American Films and the Tales They Choose to Tell

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"[The author's] very choice of what he tells will betray him to the reader. He chooses to tell the tale of Odysseus rather than that of Circe or Polyphemus. He chooses to tell the cheerful tale of Monna and Federigo rather than the pathetic account of Monna's husband and son. He chooses to tell the story of Emma Bovary rather than the potentially heroic tale of Dr. Larivière. The author's voice is a passionately revealed in the decision to write the Odyssey, "The Falcon," or Madame Bovary as it is in the most obtrusive direct comment of the kind employed by Fielding, Dickens, or George Eliot. Everything he shows will serve to tell; the line between showing and telling is always to some degree an arbitrary one.

"In short, the author's judgment is always present, always evident to anyone who knows how to look for it... [We] must never forget that though the author can to some extent choose his disguises, he can never choose to disappear."

- Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961, rev. 1983), p. 20

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Of the nine films nominated for Best Picture at tonight's Academy Awards, three claim to depict historical events. One is about an American outwitting a bunch of scary Muslims; another is about an American interrogating and outwitting a bunch of scary Muslims, then spearheading an operation to kill one very scary Muslim; and a third is about a white American collaborating with several other white Americans to liberate a bunch of noble, deferential African Americans.

All three movies are expertly written, acted, and directed; one of them will likely win the big prize tonight. (Argo. It's going to be Argo. Or Lincoln? Not Zero Dark Thirty, I think.)

But to the credit of the American critical community, these history-based Best Picture nominees have all been held to account for their political implications. Smart critics and dumb politicians alike have censured Zero Dark Thirty for its insinuation that torture led to the discovery of Osama bin Laden's courier. In a compelling New York Times editorial, Northwestern history professor Kate Masur objected to Lincoln's relegation of black characters to the political periphery. On Slate, Kevin B. Lee slammed Argo for reimagining the disastrous Iran hostage crisis as "a mere backdrop" to the glorious rescue of six American diplomats.

Among the majority of filmmakers and filmgoers, however, these politicized critiques have not gone over well. First, people have been playing the old "it's a movie, not a documentary" card. Disguised as a knowing acceptance of Hollywood's tendency to fabulate, this argument glosses over the fact that inaccurate representations of historical events have real social consequences. When Zero Dark Thirty depicts a torture victim divulging key intelligence, it's not just falsifying a detail for the sake of dramatic unity. It's contributing to the public perception that torture, while ghastly, is effective.

Granted, this pragmatist pro-torture stance is one that many people (read: awful people) agree with, and one that a work of art has every right to adopt. Equally, critics have the right, even the duty, to evaluate movies on political grounds. So far, though, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, the creators of Zero Dark Thirty, have refused to concede that their film takes any partisan position. Sometimes they claim artistic license. Other times, journalistic objectivity. Anything to evade responsibility for the real work that Zero Dark Thirty does in the real world.

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Lately I've become aware of a second mode of thinking adopted by those who dislike politicized film criticism: "Review the movie you saw," they say, "not the movie you wanted to see." Variations on this bromide pervade the comments section below Kevin B. Lee's anti-Argo piece:

"Critique the film based on the filmmaker's goals, not your cinematic wish list." 

"Don't criticize a movie for not being about what you think it should be about. That's not how it works." 

"So, Argo is a fraud because Kevin B. Lee would like it to be an entirely different movie. Great argument!" 

"The worst kind of movie review is the one that says, 'You made the wrong movie! THIS is what your movie SHOULD have been about!' If you want that movie, go make it yourself." 

"Do we have to judge films on what they could have and should have been?"

To answer the last commenter's question: Yes! We definitely should judge films against what they could have and should have been. Les Misèrables sucked. It could have and should have been a different, better film.

But a deeper fallacy underlies the comments on Lee's article, and that is the unwillingness to criticize the premise of a narrative, the "what it's about." Who says we aren't allowed to find fault with an artist's initial, foundational choice of tale? As Wayne Booth reminds us in The Rhetoric of Fiction, when an author decides to tell one story and not another, he takes a significant rhetorical position.

To push this thought further (and into what would be uncomfortable territory for Booth himself), I would contend that an author's choice of tale powerfully determines the ultimate political meaning of his work. Bigelow and Boal chose to depict the successful mission to find and kill Osama bin Laden, not the failed attempt to capture him during the Battle of Tora Bora. Tony Kushner and Steven Speilberg chose to make a film about white politicians negotiating and passing the 13th Amendement, and in so doing, they chose not to make a film about black abolitionists bringing about their own emancipation. (Which, to a substantial degree, they did.)

Most egregiously of all, Ben Affleck not only decided to tell the story of American triumph over Iranian perfidy, but also washed, polished, and waxed the historical record to render the Americans more triumphant and the Iranians more perfidious. Midway through Argo, the stranded American diplomats visit a bazaar in Tehran and barely escape getting their asses kicked by a mob of inexplicably furious Iranians. Didn't happen. Whole-cloth invention. The film also fabricates nearly all of the dramatic complications in the climactic airport scene. We see menacing Iranians at the passport counter, menacing Iranians at the gate, menacing Iranians forcing their way into air traffic control, menacing Iranians piling into a truck with their guns and chasing the plane down the runway. No such Iranians existed. In reality, the Americans glided through the airport without arousing suspicion.

So in addition to focusing on the one U.S. victory in the entire 1979 hostage crisis, Argo finds a number of dishonest ways to emphasize the heroism of the Americans and the malevolence of the Iranians. Perhaps after seeing an early cut of the film and sensing this bias, Affleck tacked on an introductory voice-over (not to be found in Chris Terrio's original screenplay) that clarifies how U.S. meddling in Iran contributed to the instability that, in turn, led to the Islamic Revolution and the storming of the U.S. Embassy. But this brief moment of anti-imperialist lip service fails to shift the film's overall sympathies and politics. The calm, rational C.I.A. operative is still our hero; the fiery, irrational Muslims are still our enemies; and at every turn we are encouraged to feel that our diplomats-in-distress must escape to a safer, whiter part of the world... or else.

This is the tale Affleck chose to tell.

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So why should we hesitate to hold him responsible? In a New Yorker blog entry, Nicholas Thompson, one of the editors of the Wired article that inspired Affleck's movie, lamely asserts that "none of Argo's fibs really matter."

They don't change the way we think about history or politics. They don't alter the emotional truth of the story.

Wait, the demonization of Iranian revolutionaries doesn't change the way we think about history or politics? The bullshit sensationalism in the getaway scene doesn't alter the emotional truth of the story? I don't know why Thompson would so casually dismiss these possibilities. Maybe Argo insulates itself from serious critique with its larky tone, its self-deprecating Hollywood satire, and the relative obscurity of its historical subject. But light entertainment has always done heavy ideological lifting. We shouldn't let Argo slip under our analytical radar just because it's less po-faced than Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty.

Nor should we stop being critics as soon as we find ourselves questioning a filmmaker's choice of what to tell. Some stories, by their very nature, offer a partial, naïve vision of the world. And one of these stories is going to win Best Picture tonight.