We may think it's a particularly Canadian stupidity, but the Yanks frequently do these history docudrama accuracy fights, too.
ABC is running a drama called "The Path to 9/11." By most accounts, it's a Bushite interpretation, one that minimizes the Clinton administration's anti-terror initiatives and exaggerates the preparedness of the Bush administration.
Bill Clinton and his people (and many Democrats and many Democratic bloggers) are making the usual demands: for accuracy, for corrections, for retractions, for a disclaimer, even for a boycott of the program's sponsors.
The Dems are wrong and they are right. They are right in that ABC and the film makers made the accuracy claim in the first place. This is history, they said, this is fact, this is how it all happened. When to be honest, they should have said, this is a drama we made up about real events. We developed characters for people involved, we wrote dialogue for them, they gave them motives and personalities. When you make a drama, it's not honest to claim it ain't dramatized.
But that's why the Democrats are wrong to demand accuracy. Drama cannot be fact-checked. The Democrats should not be disputing the accuracy of the film; they should be establishing the fact that it is fiction, to be judged by fiction's rules.
Does that mean you can tell lies about one's partisan rivals in historically documented situations so long as you label it drama. Well, yes, by and large it does, it think. Y'see, history is not a bag full of facts. History is always a story about the past, an argument about the past, an exploration toward the past. The advantage of history, of non-fiction, is that it can at least engage with the various arguments. It can lay out the evidence for its interpretations. Drama, by its inherent nature, can't. It just determines what interpretion works for it, and runs with it.
We need viewpoints on history. We need contradicting storylines. Sure, we would like accuracy. But nothing is every perfectly accurate.
We accept that there are right-wing books on 9-11 and left wing books on 9-11, and books that disagree about every aspect of 9-11. Same with documentary films -- they have points of view, and they argue them out. We don't demand they be withdrawn pending some kind of inaccuracy audit, we just disagree with them.
But in television, and particularly with dramas about historic events, the accuracy demand too often, too easily, becomes a silencing technique. Instead of trying to silence slanted drama, let's just label it. It's a movie, folks. Arguing about accuracy goes on somewhere else.
