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accuracy and the Patriot



Today's (July 1, 2000) New York Times carries an opinion piec by historian
David Hackett Fischer on the THE PATRIOT, entitled "Hubris, But Not
History."  Fischer starts off his essay with "Despite terrific pacing and
beautiful costumes and photography, something has gone wrong in "The
Patriot," the new Mel Gibson movie about the American Revolution."  "In
short, "The Patriot" is to history as Godzilla was to biology. Egregious
errors appear in every scene."  Fischer then enumerates the errors
including "Some inaccuracies are introduced to create an illusion of
authenticity. . . .  [such as] in the written documents that the tangled
underplots require. Eighteenth century ink was black, which on the
documents we have from those days has faded to a soft brown. To make the
letters seem authentic in the film, they are freshly written in faded
brown ink." Historian Fischer concludes: "The inaccuracies in "The
Patriot" are all errors in the first degree: willful and premeditated. Mr.
Emmerich is quoted on the Web site as saying, "On certain kinds of points,
we had to decide what is most important, historical accuracy or the
dramatic impact." One wonders if there was ever any point where the
filmmakers decided accuracy was the more important." You can find this at
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/01fisc.html.

Enjoy this comedy over the fourth of July weekend. . . .

Richard J. Cox
Professor
Department of Library and Information Sciences
School of Information Sciences
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Voice:  412-624-3245
FAX:    412-648-7001
e-mail: rcox@mail.sis.pitt.edu
homepage: http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~rjc

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