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 ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]