Books to Movies: X is for the X-Marks-the-Spot Quest of History Movies

What should a history movie do? Be visually stimulating? Be a story? Be accurate? Can it be accurate?

I occasionally show my College Writing students a clip from Cameron's Titanic. I point out all the inaccuracies. I also point out that the movie offended some people, namely citizens of Commander Murdoch's hometown. No, Murdoch did not commit suicide because he ran the ship into an iceberg.  

I ask my students, "Do you think Century Fox should have apologized? Since they did, was the money [pocket change to James Cameron] enough?" 

Most of them think a movie is a movie but the low compensation was tacky. 

Since I'm going in alphabetical order, I picked Xenophon for the history movie here. Xenophon was an Ancient Greek who wrote about Ancient Greek stuff.

300 was the movie. 

Although Xenophon lived later than the events in 300, he did write about Sparta and Spartans. A rather melodramatic person, it is doubtful whether Xenophon's knowledge of Sparta was more than cursory. He lived near Sparta since he fought with them but he doesn't strike me as a guy that delves beyond what he is told. Kind of like Charles Lindbergh and the Nazis only Xenophon is slightly less irritating.


I would not say that 300 is a historically accurate film. Rather, it is a melodramatic film with the look of its graphic novel, which means...

It does its job.

In terms of history, Gary Corby's fiction books about an Athenian detective captures the Sparta upbringing somewhat better. The detective meets Markos, a great character who was raised in the Spartan way. Markos is clever and cunning and tough and practically sociopathic. He embodies why Sparta was so successful and, also, why it eventually couldn't sustain itself. Human nature cannot be so strenuously "cancelled" for a social good. It just doesn't happen.
 
300 does imply that family ties are stronger than the Spartans like to admit. It also leaves out a, uh, great deal. It also, like a good graphic novel, occasionally provides quite lovely images. And the narration by Wenham is stirring. (Wenham has one of those "marbles in the mouth" rounded voices, like James Sloyan's, that I happen to adore.) 


In sum, despite the dubious historical accuracy, I would argue that the movie, again, does its job. I get irritated by books that whine about "WHAT MY TEACHER DIDN'T TELL ME!" The fact is, when teaching history, one has to focus on what is possible. I try to teach my students that history is complicated but most of the time, I just want them to know that the Enlightenment occurred before the Industrial Revolution and that the Spanish-American War occurred before World War I. And yeah, it matters, because later times react against previous ones. People purposefully challenge older ideas as well as use them, change them, adapt them, get influenced by them. Beliefs and ideas also continue, having far longer pedigrees than modern humans often acknowledge. Historical events are not islands.

Would I have suggested changes to the 300 script? Yeah. For one, don't use "Greek." It is highly doubtful that the city-states saw themselves as having a common culture. Common cause, yes. Not necessarily a common culture.

I think it would be okay to leave in all the freedom stuff, even though (1) the Spartans had slaves (so did the Athenians); (2) most of the ideas about reason and self-governance come from Athenian writings, not Spartan ones. But the city-states were, in essence, fighting off an empire for the sake of making their own decisions. And they succeeded. (Alexander the Great eventually "united" what we think of as Greece, not the Persians.)

Although the 1962 movie The 300 Spartans has MORE anachronisms, the politics is somewhat more accurate. But it doesn't remotely capture Spartan culture, so 300 comes out ahead there. (If you are thinking The 300 Spartans looks like a World War II film with fresh-faced G.I.s.,you would be entirely accurate.)
 
Of course, capturing mindsets is a different problem from capturing facts.