THE KUSHNER/ SPIELBERG TRAVESTY…..THE CONNECTICUT JEWISH LEDGER ****
Spielberg&Kushner versus Golda Meir, Abraham Lincoln and Joe Courtney: Richard Greenfield, Publisher of the best Jewish interest newspaper in the United States
www.jewishledger.com
Daniel Day Lewis did a great job portraying Abraham Lincoln in the film Lincoln. He did that by trying to recreate exactly who Lincoln was. He walked like him, talked like him, and projected the demeanor he thought was very much like our Civil War President’s. Of course screenwriters had to supply the dialogue for this film in order for it to work. But we have a problem when the dramatization of history pushes aside the truth as we know it for certainties that screenwriters think should be affirmed. Certainly writers are allowed to create dialogue and scripts to guide a story along where there is none. We know the Gettysburg address, for example, because it was written down. But in order to tell the story of the address, we allow the creation of the dialogue about it in the dramatization that comports with the essence of the facts being presented. We assume that in this process that there’ll be a fidelity to truth, in the same way Daniel Lewis worked with the truth as he saw it in playing his role. But Tony Kushner, the screenwriter in this instance, abused that license, as he’s done before. And Congressman Joe Courtney, of Connecticut’s second district called him on it and rightly so.
“… I was on the edge of my seat during the roll call vote on the ratification of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery. But when two of three members of the Nutmeg State’s House delegation voted to uphold slavery, I could not believe my own eyes and ears.”
Courtney’s disbelief was justified since those Congressmen from Connecticut, all four of them, in fact did vote to pass the 13th Amendment and Kushner/Speilberg chose to alter that troublesome fact to add drama to their production. The 13th Amendment , the subject of the vote in question, is no mere procedural act. It is the law that eradicated slavery after four terrible years of war and death visited on our Republic. While fabricating the votes Kushner changed the names of the Congressmen also in the service of his theatrical license.
‘What does it matter?’ asked our last Secretary of State at a recent hearing about our current administration’s actions while four Americans were slaughtered in Benghazi. Kushner said as much in his condescending reply to Representative Courtney’s inquiry. The answer, of course, is that it matters. It matters a lot. Truth mattered greatly in 1865 just as it does today and changing the historical record and creating a fiction is a big step away from the honest historical record. Where we know the facts artistic license is not a sufficient reason to change them. It is one thing to provide speech or a script where we have to infer what was said, but another to change names and votes and the historical record when we know exactly what they are.
“In making changes to the voting sequence, we adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama, which is what Lincoln is.” Note that Kushner doesn’t acknowledge here or elsewhere that he also changed the votes and the people involved. In Kushner’s snarky answer to Representative Courtney, he asserts this right, without apology, to continue to alter history in pursuit of his own agenda. Just as he did in 2005, in his film Munich, he never defended the liberties he took with the truth by claiming that his script was an honest one.
The Ledger wrote about Munich in 2006 and also pointed out that Tony Kushner, in collaboration with the super gifted Steven Spielberg did this kind of thing in that film as well. Using the same heavy handed alteration of history Kushner and Speilberg preached their brand of moral equivalency in 2005 in their woeful presentation of Munich, the story of the slaughter of Israeli Olympic athletes which they used to denigrate that country’s response to that heinous act. Denying any notion that Israel be allowed to defend itself and act as a sovereign, Kushner who is on record as saying that ,” The Israeli-built security wall should come down, the homeland for the Palestinians should be built up, with a strictly enforced peace, not enforced by the Israel Defense Forces, but by the United Nations.”, proceeded to move fact around to suit his views. (See February 2006 at www.jewishledger.com)
Kushner abused his license then by changing a matter of record to fit his preconceptions and ideas of morality, as he does now in Lincoln to provide drama to the vote on the 13th Amendment as if four years of war and 600,000 deaths weren’t enough.
The Speilberg/Kushner travesty was highlighted in Munich by the way they portrayed Golda Meir in its final scene.
On September 12, 1972, speaking to the Knesset and reacting to the murder of Israel’s athletes, Golda Meir said that “we have no choice but to strike at the terrorist organization wherever we can reach them. That’s our obligation to ourselves and to peace. We shall fulfill that obligation undauntedly.” Those words, a matter of record, are light years away from the equivocation that Spielberg and Kushner had her say at the end of the film. …”every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.” Compounding the tragedy of this misrepresentation is that this statement has been routinely attributed to her since that film was produced. A search through the serious work done about her since her death turns up no similar citation. Another by-product of Kushner’s invention.
It would have been easy for Congressman Courtney to just let the altering of the historical record slide by. Why pick a fight with Hollywood. But he didn’t and for that he deserves our appreciation and respect. His objection again focuses us on the compromising of truth which in our society is too often being treated as a relative value. There are times, particularly in a movie theatre, that we have to remind ourselves that it is not.
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