Three more films: an opening onto fact, fiction and the grey zone between

I forget who it was who said it – it might have been Denis Diderot – but I’ve always liked the sentence “I have read many histories that are poor novels, and many novels that are fine histories”.

It’s true that a work of fiction can sometimes be a more effective tool for conveying timeless truths that a dull history, especially if the latter is also unreliable.

Entertaining. But a truthful historical account?
Not so much

My son was so angry about the film of Hidden Figures, for its many distortions of the truth, that I made a point of reading the book before I watched the screen version. And he’s right: the film certainly takes extraordinary liberties with the historical record. “Based on true events”, the film claims, but there’s an implicit “loosely” in there somewhere. Or maybe “very loosely”.

Still, it’s an entertaining fiction making an important point: Virginia in the fifties was shamefully segregated where (the book reveals) the State closed public schools for five years rather than integrate them, creating a “lost generation” of under-educated black students. At a time when it was hard for women of any race to win professional recognition, the film tells the uplifting story of black women at the NASA operation in Virginia who, by dint of their brilliance, eventually carved careers for themselves through their vital if not always visible contributions to the US space programme.

This was the first time I’d seen Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe, who were great as the three leading black, woman protagonists; and I enjoyed seeing Mahershala Ali, from House of Cards, as the man who put the “Johnson” in Katherine Johnson’s name.

Sticking with the Virginia location and the theme of racism, Loving is another film worth seeing. It’s a chilling thought that until 1967, sixteen US states still had anti-miscegenation laws: sex between races – strictly, between whites and non-whites – was illegal as, inevitably, was marriage. You may be interested though probably not surprised to know they were all in the South. A far more amusing thought is that it took a case brought by a loving (interracial) couple called Loving to put an end to that lamentable state of affairs.

Discrimination iseven more shocking than in
Hidden Figures

Ruth Negga is an outstanding actor of joint Ethiopian and Irish descent, giving her looks just the kind of ethnic ambiguity the role needed: Mildred Loving was described as Indian or Black at different times of her life, though what really mattered was that she was non-white. Negga has impressed me ever since I first saw her in Breakfast on Pluto a dozen years ago. She plays Mildred with her usual skill and entirely convincingly, opposite Joel Edgerton as her white husband Richard. He fully communicates the character, a man of few words and little education, hard working though poor (the couple could only take the case thanks to funding by the American Civil Liberties Union). He was devoted to his wife and bemused by Virginia’s refusal to let them live their lives as they wished. It’s a good story, summed up for me in the words of Richard Loving to the lawyers as they were about to appear before the Supreme Court: “Mr. Cohen, tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can't live with her in Virginia”. 

The film quotes the four key words. I’ll leave you to guess which they are.

Stranger than Fiction differs from the other two by not being at all concerned with the portrayal of fact. On the contrary, it is the chilling story of a man coming to the realisation that a writer has built him into her latest novel and is trying to find a compelling way of bumping him off. The character, understandably, resents this fictional ending, especially as it will spell his own death in reality (except that this is a film and therefore a fiction itself: see they layering?)

Too amusing to be as chilling as the plot might suggest

The film shows us his resistance to the writer’s plans, which he’s aware of because he can hear her voice recounting – perhaps I should say narrating – what’s happening in his life. A great cast, with one of the finest actors of our day, Emma Thompson, playing the writer, Will Ferrell as her hapless protagonist and victim, and Dustin Hoffmann as the professor of Literature to whom he turns to try to find out whether there’s a way out of the narrative in whose coils he is caught. The problem there, of course, is that not everyone feels the superb quality of the novel is worth sacrificing to save his one, individual life.

The film finds a neat way out of the conundrum in an ending which lives up the originality of the plot.

It’s not a new film (2006) unlike the other two, but we watched them all recently. Between them they provided a pleasant and entertaining stay in the grey area where the end of fact overlaps with the beginning of fiction. I hope you can enjoy that intriguing place as much as we did.

Being principled is great. In the right cause

It’s not enough to have a conscience.

We all tend to respect honesty and principle in politicians. Well, we don’t get that much opportunity to do so, since in the age of spin and soundbites, it’s hard to find a politician that displays much of either. Which perhaps makes us all the more admiring of those who do.

But honesty and principle, like courage, have much in common with a gun: what matters isn’t so much the thing in itself, as where it’s pointing. It would be hard to deny that Margaret Thatcher showed great courage, resolution, pure grit, but she used it to destroy communities up and down the country. Back in 1970, I taught in a mining village in South Yorkshire; today the population has fallen by over a third, and rates of unemployment or invalidity are frighteningly high. The price of the crushed miners’ strike…

Maggie: grit and courage misapplied

I can think of no better example of misapplied honesty and principle, analogous to Thatcher’s misapplication of courage and resolution, than the case of Robert E. Lee. He occupies a place of honour today, for many, as one of the great generals of history, although he fought, indeed became the leading military figure, on the Confederate side in the American Civil War. That’s the defeated side, and generally now felt to be the wrong side (except by a few diehards in the southern US).

That meant he fought on the side of states defined by slavery – it was their one common point – although he called it “a moral and political evil” and personally freed his slaves. He fought against the Union, although he considered the so-called right of states to secede as “idle talk.”

So why did he fight on the slave-holding Secessionists’ side?

His father, “Light Horse Harry” Lee died a disgraced bankrupt, but in his youth he’d been a dashing cavalry commander in the army George Washington led to fight for independence from Britain. The father had claimed “Virginia is my country; her will I obey, however lamentable the fate to which it may subject me.” Virginia came first.

Likewise, Robert Lee, the son, claimed “if the government is disrupted, I shall return to my native State and share the miseries of my people, and save in defence will draw my sword on none.”

So Lee turned down the opportunity to take overall command of the forces of the Union to which he was ostensibly committed, even though it was offered to him not just by a Northerner, the President, Abraham Lincoln, but by the Commanding General of the Army, Winfield Scott – who was a Virginian like Lee. Indeed, another Virginian, George H. Thomas, had a distinguished career as a general on the Union side, and a distant cousin of Lee, Samuel Phillips Lee became an Admiral in the Union navy.

Many admire Lee’s commitment to the principle that he could not fight against his own country, which he saw as being Virginia rather than the United States.

I however have real trouble with that notion. He was undoubtedly a man of conscience, and it’s apparently honourable to live by one’s conscience. But surely the admiration ends when doing so leads to your fighting for two bad causes, secession and slavery, especially if you believe in neither?

Robert E. Lee: principled and honest,
but for the wrong cause – which he didn't even believe in

It’s like Thatcher’s courage. It would have been wonderful, employed in furthering a good cause. it was lamentable when used for a bad one.

It isn’t abstract principle that counts. It’s the concrete application made of it.

A tribute to the strength of the slaves who populated the US. And the white settlers too. They had much to overcome

Black friends, and not just black ones, have often pointed out to me the sheer courage and strength that must have animated the unfortunates who made the dire crossing of the Atlantic from Africa, to enter slavery in North America. 

It must indeed have taken great resolve and reserves of will to avoid being crushed and live through both the journey and slavery itself. Black Americans – or African Americans if you prefer the terms, and I don’t, because they are wholly American – can at least pride themselves on being descended from tough stock.

Slaves on the 'Middle Passage'. It took strength to survive

It strikes me, however, that white Americans were also fortunate to survive the process of colonisation. 

It has often surprised me – though perhaps it shouldn’t – that quite a few Americans labour under the illusion that the first English-speaking settlement in their land was in Massachusetts: the Pilgrim Fathers from the Mayflower expedition. It’s comforting to think that these were the first, as they’re presented as victims of persecution escaping to a land where they could be free. 

In passing, it needs to be said that this does ignore the awkward truth that the freedom they sought also involved denying any to those who were of a different faith from theirs. The Salem witch trials were perhaps the most celebrated example of the intolerance of the Massachusetts Puritans, but it was far from the only one.

In any case, they were not the first settlers. These were in what would be turned by their descendants into the slave-owning, tobacco-growing colony of Virginia. Two attempts at colonising Roanoke island failed in the 1580s. Then in 1607, settlers were sent to what became Jamestown.

Now here come the breathtaking stats: two years later, by 1609, 1000 colonists were down to just sixty.

No slaver could possibly have stayed in business with that level of losses. These guys just couldn’t make a go of things. In fact, the remaining sixty were heading down the river, ready to make a dash back to England, when they were met by a new fleet coming upstream which forced them to return to the hellhole they were escaping.

What had been the problem? Well, they certainly had their share of attacks from the local Algonquin ‘Indians’. The latter, perhaps not entirely unfairly in the light of subsequent developments, were distrustful of these new arrivals who were encroaching on their ancestral lands. There must have been problems with disease too, no doubt. But the biggest difficulty of all was that the colonists just couldn’t feed themselves.

Now, hold on and think about that. By the seventeenth century, ‘Indians’ had been living on those lands for perhaps 10,000 or 12,000 years. For some centuries, they’d developed an agricultural way of life, growing such crops as maize, which they supplemented with meat from hunting in the forests that covered most of the landscape.

They weren’t dying of hunger.

In fact, just as happened in the later Massachusetts colony, the local people made the big mistake of taking pity on the settlers and showed them how to grow food to stave off starvation. A gesture of kindness for which they were thanked by a war of extermination which started in the 1620s (but, of course, a justified war: those vicious savages had attacked some English settlements which they viewed as threatening more of their lands).

Jamestown. Settlers faced many obstacles, not least their own ineptitude

In my view, it’s time to salute those early colonists. They had much to overcome. Hostility from the local population. New diseases. But above all their sheer incompetence at carving out a living for themselves from highly fertile land.

Not sure why I can’t feel quite the same degree of admiration for them as for the slaves who survived the ordeals they faced...