all fantastic (with one or two exceptions). The Marie Antoinette one inspired me to add this edit because I actually had a well-recognized history text-book writen five or ten years ago (that I used a couple of years ago in ninth grade) that included the "let them eat cake" quote; it's just another example that 'legitamate' sources are willing to include things that are not fact.
Marie, I think, earned her bad wrap anyways for having a peasent village set up and acted-out in her gardens (at a large expense, somehow) simply for her entertainment because she did not see the plight of the peasents something to worry about. Though I do not believe the quote is factual (what French person doesn't know how every bread is made...?), it does not strike me at all as an unfair representation of her... I do not believe that Louis XIV was 2D, but the portrait that was supposed to be an exact representation of him was 2D. Some of the misrepresentations in history aren't so much distortions as they are simplifications... sorry for my giant tangent appendix.

Answer 6

No, Hollywood isn't to blame. The government is slowly rewriting history.

For example Rosa Parks. When I was in elementary school, Rosa Parks indignantly sat at the front of the bus in protest of segregation. Slowly, over the years, that story has been changed to now, last year in a Martin Luther King Documantary, Rosa Parks is shown as a little old woman who timidly sits on the very edge of the last seat in the white section of the bus because she was old and the black section was full. After watching the movie, I asked one of the kids in my church if that's what she learned about RP and she said yes.

This is just the best example I can think of right now, but there certainly are more if you look closely enough.

Well done on noticing it. Now we just have to figure out how to stop it.

Answer 7

Depends on whether you believe people of the 21st Century would know some history out of books if Hollywood left it alone, or whether they'd even be more clueless.

Thanks to Hollywood, they know WWII happened, and the Civil War, and that the American West had cowboys and Indians.

Likely minus Hollywood they'd just think it was all the same as it is today.

Answer 8

It's a sad fact that americans will not flock to war films unless Americans are depicted as the heroes,White Americans,at that.Even British made films have Americans doing the heroics,& use American English,otherwise they will not make money in America.

Answer 9

Yes, as a historian that is one of my complaints and I do not understand why it is necessary to distort the facts of history in order to entertain.

And, unfortunately, so many people get their knowledge from movies and TV and don't question the veracity of the material.
One can only hope that there are enough good history teachers out there able to overcome the misperceptions of their students.

Answer 10

You seem to be asking if there would be ignorant people if not for Hollywood. Yes. People have always had weird ideas about history, and always will. People will tell stories how they want to hear it, and then other people will unfortunately repeat it, thinking its the truth. (We don't believe Marie Antoinette ever said "let them eat cake," yet the notion was popular enough to help lead to her execution, for example.) Hollywood is just one more avenue for misinformation.