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January 1996, Week 3

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Subject:
From:
Jeffrey Apfel <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 16 Jan 1996 06:45:12 -0800
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You wrote:
>
>Is there a significant difference between the "poetic license"
Shakespeare
>used in writing the "history" he titled "Richard III" and the "poetic
>license" Oliver Stone  used in writing the "history" he titled
"Nixon"?
>
>I appreciate any and all suggestions.
>
>Peter S. Latham
>
 
The general issue of Oliver Stone's "responsibility to history" and the
specific question of whether there is, after all the sound and fury,
any distinction that can be made between his liberties with the past
and those of Shakespeare were addressed last Sunday by Ed Siegel in The
Boston Globe.  Siegel raises the interesting point that people bring to
different media entirely different expectations with regard to "truth".
A continuum exists: he says people cut the greatest amount of slack
with theater, expect greater verisimilitude with film but demand
accuracy where television is concerned.  As he says, even non-leftists
did not take issue with Roy Cohn's portrayal in Angels in
America--poetic license is generally OK on stage.  But when we leave
the stage for more (so-called) realistic media, people tend to be less
forgiving of metaphor and more attuned to accuracy.
 
To me this points out why it's never enough to look at
art--particularly performing arts, given their "human scale"--as a
matter only of aesthetics or culture or history or any other
single-frame view.  It's like wearing purple-tinted sunglasses then
wondering why the trees look so funny.
 
It seems to me that film, like art, like religion, like many "big"
human constructs is pieced together from a variety of forms of human
comprehension and understanding.  Take religion.  I remember watching
Joseph Campbell interviewed by Bill Moyers on PBS and being struck by
how one simply could not boil religion down to any one element.  The
moment it seemed as though its primary impulse was mystical, a way to
ground human experience, the social requirements of and effects of
religion would become apparent.  Is it about social control or solitary
mystical experience or psychological well-being?  Yes to all.
 
Art is likewise a "big" human endeavor and therefore complex from the
get-go.  Film is a wonderful medium for telling stories about people.
Well, what kind of stories?  There are all kinds.  People tell stories
to ground themselves in the universal somehow (back to Campbell's Power
of Myth), but they also tell stories to divert, to explain, to confuse,
to challenge.  These are all human impulses.
 
I think as humans we like to think each of these impulses can be taken
*straight up*.  Hence we create a category called history ostensibly
reserved for the "explaining stories" and a category "children's
stories" ostensibly to teach moral lessons, an so forth.  But all these
things, like religion, are always mixtures.  Some part of history is
inevitably myth-making; some part of the most escapist tale seeks to
locate the viewer in the real world.
 
So my point is that people seem to be talking past each other on the
Oliver Stone issue.  Art folks ("it's all about metaphor, dammit!")
wear their orange sunglasses and history folks ("c'mon, it says
*Nixon*! It's obviously about recounting history, dammit!") wear their
blue sunglasses and the beat goes on.
 
The argument above could be taken to justify relativism, but I'm trying
to resist that conclusion as unsatisfactory.  Something tells me that
there is something wrong with Stone's approach.  (Full disclosure:  I
admit to being of the blue sunglasses crowd and have posted anti-Stone
pieces to usenet film groups).
 
So, if film is inevitably part history, part myth, part metaphor, part
explanation, what bothers me about Stone?  Well, there's this wonderful
soliloquy in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing in which the main character,
a writer, tries to explain why some art works and some does not by
referencing hitting a ball with a cricket bat.  Sometimes you connect
and the ball goes sailing; often you do not and hop around in pain as
the cricket bat's vibrations get transmitted to your hands.
 
Stone is, for my money, simply ham-handed.  I do not take issue with
his liberties with history proper, I guess.  After all, as a former
assassination buff, I rushed to see Executive Action, Parallax View and
Winter Kills on the JFK conspiracy theme--all took "liberties" in one
form or another, regardless of their pseudo-metaphorical defenses.  But
it's just that I think he does it all wrong  and I , for one, don't
like the result.  Some like the result, for sure.  But the negative
reaction of many to his approach tells me we got a bad cricket player
here, that's all.
 
People defending Stone sometimes say "well, what about Citizen Kane?  A
thinly veiled portrait of a real person, too, with lots of stuff made
up."  To which I say, Bingo!  That they are alike on this one issue
hardly makes the two works comparable.  Welles made his own series of
aesthetic choices (including, but not limited to, changing Hearst to
Kane) and ended up with a movie that works.  Stone has all the pieces
(and the money, and the production values, and the "passion"), but puts
them together in a way that reminds me of that shocking cricket bat.
Yow!!!
 
Jeff Apfel
 
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