This Is More Important Than "Historical Accuracy"

[00:00:00]When making the genredefining Superman movie, director Richard Donner had a poster on the wall of his office of >> Superman flying through the air and dragging [clears throat] a sign by him that says Barissa Militude. Because this story had to have its own honesty.

[00:00:14]Everybody had to believe it was real.

[00:00:16]>> Like most of these academicy sort of words, it comes from Latin. Verim meaning truth and simileis meaning similar. And in the context of fiction, verimilitude is something having the appearance of truth or realism. Donna had this poster on his wall because his mission was to make you believe a man could fly. We know people can't fly in real life, but thanks to Vera similitude, we can believe it in the context of the reality created by the movies.

[00:00:42]>> He wants to believe in those myths. And when you can make an audience believe that what's happening on the screen, even though it's totally extraordinary, that this is actually happening, that's when you have verilitude. And I've been thinking about this a lot recently because of the reaction by certain corners of the internet to the Odyssey trailer with people apparently getting upset about things like uh hang on, let me just check my notes here.

[00:01:08]Oh yeah. Uh American accents using modern words like dad, uh the cast not looking like the gang from Troy, and something about armor and boats.

[00:01:20]Now, I try to avoid these sorts of conversations because I prefer to do literally anything else with my time, but I do think that the Odyssey is an interesting starting point to talk about ver similitude and I guess media literacy more broadly because this sort of conversation isn't new. I mean, we saw it with Gladiator 2 just last year.

[00:01:38]But what frustrates me is that with movies like The Odyssey, it tends to get talked about in terms of historical accuracy. It's not historically accurate to insert weirdly specific thing here and that stops me enjoying the movie.

[00:01:52]Now, putting aside the fact that the Odyssey is not history, it's mythology.

[00:01:56]And putting aside the fact that if you ask two historians for their opinion about something, you'll probably come away with three different answers. And also putting aside the fact that the term historical accuracy can sometimes be used as a bit of a dog whistle by bad faith outrage merchants who want an excuse to be a bit racist on the internet. There is also a genuine and good faith conversation to be had about how far filmmakers should or shouldn't go when trying to bring history to life in an authentic way. But when we talk about that in the context of film and fiction, which the Odyssey is, we're not talking about historical accuracy. We're talking about ferris similitude. Like we all know what statues from the ancient world looked like, right? The beautiful white marble we've seen for all our lives. Well, originally these were mostly painted bright garish colors and looked nothing like the classical elegant sculptures that we're so used to seeing in museums, but I guarantee that if Christopher Nolan whacked a Technicolor statue in the background of his temple, people would be losing their minds. It may be more authentic, but it feels weird to look at this sort of thing, no matter how much our rational brain might be telling us it's more accurate. And so when making an historical epic, the important thing is not that it be perfectly representative of that period of history. The important thing is that we the audience believe that this world and these characters are real. And so filmmakers will continue to depict the ancient world with white marble because vera similitude is more important than historical accuracy. And to use the most basic example, in historical epics, everyone speaks modern English instead of Latin or whatever because these are Hollywood movies being made for mostly English-speaking audiences. Is that historically accurate? Of course not. But we understand that within the reality created by the film, the English being spoken represents another language. And so hearing English doesn't feel unrealistic or unbelievable in the context of the movie. very similitude.

[00:03:54]But on the other end of the spectrum, if the audience in Gladiator were all wearing jeans or if Ed Sheeran cropped up in Game of Thrones, it would not feel real because it is inconsistent with the reality created by the film. But in a movie like Aladdin, the genie can make references to modern pop culture or A Night's Tale can use modern rock music and brand logos. And in both cases, we accept it because these things feel real in the context of the film's reality.

[00:04:22]And this has nothing to do with historical accuracy and everything to do with vera similitude. But here's the thing about vera similitude. It is in part informed by cultural and filmmaking conventions. We expect certain things from certain genres. And when those things are different from the established conventions, it's harder to believe them so easily. So for example, in historical epics, everyone speaks English. But the long-standing filmmaking convention for most actors who aren't Kirk Douglas in Spartacus has been to speak with British accents, specifically received pronunciation of classical theater.

[00:04:57]>> Seemed most anxious to be present. I saw no harm in granting him permission.

[00:05:01]Danger >> after today, never again shall I doubt the extent of Egypt's wealth. So when people heard American accents and the word dad instead of father in the trailer for an historical epic, they were confused because those are not things that we are used to hearing in this sort of movie. Never mind that in ancient Greece, an American accent is just as historically inaccurate as a British one. One of them feels more real than the other because of decades of filmmaking convention telling us that people in these sorts of movies should have British accents and not American ones. And this has nothing to do with historical accuracy and everything to do with ver similitude. And look, if you're actually the sort of person who found the accents to be a bit discombobulating when you saw the trailer, then sure, art is subjective and everyone's experience is different. Personally, I don't really mind, but I understand why some people do because a lot of the way in which we consume media is instinctive and immediate. If something feels off in the moment, if the ver similitude is not there, then it can be difficult for you to change your mind about how you feel, regardless of any rational arguments to the contrary. And that's the biggest challenge with veric similitude. You can't measure it. It's not rational.

[00:06:12]It's all about vibes. It's about what feels real. It's the same reason dinosaur movies rarely give them feathers. Culturally, our collective understanding of what dinosaurs look like is still largely based on Jurassic Park. despite decades of evidence to the contrary. But in order to achieve verilitude, in order for the filmmakers to get the audience to believe that these dinosaurs are real, then a good starting point is to have them line up with what the audience already expects a dinosaur to look like. But this ends up becoming a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. People think dinosaurs look like this or marble statues look like this or classical dialogue sounds like this or the cast of historical epics should look like this. Then what happens is those beliefs become reinforced by movies and pop culture which in turn makes future filmmakers more likely to just follow the herd as it were. So this is where filmmakers like Christopher Nolan have an opportunity to come along with their enormous levels of influence and creative capital and deliberately challenge some of these long-standing conventions because that is how any art form evolves. When Hollywood makes a mistake, it's always the same mistake, which is to forget how much people want something new, how much they want something they haven't seen before they don't know that they want. U because obviously it's easy to analyze things that have worked in the past and kind of follow that path. But the way I like to term is, you know, the biggest risk in motion pictures is to not take a risk.

[00:07:40]Um, you have to be putting it out there and offering people something new and that's what'll get them out of their houses. But this is one of the problems with the current state of online film conversation and this temptation we have to hyperanalyze weirdly specific aspects of movies based on their trailers.

[00:07:55]Because a trailer is not a movie and so when you watch a trailer for a big historical epic like the Odyssey you're watching it removed from the context of the rest of the movie which means you're watching it without the ver similitude without knowing what this film establishes about its own reality. I think this is what Nolan was getting at when he said, "These conversations that happen before people see the film, they're always irrelevant because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet." Because when you actually watch the movie itself, none of this matters.

[00:08:27]Just like the cast of Chernobyl speaking English with a range of regional British accents instead of Russian ones or indeed Kirk Douglas using an American accent in Spartacus, there is a very similitude to the Odyssey and its dialogue and a consistency of presentation that allows us to believe what we are seeing and accept the reality of this story and these characters because hot take Christopher Nolan knows how to make a movie. When you watch a movie, any movie, you will enjoy it more if you are introduced to the reality of that film's world in the way intended by the filmmaker, not by some marketing department or by having your judgment influenced by what people on the internet tell you you should think. But I will acknowledge that the whole point of a trailer is for people to judge a movie. They are designed to convey genre and tone and style and to sell you on going to see it. So when making a trailer, filmmakers should be conscious of the fact that rightly or wrongly, people will judge it based on weirdly specific things like this, even if those things are perfectly believable in the context of the film itself. So I guess what I'm saying is that two things can be true at once. The first is that the online response to this exchange in the trailer was entirely predictable and avoidable because it felt inconsistent with people's expectations of how people speak in historical epics and so perhaps did not give the best first impression of the dialogue in the Odyssey. And the second thing that can be true is that this doesn't matter even a tiny bit when you see it in its proper context because all of the dialogue in the film is presented in this way. And so we very quickly accept the reality of it because, say it with me now, there are similitude. So yes, you are allowed and indeed encouraged to make judgments about movies based on their trailers.

[00:10:08]And you're also allowed to dislike a movie for any reason that you want.

[00:10:11]Again, art is subjective and everyone's experience is different. But I do think you should have at least watched the movie before you decide whether or not you dislike it. And I also think that maybe you should give the benefit of the doubt to the guy who made Momento and the Prestige and the Dark Knight trilogy and Inception and Interstellar and Dunkerk and Tennet and Oenheimer. Like I don't know, maybe the guy knows what he's doing and we should just let him cook.

[00:10:39]>> I ordered my hot sauce an hour ago.

[00:10:40]>> Which does bring me to another term that kind of goes handinhand with verilitude but is far less Latin and academic. And that term is the rule of cool.

[00:10:53]As defined by TV tropes, the rule of cool states that the audience's ability to suspend disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its awesomeness. In other words, all but the most pedantic of viewers will forgive liberties with reality as long as the result is wicked sweet or awesome. The protagonist might not use guns because it's cooler to have them fight vampires with knives and stakes. Now, obviously, the rule of cool is going to be very subjective because people disagree over what is cool, but I think we can all agree that the flamethrower guitar guy in Fury Road is rad as hell, and so none of us really care about the reality of a dude burning off this much fuel in a dystopian wasteland. I mean, sure, if you think about it rationally, it goes against the world building. But because of the rule of cool, we don't think about it rationally. We just instinctively go, "Hell yeah," and get locked into the movie even more. And without running the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at clouds, I do think that this kind of cynical nitpicking cinema sin style of film criticism that has been popularized over the last 15 years or so has made filmmakers less willing to deploy the rule of cool out of fear it'll come across as silly or lame or that it will undermine the verimilitude of the film.

[00:12:03]You may be trying to go for something as awesome as a legalist riding down the stairs on a shield in the two towers, but if you go too far, you may end up with a legalist bouncing up the falling bricks in The Hobbit. So, people tend to kind of play it safe and not try to do anything ambitious or risky, resulting in movies that feel a bit sterile.

[00:12:21]Anyway, the point I'm making in a very roundabout way is that when I saw that Christopher Nolan was making an historical epic based on Greek mythology, I was absolutely pumped to see that he was following the rule of cool because this armor looks cool as hell. Is it historically accurate? No.

[00:12:39]But it's not trying to be. It's trying to be cool as hell. Because, as I just said, the purpose of a trailer is for you to judge a movie and for it to tell the audience what to expect from it. And what these trailers are making abundantly clear to anyone with an ounce of media literacy is the fact that Christopher Nolan isn't trying to make a literal historically accurate adaptation of the Odyssey. He's trying to make a big epic summer blockbuster because we actually had a literal historically accurate adaptation of the Odyssey last year. It was called The Return and none of you saw it even though it absolutely rocks. I mean, look how jacked Rafe finds us here. Jesus. But Nolan's movie, like all of his movies, is a big movie aimed at a wide audience who are wanting to go to the movies to have a cinematic experience of the kind that he has been consistently delivering for over 20 years because he has proven time and again that he is the master of the rule of cool. Well, actually, I take that back. Ridley Scott is the master of the rule of cool, but Christopher Nolan is very much his spiritual successor. Even though his Dark Knight trilogy was part of the whole gritty, grounded, realistic reboot genre of the early 2000s that largely ditched the comic book inspired stylization from '90s superhero movies, he still takes the time to give us cool shots of Batman standing around looking cool or the Joker blowing up a building or the Batpod or Bane fighting in the snow or the climb. Like everything being done in these movies is being done because having a fight on a glacia with ninja swords is just cool. And as for the rest of Nolan's filmography, well, this is cool. This is cool. This is cool. This is cool. And this is cool.

[00:14:20]And the sooner you embrace that as a viewer, the more fun you will have at the movies. And look, I am not saying that doing something cool gives an automatic free pass to filmmakers for not putting the effort into telling a believable and consistent story or not trying to achieve their similitude. As Zack Snder showed us with the Rebel Moon, cool visuals only get you so far.

[00:14:42]You still need to actually tell a compelling story and have interesting, believable characters, not action figures swishing their capes around in slow motion for 2 hours. But what I am saying is that I think we should be celebrating filmmakers like Christopher Nolan who use their enormous creative capital to actually take a big swing on something like The Odyssey and not just play it safe and boring. The biggest risk in motion pictures is to not take a risk.

[00:15:08]>> Whether or not those risks pay off is a matter of personal preference, but it is much more interesting than just doing the same thing as everyone else. Because I would much rather see a master take a risk and fall short rather than not even try. Like I just mentioned Ridley Scott and say what you want about his filmography, but even the movies of his that are less wellreceived still have a bunch of moments in them that are simply there because they are cool as hell. The movie may not be great, but damn it, you got to respect the man for actually trying to deliver something awesome. As Nolan himself said of Gladiator 2, "Scott knows we are not there for insights into Roman culture. We're there to see our own dark desires at a comfortable remove. Why are there sharks in the coliseum? Because we demand them." Now, compare Redley Scott to say Guy Richie. He's made some brilliant movies. movies with character and style and that were distinctly his because he chose to take some bold creative risks that for the most part paid off. But more recently, Richie seems to be a bit more of a gun for hire, pumping out relatively generic streaming blockbusters or indeed live-action Disney remakes that have very little of his signature about them because he doesn't care. No one cares about these movies, and you can sense that in the movie, and it's why so many of these big streaming blockbusters are so bland and forgettable because they take zero risks and have zero character. Give me Gladiator 2 over whatever the hell this is any day of the week. But I won't deny that deploying the rule of cool is to take a risk that can end up undermining your film's very similitude. And the reaction to the Odyssey trailer shows why some studios and filmmakers would rather just avoid taking those sorts of risks altogether. But thankfully, Christopher Nolan is at the point of his career where he doesn't have to care about this sort of thing. Like in the final trailer, he fully doubled down on the whole dad line in the same way James Cameron did with the Papyrus font in Avatar. Another director who always follows the rule of cool and whose box office results speak for themselves.

[00:17:06]There is a time and place for realism and historical authenticity in film, particularly if the film is trying to tell an historical story accurately. You know, like Christopher Nolan did with Oenheimer. But there is also a time and place for awesome mythological scale epics that are trying first and foremost to entertain their audiences. And these things are not incompatible, but more often than not, it is difficult to judge whether or not certain creative decisions were justified until we have seen them in their proper context. Until we understand the verilitude of the movie. And so on that point, let me leave you with a story from the making of the Lord of the Rings, a movie trilogy that achieves pitch perfect verilitude and that also very much embraces the rule of cool. And one of the reasons it is so brilliant is because of the work of the late great Andrew Lesnie. the trilogy's director of photography, who oversaw some of the most beautiful and memorable images ever put on screen. Like, you know how annoying it is that people don't film night scenes like this anymore? They film them like this. Well, it's partly because filmmakers started prioritizing realism over, you know, actually being able to see what's going on. So, yeah, sure, this is more accurate and realistic than this, but it's an objectively worse cinematic experience, right? Anyway, one day Andrew Lesnie was talking to Sha Aston about the lighting in a particular scene that Shaun Aston felt was unrealistic.

[00:18:29]>> There's just one other thing that I asked Andrew Lesnie. I I sort of uh I sort of zinged him with a question that was really kind of a kind of an inappropriate thing for an actor to ask a cinematographer.

[00:18:38]>> This is a great story.

[00:18:39]>> I just said to him to to Andrew Lesnie, the cinematographer who won an Oscar. I said, "Where where is the light coming from?" Because we were in this tiny little space at this moment. There was light where there would have been no source for it. He He looked at me and he just said, "Same place as the music."

[00:18:54]>> If you want to enjoy movies more, I think that's all you need to remember.

[00:18:59]See you next time.

[00:19:08][music] Open. Open. Open. [music] Open. Open.