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At the movies...
Topic Started: Dec 27 2015, 10:31 AM (182 Views)
Quasimodo

Quote:
 
http://www.weeklystandard.com/showtime/article/2000340

Showtime
DEC 24, 2015

(snip)


"Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia."

– George Orwell, 1984

These are hard times for the truth. Well … maybe no harder than other times. Difficult to know when the truth of the past is constantly being changed. Not eradicated, like the image of one of those Soviet poo-bahs who suddenly becomes a non-person and whose image is, thus, removed from the official portraits. Nothing that crude or Orwellian. Far more effective to edit and improve "the narrative." To suggest an "alternative history." One that is more congruent with the way people feel, or want to feel, about a past that they grasp only tentatively. To accomplish this, you merely need to rewrite the script. Remake the movie.

[Is anyone reminded of a book about the lax case that came out recently?]

A few months ago, we got Truth, a film that repaired the flawed historical fact that Dan Rather and the people who worked for him, and with him, at CBS News, used forged documents in a report on the National Guard service of George W. Bush who was President and running for re-election when the program aired. Robert Redford played Rather and that tells you what you need to know about the political slant of Truth. The film inverts all the usual rules by making Dan Rather and his team into the little guys and underdogs. They were, in fact, well paid employees of a powerful media operation and brought down by bloggers who were dismissed, at the time, as just "guys in their pajamas."

[Were there well-paid employees of a powerful media operation -- in fact, several of them-- who were opposed by little guys and underdogs --bloggers in pajamas? But, is that the way Duke would like to remember the story? Or the media would like to remember the story?]

A story about individual truth seekers bringing down stars of big corporate media might have made a good movie


[Yeah, it would have. KC's story would have made a great movie --Jimmy Stewart vs the media tycoons (and the university tycoons). But I digress...]

and could have done better at the box office

[See above.]

(it wouldn't have taken much) than Truth, which bombed. But the point, it seems, was to make neither a good movie nor a profit. The point was to rehabilitate Rather and the people who worked with him. To create a new narrative (indeed, a new truth) in which they were both right and victims.

[Hmmm. . . can anyone here think of a recent book which might fit that category? (Purely for the sake of discussion)]


Even if the movie bombed at the box office, it will live on in the database of Netflix

[and in public libraries . . .?]


(and others) so generations hence may come to believe that Rather and his team of fearless producers and researchers were brought down by powerful forces who were either in the pocket of George Bush or, alternatively, had him theirs. People will believe this because they saw it in the movie and not knowing much else about this story, it will become their emotional truth. These days we all get to have one – an emotional truth, that is – and it often comes out of the movies we see. And like.


Edited by Quasimodo, Dec 27 2015, 10:34 AM.
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Quasimodo


I await the next documentary...


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