Well, It's Very Bad History!

IF YOU'VE EVER visited Washington D.C. and trekked up the steps to the Capitol Rotunda, you've likely seen the painting at left.

Turnbull's "Presentation of the Declaration of Independence" is, to many, the seminal image of that event.

An interesting wink, then, in last night's final installment of the very fine HBO series JOHN ADAMS.

In the scene, set in 1826, just before the second President's death, the 9o-year-old Adams is shown the painting. And he's not pleased. "You must understand," says he, that we were at war. People were coming and going that whole summer, trying to fix their signature when they could." He explains that no gathering such as this, with the complete Congress, ever took place. "It's very bad history!" Adams rages.

But a moment later, it's another remark, offhand, that gives you the emotional key to the scene. "Everyone in that painting is dead," Adams complains -- knowing that, at that moment, only he and Jefferson survived. The first hand history, the events, the reasons for breaking away from England -- all that knowledge was on the verge of slipping away.

Adams cared, perhaps a bit too much, about the judgement of history, and what people would make of his actions. After all, the fun of living history is that even as it recedes, it is broken down and re-interpreted. There are those who insist that the recollections of those who were there, the "First sources," should be respected at all costs. And then many of us know how memories lie, and how passion and direct involvement can color your opinion of an event, even years later. Sometimes the sober second judgement of those who have a distance from the event is needed.

But from Academia to Historical Adaptation in filmmaking, there's a bigger leap. Perhaps the biggest. Every epic tries to claim historical accuracy, and by design, on some level, every one is going to get it wrong.

But there is something, in our visual age, to the film or TV adaptation of history that is worthwhile, even as it's threatened.

Again, I'll use an example from John Adams. First, let's consider the source material. David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize winning book asks us to reconsider the second President, long misunderstood and maligned among the Founding Fathers, mostly by those who worship at the cult of Jefferson.

McCullough's book is eyeopening in many ways; its telling of the story of the Revolution and the birth of American democracy is novelistic, and sweeping.

There's one passage where he describes Washington, D.C., when Adams first occupied the White House. (He was the first President to do so.) There are carefully drawn passages about how the city was little more than an idea. The Executive Mansion was plunked down in a barely cleared field, with mud everywhere. It's a great passage. But even a wonderful writer like McCullough can't capture the scene as effectively as one image in the miniseries.

The first time you see The White House in John Adams, it is from a distance, set on a hill in a forest. As they push in, you see what McCullough was getting at: slaves wander, clearing brush (Yup, the White House was built partially by slaves.) The new President's home is plunked down in the middle of a construction site. Outside it's nasty, muddy, and almost unbearable: a tent city. Inside, the paint isn't dry, it's dark and empty and the most usable part of the house is the part closest to the fireplace.

To see that image, you can't help but have an emotional response. If you're an American, it may put you in mind of how fragile, how unlikely the American experiment must have seemed in those very early days. All around you must have been the counter-thought that you had to banish: "perhaps we've made a mistake." To know that at the same time, America was struggling at remaining neutral in a war between England and France -- watching as France's own revolution spiralled out of control...the disgust and guilt writ on Adams' face as he beholds the slaves working outside the mansion...the whole thing, tied up in that objective correlative image of that lonely, impractical house -- and John Adams alone in the dark inside, maybe staring at that famous portrait of Washington...the man he could never equal, the man he could never live down.

If you're not American, I imagine to see that image would be confusing and unsettling and maybe even gleeful. What better way to remind yourself that once upon a time, America was anything but powerful. It was a muddy hellhole, in fact.

People complain about the historical accuracy of Films and TV the same way they complain about TV news -- that they don't give a full picture of what's going on in the world; that they favor some stories over others, that they shave away complexity in going for the best pictures.

All of that is true. But yet, there is something essential and moving in the pictorial depiction of where we've been.

I say this because it seems to me that in the internet age of immediate fact-checking, the "based on a true story" and "based on historical events" tags have become far more controversial than they used to be. In the end, one must ask if Adams was right about that painting, or whether there's sometimes greater truth in getting people to understand not the facts, but the emotional context of great events. Because that is something that TV and film can do very, very well.

In Canada, we've suffered through a couple incidents in the last few years where organizations like CBC have caved to pressure to withdraw historical movies because of very minor quibbles about this characterization or that characterization. I've spent most of my schooling years in Canada -- I have a rich and deep sense of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, and almost zero sense of the personalities of John A. MacDonald and those who formed this nation. I'm not the only one. A recent biography of John A, Canada's first Prime Minister, was the first new bio of him in fifty years.

I don't get it.

In the end, I hope that the drumbeat of "make it completely accurate" fades, and we can get at more emotional truth in our historical films. The history is always there for the reading. But to get us all to understand these personnages as flesh and blood people, faced with terrible choices and no degree of certainty. That's a fine thing indeed. That's why John Adams, the miniseries, ulimately moved me and made me think anew about the history of the land of my birth.