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selenakI have to switch some subjects and postpone others till later this month, as rl gets a little busy right now. But I will write about all the subjects within this January!
So: inaccurate historical adaptions; assaturnofthemoon says, all are, within various degrees, simply because the laws of film/tv series and messy history seldom coincide (that pesky reality has too many people and rarely a three act structure with someone's life culminating in a satisfying climax, for starters), but some are extra special. Sometimes in a fun way, sometimes the opposite. Which is which is entirely in the eye of the beholder.
To start with ancient Rome, one enduring legacy of I, Claudius is that for decades, every movie or tv series set after the Roman Republic and featuring a meant-as-sympathetic Roman politician/general/ruler had that person declare he wants to bring back the Republic. Look, Graves barely pulled it off with Claudius and even he had to follow it up with some even more outlandish twists to explain why Claudius DOESN'T restore the Republic. I certainly don't buy it in "Gladiator", set centuries later, when Marcus Aurelius, of all the people, says he wants to restore the Republic. (Marcus Aurelius being the one to break a successful series of Emperors who were not blood related at all but adopted as adults after their skills had been amply proved by promoting his son Commodus.) That's by far not the only anachronistic thing about Gladiator, but it's the one which touches on a pet peeve of mine, because it's due to this idea that you can't have sympathetic historical characters who don't want a republic. At all.
Next pet peeve: many a medium featuring one Gaius Julius Caesar as a character in which people refer to him as Julius, or call him Julius, or for that matter "Julius Caesar". This is not how Roman names work. He was Gaius, of the family of the Julii, with the cognomen Caesar. Sallust, a contemporary, refers to him as Gaius Caesar in his history of the Catiline Conspiracy. Cicero in his letters writes "Caesar". (Meanwhile, Cicero thankfully escapes being called "Tullius" in tv shows, novels and movies, at least that I know of.) If a "history what history?" type of fantasy show like "Xena" does this (complete with introduction of "Caesar, Julius Caesar" as a parody of you know whose introduction, I don't really mind, because Xena never pretends it's anything but a fantastical romp. But if something eyeing the aura of respectability does it, I'm sulking.
Moving on to: sex in the days of the Tudors. The Tudors, step forward, but you're far from the only offender. No one ever seems to be bothered by the prospect of pregnancy and/or being in trouble for not being a virgin anymore once they marry, and not just if it's the King they're having sex with. Speaking of pregnancy: when I marathoned the second season of Versailles last year, and saw how Athenais de Montespan's seven children by Louis XIV were reduced to one, which dies, fitting a show where a season earlier Henriette (Minette)'s pregnancies and children also seemed to be reduced from between eight and ten (two surviving children) to one (stillbirth), though in s2 it was suddenly pointed out that yes, Philippe had two surviving children by Henriette (unseen, just mentioned in dialogue), the obvious occured to me: in tv shows and movies with a historical settings a great many of the female characters ought to be in various stages of pregnancy. As would be the case in a society with no reliable means of birth control which measures the worth of a given woman on whether or not she can birth male children. But producers want the female characters to look sexy all the time, don't think a pregnant woman is sexy, and that's that. (In fairness, Versailles s2 does feature a highly pregnant Athenais having sex with Louis. But the number of her kids is still incredibly and ahistorically reduced.) Also, I think, there's this automatic assumption that if a female character has children in the story, these children should be her primary concern, and must not be shown to be raised by other people, which, if the female character was an aristocrat, they mostly were, because that would alienate viewers. Only evil female characters who are mothers get to be mothers letting someone else to the raising, never mind history.
(Laudable exception: the 1970s tv show Jennie about Winston Churchill's mother, which has her let the nannies to the raising and only getting involved once the kids are old enough to carry on conversations with. ("Winnie, you are going to be interesting after all.") Jennie in that show is definitely meant to be sympathetic. Meanwhile, Finding Neverland took so many liberties with history I don't know where to start, but the one related to this subject is excluding the Nanny from the Lwellelyn-Davies household and letting Sylvia be a hands-on mother instead (which she was not). )
Back to the Tudor era, and The Tudors as well as The Other Boleyn Girl, and of course, the all time recent champion of anachroniosm nominally set in that era, Reign: hair styles and hats. Anne Boleyn was famous for championing the French style at the English court, so the movies occasionally let her the bonnet she's depicted in in a portrait, but mostly she wears her hair open, and so does almost everyone else. Never mind Tudor hoods. I can see the rationale (the women are harder to tell apart for the viewer if they were actual historical hoods covering their hair), but all the long open hair is still either amusing or annoying, take your pick. As for Reign's fashion in its mixture of cocktail dresses and vaguely late 19th century looking evening wardrobe... never mind. Just - Reign.
From England to France: look, no one ever accused Alexandre Dumas of historical accuracy. But one thing he didn't let Richelieu do in The Three Musketeers was conspiring against the King in order to take the throne himself. That utterly outlandish conceit was introduced by the stupid Disney/Touchstone version and has been making the rounds ever since, and I wrote a separate post about it, which I shan't repeat here. It's probably the inevitable result of scriptwriters using the "Evil Vizir in Arabian - or "Arabian" fairy tale based movies" concept and applying it to French history. Which just, no. Louis XIII had a very legitimate and conspiracy-prone brother, Gaston, who was his heir for most of their lives until future Louis XIV finally arrived, and he had dozens of illegitimate half brothers, and then there were dozens of legitimate high nobility princes. Richelieu, leaving side that he as a Cardinal could not occupy any throne anyway (no, not that of St. Peter, either, he'd never have gotten enough votes), was provincial nobility from his father's side and from his mother's not even that but recently raised to nobility bourgois. Under no circumstances could he have taken the throne. He also was phenomenally unpopular, which meant Louis XIII was his sole claim to power. So yeah. Musketeer adaptions in which Richelieu is after the throne are forever at my bad side, and that Touchstone atrocity most of all. We hates it, precious, we hates it forever.
The Other Days
So: inaccurate historical adaptions; as
saturnofthemoon says, all are, within various degrees, simply because the laws of film/tv series and messy history seldom coincide (that pesky reality has too many people and rarely a three act structure with someone's life culminating in a satisfying climax, for starters), but some are extra special. Sometimes in a fun way, sometimes the opposite. Which is which is entirely in the eye of the beholder.To start with ancient Rome, one enduring legacy of I, Claudius is that for decades, every movie or tv series set after the Roman Republic and featuring a meant-as-sympathetic Roman politician/general/ruler had that person declare he wants to bring back the Republic. Look, Graves barely pulled it off with Claudius and even he had to follow it up with some even more outlandish twists to explain why Claudius DOESN'T restore the Republic. I certainly don't buy it in "Gladiator", set centuries later, when Marcus Aurelius, of all the people, says he wants to restore the Republic. (Marcus Aurelius being the one to break a successful series of Emperors who were not blood related at all but adopted as adults after their skills had been amply proved by promoting his son Commodus.) That's by far not the only anachronistic thing about Gladiator, but it's the one which touches on a pet peeve of mine, because it's due to this idea that you can't have sympathetic historical characters who don't want a republic. At all.
Next pet peeve: many a medium featuring one Gaius Julius Caesar as a character in which people refer to him as Julius, or call him Julius, or for that matter "Julius Caesar". This is not how Roman names work. He was Gaius, of the family of the Julii, with the cognomen Caesar. Sallust, a contemporary, refers to him as Gaius Caesar in his history of the Catiline Conspiracy. Cicero in his letters writes "Caesar". (Meanwhile, Cicero thankfully escapes being called "Tullius" in tv shows, novels and movies, at least that I know of.) If a "history what history?" type of fantasy show like "Xena" does this (complete with introduction of "Caesar, Julius Caesar" as a parody of you know whose introduction, I don't really mind, because Xena never pretends it's anything but a fantastical romp. But if something eyeing the aura of respectability does it, I'm sulking.
Moving on to: sex in the days of the Tudors. The Tudors, step forward, but you're far from the only offender. No one ever seems to be bothered by the prospect of pregnancy and/or being in trouble for not being a virgin anymore once they marry, and not just if it's the King they're having sex with. Speaking of pregnancy: when I marathoned the second season of Versailles last year, and saw how Athenais de Montespan's seven children by Louis XIV were reduced to one, which dies, fitting a show where a season earlier Henriette (Minette)'s pregnancies and children also seemed to be reduced from between eight and ten (two surviving children) to one (stillbirth), though in s2 it was suddenly pointed out that yes, Philippe had two surviving children by Henriette (unseen, just mentioned in dialogue), the obvious occured to me: in tv shows and movies with a historical settings a great many of the female characters ought to be in various stages of pregnancy. As would be the case in a society with no reliable means of birth control which measures the worth of a given woman on whether or not she can birth male children. But producers want the female characters to look sexy all the time, don't think a pregnant woman is sexy, and that's that. (In fairness, Versailles s2 does feature a highly pregnant Athenais having sex with Louis. But the number of her kids is still incredibly and ahistorically reduced.) Also, I think, there's this automatic assumption that if a female character has children in the story, these children should be her primary concern, and must not be shown to be raised by other people, which, if the female character was an aristocrat, they mostly were, because that would alienate viewers. Only evil female characters who are mothers get to be mothers letting someone else to the raising, never mind history.
(Laudable exception: the 1970s tv show Jennie about Winston Churchill's mother, which has her let the nannies to the raising and only getting involved once the kids are old enough to carry on conversations with. ("Winnie, you are going to be interesting after all.") Jennie in that show is definitely meant to be sympathetic. Meanwhile, Finding Neverland took so many liberties with history I don't know where to start, but the one related to this subject is excluding the Nanny from the Lwellelyn-Davies household and letting Sylvia be a hands-on mother instead (which she was not). )
Back to the Tudor era, and The Tudors as well as The Other Boleyn Girl, and of course, the all time recent champion of anachroniosm nominally set in that era, Reign: hair styles and hats. Anne Boleyn was famous for championing the French style at the English court, so the movies occasionally let her the bonnet she's depicted in in a portrait, but mostly she wears her hair open, and so does almost everyone else. Never mind Tudor hoods. I can see the rationale (the women are harder to tell apart for the viewer if they were actual historical hoods covering their hair), but all the long open hair is still either amusing or annoying, take your pick. As for Reign's fashion in its mixture of cocktail dresses and vaguely late 19th century looking evening wardrobe... never mind. Just - Reign.
From England to France: look, no one ever accused Alexandre Dumas of historical accuracy. But one thing he didn't let Richelieu do in The Three Musketeers was conspiring against the King in order to take the throne himself. That utterly outlandish conceit was introduced by the stupid Disney/Touchstone version and has been making the rounds ever since, and I wrote a separate post about it, which I shan't repeat here. It's probably the inevitable result of scriptwriters using the "Evil Vizir in Arabian - or "Arabian" fairy tale based movies" concept and applying it to French history. Which just, no. Louis XIII had a very legitimate and conspiracy-prone brother, Gaston, who was his heir for most of their lives until future Louis XIV finally arrived, and he had dozens of illegitimate half brothers, and then there were dozens of legitimate high nobility princes. Richelieu, leaving side that he as a Cardinal could not occupy any throne anyway (no, not that of St. Peter, either, he'd never have gotten enough votes), was provincial nobility from his father's side and from his mother's not even that but recently raised to nobility bourgois. Under no circumstances could he have taken the throne. He also was phenomenally unpopular, which meant Louis XIII was his sole claim to power. So yeah. Musketeer adaptions in which Richelieu is after the throne are forever at my bad side, and that Touchstone atrocity most of all. We hates it, precious, we hates it forever.
The Other Days
no subject
Date: 2018-01-10 08:00 pm (UTC)Amen.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-10 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-10 08:14 pm (UTC)It's the way that too many historical narratives signal that characters are sympathetic—are good people—by having them think like us, whoever that is assumed to be. Agora (2009) had all sorts of historical-record problems, but I really appreciated it not falling into this trap with its Hypatia.
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Date: 2018-01-10 08:23 pm (UTC)In Marcus Aurelius' defence, he was the only one of that run of emperors who had an adult son alive when they died. If any of them had, they wouldn't have adopted.
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Date: 2018-01-10 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-11 02:12 am (UTC)I really enjoyed reading this post. Thanks for taking the time to write it out. It is clear you have a passion for this sort of thing and that is not always readily apparent in blog writing.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-11 07:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-11 08:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-11 08:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-11 08:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-11 09:01 am (UTC)Oh! Sudden thought: the historical Claudius choosing adopted son Nero over biological son Britannicus did, err, not turn out so well for all parties concerned, but it definitely is a precedent.
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Date: 2018-01-11 09:33 am (UTC)You are right, of course, about the possibility of adopting an heir, but he would have had to formally disinherit Commodus first, and the heir would need ot be married to one of his nearest female relatives, or better the nearest. Ideally a daughter, but a grand-niece was good enough for Trajan and Hadrian! But I think it's a mistake to assume that any of the Antonines would have selected an heir by adoption if they had had a closely related male heir (sole exception: Antoninus Pius) -- they adopt someone in because they don't.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-12 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-12 10:51 pm (UTC)say WHAT.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-13 11:52 am (UTC)