How the media changed the world
But there’s a problem: making anything into a film or television series – or shaping it into a narrative account in any form – is by necessity a subjective and interpretive process. What you get depends upon who was doing the writing.
Both forms of narrative are ruled by the god of research. Second spot is given to objectivity for history, but in film and television, the next place is occupied by Mammon. A screenwriter’s task lies in making the account as interesting as possible, bringing it alive in a manner that will attract the maximum number of viewers. There lies the rub: objectivity may be attempted but it is not as important as creating a sympathy in the audience for the event being portrayed, or the characters – which are actually historical figures – who played a role in it. As a result, film and television scripts are usually based on historical accounts rather than being meticulously factual. And while the creators of such fictionalisations of history are generally responsible enough to state that their account is “based upon” real events, the viewers are often not so discerning. Too many people tend to take the film or television industry’s account as a real depiction of what happened.
So it is that we end up with a perception of history that is sometimes very far from reality. Take the Vietnam War, for instance. We have an entire post-Vietnam Baby Boomer generation that has grown up with electronic media productions depicting this particular blot on America’s conscience. To believe the line taken by most of these productions – from Good Morning Vietnam, Forrest Gump and Hair, all the way to M.A.S.H. – one would think that the American actions in Vietnam were nothing short of self-sacrificing heroism. Which, as history tells us, is very far from the truth. But, as I said, how many read history?
This is not to say, however, that one can blame Hollywood for fictionalising history: the film and television industries do what they do – primarily entertain and secondarily inform. The productions I’ve named take a somewhat light-hearted view of the war but others such as Full Metal Jacket and The Deer Hunter take a courageously unflinching – though still fictionalised – view of the war. Yet the fact is that even here in Pakistan, far away from the heirs of the Vietnam war heroes of America, one finds young people dressing in combat fatigues for added cool. The power of the popular media is such that an entire generation, including people who have no reason to take one side or the other, can talk about the sufferings of the US soldiers but remain ignorant of the excesses meted out to the Vietnamese.
In recent times, we can see the same sort of power at work in terms of recent historical events. The fall of Saddam Hussain, for example. Last year, the BBC and HBO Films teamed up to produce a mini-series titled The House of Saddam. It received acclaim, from being referred to as “The Sopranos with Scud missiles” (The Independent) to being an extraordinarily ambitious attempt that succeeded (The Guardian) and “convincing and chilling” (The Times). However, reviewers also expressed concerns that the series tended to avoid early American and British support for Saddam’s regime. And, certainly, the series does write out the subsequent American assault on Iraq, which was – as modern history tells us – bases on concocted premises. The invasion of Iraq is barely six years old, but the world is already being made to forget the whys and the wherefores. Thus does ‘history’ become a fiction.
– hmumtaz@dawn.com