Are these documentaries?
Once again I am forced to comment on the History Channel and H2. I’d hoped the producer’s would clean up their
act by depicting the facts and that means getting the details right. The Hitler scenes must be fashioned by those
recovering from Hollywood pot sessions.
This time Eva Braun bleached her hair blond for the Fuhrer and styled it in the fashion of the 1930s. Hitler suicide pistol
is now a Luger. It’s a strange state of
affairs when so much of the details are readily available and everybody ignores
them. The show on Hitler’s bodyguards
was pretty good and scenes explaining what happened to his corpse were unpleasantly
detailed. At least the producers didn’t
show him being whisked away from the Fuhrerbunker by aliens or occultists when
the Russians closed in.
There must be a split in Hollywood over how to make
documentaries. On the one hand
technology has given the producers unimaginable digital capabilities that bring
color and depth to the past. The Spaniard with Russell Crow was
exceptional except the last scene where he approaches death by floating to his
front door. The Magic Realism genre
insertion was unnecessary, but money has to be made and that’s the
problem. What do we see? The dreadful Spartacus series pushed the limits of censorship and quickly
degenerated into slow motion battlefields littered with Roman soldiers
decapitated by airborne somersaulting female gladiators. Pompeii discredited itself by having a Roman senator wearing the
purple of the emperor – a capital offense.
On another show Julius Caesar was cast with a fellow who had hair like
Stalin. A program on the Spartan’s last
stand brought artistic license to a new high.
I thought the spears were wrong, but as the stacks of Immortal bodies
grew higher you could see the rubber soles of their shoes. The now bald, beardless, and Heavy Metal Xerxes
must have just outfitted his army with Chinese tennis shoes from the local
Persepolis WalMart.
I witnessed a new low last night when Nero strutted his stuff on a rickety
chariot around the Circus Maximus.
Edward Gibbon in his Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire said Roman emperors actually did this
occasionally. This time, however, Nero’s
chariot had farm implement wheels with metal spokes.
The only thing missing were the rubber tires. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so critical. Hollywood does know how to make money; so
much for the purists. What we may be
seeing is a change in the nature of documentaries from telling history as it
really was to a sort of Agatha Christie Peril
at End House game with rooms full of entertaining and very annoying
anachronisms.
