Know Thyself

[lifeonqueen]

I am self aware enough to realize that I am rather pedantic about certain things, historical accuracy in TV and movies being one. I was trained as a historian and I have a hard time understanding why you would write about a specific period in history if you weren't interested in accurately recounting the story of what happened. It is natural for a dramatist to want to exaggerate and elide events for effect but a degree of fidelity to the historical record is necessary otherwise, you are writing fiction. And if you want to write fiction, then by all means do so but don't, for Christ's sake, call it "history." There's nothing that makes me want to reach through my broadband to throttle someone like reading that a production "isn't meant to be historically accurate, it's meant to be entertaining" - because those two things are so obviously mutually exclusive. It's an attitude that makes a virtue of ignorance by dismissing those who value accuracy with a sneer, implying that they are (I am) incapable of appreciating entertainment for entertainment's sake. I see it as the dumbing down of the masses, this assumption that any real presentation of history would not be entertaining. So do the princes and kings of this world encourage us to value the fiction over reality, constantly blurring the line between fact and imagination, encouraging the fallacy that every truth depends on a certain point of view, which is bullshit. But Fox News continues to do very well, which I think proves my point.