Quotulatiousness

November 25, 2023

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I was initially quite interested in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, but given the criticism from historians, I doubt I’ll make the effort to see the film in the theatre. I’ve quite enjoyed some of Scott’s earlier “historic” movies, but it appears that he’s taken the historical figure of Napoleon and “interpreted” it to better fit his preferences for a film. Bret Devereaux‘s initial response is rather telling:

For this week’s musing, I want to comment at least briefly on dust-up surrounding Ridley Scott’s latest film, Napoleon and historians. As was evidently heavily reported, Ridley Scott responded to historians doing critiques of the film’s historical accuracy by telling them to “get a life” and suggesting that the earliest works on Napoleon were the most accurate and that subsequent historians have just progressively gotten more wrong.

I think there are two questions to untangle here: is the film accurate and does it matter? Now I haven’t yet seen the film, I’ve only seen the trailer. But my response to the trailer seems to have been basically every historian’s response to the trailer: Napoleon shows up at all sorts of places, doing all sorts of things he didn’t do. In particular, the battle scenes I’ve seen in the trailer and other snippets bear functionally no relationship to either Napoleonic warfare in general or the Battle of Austerlitz in particular (the bit with large numbers of soldiers drowning in a frozen lake was disconfirmed at the time; the lake was drained and few remains were found).

All of this is not a huge shock. All of Ridley Scott’s historical movies take huge liberties with their source material. Sometimes that’s in the service of a still interesting meditation on the past (Kingdom of Heaven, The Last Duel), sometimes in service of just a fun movie (Gladiator). Ridley Scott, in particular, has never mastered how basically any historical battle was fought and all of the battle scenes in his movies that I’ve seen are effectively nonsense (including Gladiator, which bears functionally no relationship to how Roman armies actually fought open field battles). Cool looking nonsense, but nonsense. Heck, Gladiator‘s entire plot is basically nonsense with some characters sharing historical names and very little else with their actual historical counterparts (the idea of Marcus Aurelius aiming to restore the republic in 180 is pretty silly).

So it isn’t a surprise that Ridley Scott’s grasp on Napoleonic warfare is about at the level of a not particularly motivated undergraduate student or that he has finessed or altered major historical details to make a better story. Its Ridley Scott, that’s what he does. Sometimes it works great (Kingdom of Heaven), sometimes it works poorly (Exodus: Gods and Kings).

Does it matter?

Unsurprisingly, I think that Ridley Scott is being more than a bit silly with his retorts to historians who are using his film as an opportunity to teach about the past. That’s what we do. Frankly, I find the defensiveness of “get a life” more than a bit surprising, as I assumed Ridley Scott knew he didn’t have much of a grasp on the history and was OK with that (or better yet, did have a grasp on it, but chose to alter it; I do not get this sense from his commentary), but it rather seems like he thinks he does know and is now very upset with the D+ he got on his exam and has decided to blame his “nitpicky” professor instead of his not having done the reading.

That said, when it comes to criticism (in the sense of “saying things are wrong“, rather than in the sense of “critical analysis”), I think there is a distinction to make. In the past I’ve framed this as the degree to which works “make the claim” to some kind of historical validity. It might be a fun exercise to talk about the armor in, say, Dungeons and Dragons or The Elder Scrolls and we might even learn something doing that, but neither of those works is making any claim to historical accuracy or rootedness. And so the tenor of the discussion is quite different.

But here I think Ridley Scott is to a significant degree making the claim. Of the battles, Ridley Scott says, “It’s amazing because you’re actually reconstructing the real thing” and that he “started to think like Napoleon”, which is once again both clearly making that claim (“the real thing”) and also just a remarkable thing to say given how much of a mess his battle scenes generally are. He also comments that “the scale of everything is so massive … I’d have 300 men and a hundred horses and 11 cameras in the field” and while that’s far more cameras than were on any Napoleonic battlefield, that’s just not a statement which suggests that Ridley Scott is even very aware of other achievements in recreating historical battles. Gettysburg (1993) had something on the order of five thousand reenactors on the field for filming and it is by no means the largest such effort! Spartacus (1967) had a cast of eight thousand Spanish soldiers to play the Roman legions.

So while I do not know if Napoleon is a good movie or not – I haven’t seen it yet – it seems pretty clear to me that Ridley Scott did make the claim for some of its fundamental historicity and the response of historians has been to reject that claim. And I think it’s actually quite fair to also skewer the apparent whiny arrogance of Scott making that claim baselessly and then responding petulantly when historians handed him that “D+, please come see me after class”. If you want to make historical fiction, by all means do – Scott is very good at it! – but do not be upset if historians call it what it is.

“Three or more reporters, arranged in a scrum … are dumber together than any of them alone”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I’m not a fan of the legacy media, although I’ve met good folks who worked or still work in the field, and the modern incarnation of the media has become so much more transparently a PR team for the big progressive wet dreams of bigger and bigger government and more and more centralized control over peoples’ lives. I’ve never met Paul Wells, but he’s respected by some of the media people I’ve met and generally has interesting things to say, perhaps more so that he’s his own boss and publishes on Substack these days:

Images returned for an image search for “Stephen Harper media scrum”

One reason I don’t like to play along with subscribers who assume this newsletter is a running critique of “the mainstream media” is that I know too many journalists. The best ones are wonderful and most are fine. Most are better at some part of the craft than I am. They don’t hesitate to make that fourth or fifth call, they’re forever willing to butt their heads against the surreal access-to-information regime, they understand interest rates, whatever. They often (not always!) admit errors publicly, which gives the occasional schoolyard bully a chance to make fun of them for doing what bullies never do. Many have an appropriately tragic sense of what it means to work in an industry that has been collapsing for 20 years.

But as a robust rule, reporters don’t mass well. Three or more reporters, arranged in a scrum — the term of art for an impromptu news conference that the newsmaker can leave at any moment — are dumber together than any of them alone. I caught glimpses of this early on. The first time I ever had to scrum a prominent politician at an important moment, I couldn’t believe how bad most of my more experienced colleagues’ questions were. My National Post column and my first book often featured satirical descriptions of scrum dynamics. But it really got bad when Stephen Harper was prime minister.

Harper was a master at generating dumb scrums. The ingredients for a dumb scrum are (1) pre-existing mutual animosity between newsmaker and reporters; (2) a tight limit on time or the number of permitted questions; (3) a few minutes before the scrum to allow the reporters to work on ways to maximize their advantage. This last is not essential but it’s a tremendous catalyst of dumbness, because reporters who are trying to select the best questions always ask worse questions.

If 10 reporters know they will only have time for two to four questions, their responses become predictable. They will need to “get him” (the newsmaker) on “the story of the day”. That is, they need to collect audio and video clips of the newsmaker talking about a dramatic event that happened within the last several hours. That’s because broadcast has room for fewer words than print does, so broadcast’s needs are more rigid. It’s simply pointless to urge colleagues before a scrum to get the newsmaker reminiscing about his youth, or to drag up some disagreement from 2019 that might be newly relevant, or to debate the fine points of trade law. The questions that work in scrums are of the “Aren’t you …” or “Didn’t you …” kind.

Unfortunately, such questions are child’s play to defuse. A junior staffer can tell her cabinet minister what to expect in a scrum, and in 70 guesses over a month she might be wrong three times. Scrum questions are always narrow and pointed, even though every reporter learned early that it’s their very narrowness that makes such questions easy to dodge. “Aren’t you siding with the convoy protesters when you …?” “Not at all. I’m calling for basic fairness.”

Often, the goal in a scrum is to record the newsmaker confessing to a terrible error, ideally a complete moral breakdown. Sometimes it’s not even personal, although the aforementioned pre-existing mutual animosity definitely helps. It’s just that it would be fantastic radio if the newsmaker did collapse in an audibly self-incriminating heap. This too is an easy bullet to dodge. Once I know you are trying to get me to confess my soulless incompetence, all I have to do is talk about anything else, and I win.

Dumb scrum dynamics are hard to avoid. They’re the product of simple physics — there is no time for a thoughtful exchange — mixed with collegial generosity. Reporters with more complex ambitions have to take one for the team, so the clip people can get their clip. None of the rules I have described is set in stone. In 2015 I spent several days covering Stephen Harper’s last campaign, and my colleagues let me simply ask my questions without telling them what I’d ask. But I had to do it in rotation, which meant I got two questions in a week. Meanwhile most of them worked together to concoct questions he could see coming from a mile away.

“It’s not called the gender empathy gap for nothing”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo on the blatant disregard for violence as long at that violence is not directed at women:

The news headline by the CBC, Canada’s state-funded broadcaster, could hardly have been more blatant: “Ottawa had 16 homicides in 2022—and nearly half of the victims were women or girls“. In other words, more than half of the victims, as is always the case, were boys and men, a state of affairs that no one at the CBC has ever found troubling enough to lament or even notice. Only when the female homicide rate approaches gender parity in one (unusual) year is it a “collective crisis”, as the subheading alleges.

It’s not called the gender empathy gap for nothing.

[Author’s note: Perhaps I should have stopped here. What more is there to say about the extraordinary indifference of most people, men and women, to violence against men and the craven desire to deny female culpability? There’s nothing new in this essay, no new angle or stats, no rousing call to action, nothing beyond the marshalling of dreary evidence and sadly sarcastic observations unlikely to change any mind or cause any gynocentric cheek to blush. I had intended to finish it in time for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Men, on November 18, but was stymied partly by a sense of helpless anger, the weight of which pressed down on every sentence. The section at the end, about the death of Benjamin Rain, was the last straw.]

Feminists have long touted their concern for victims, yet that is never in shorter supply than in their one-sided discussions of violence, in which the only deaths allowed to matter are female deaths, presented for readers’ contemplation with poignant circumstances, names, and expressions of horrified sadness, as in the above-mentioned article. Dead men remain largely anonymous, and few readers could guess from the typical reports of feminist organizations that women are ever lethally violent.

Indifference to male suffering and death are the norm all over the world, of course, but the Anglophone feminist movement has markedly increased it, fudging numbers and manipulating language to focus empathy exclusively on women and girls. The CBC article devotes significant space to discussing the risible concept of femicide, a relatively recent coinage that makes no secret of its female supremacism, purporting to highlight how women and girls are killed “simply for being women” and “primarily by […] men”, as if every woman, even one killed by accident (as we’ll see), is evidence of gender bias.

The idea that women are killed because they are women is preposterous, impossible to support with evidence, and obviously intended to solidify the impression that women outnumber men as victims of murderous violence. An organization called the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability provides an elaborate taxonomy of forms of femicide to drive the idea home, deliberately blurring the lines between intimate partner homicide, a favored focus, and other killings of women, which are collectively deplored as “brazen acts of hatred“.

Even a cursory reading of the details, however, exposes the vacuousness of the terminology as well as the sleight of hand by which men’s alleged misogyny is misleadingly linked to the totality of the women’s deaths. Only two of Ottawa’s seven murdered women were killed by current or former intimate partners. One of the dead women was attacked and killed by her two adult daughters (an act called “non-intimate femicide”), while another was the victim of a stray bullet that killed her by accident and was probably intended for a man (if you can believe it, the Canadian Femicide Observatory calls this type of death “associated/connected femicide”).

It is impossible to conclude that all or even most of these — certainly unfortunate — deaths can logically be said to have occurred, as the mantra holds, “due to the existence of gender norms and stereotypes, discrimination directed toward women and girls, and unequal power relations across genders“. The determination to find gender discrimination at the root of all female suffering — and thus to justify yet more programs, initiatives, and taxpayer dollars for feminist organizations, as well as more collective shaming of men — seems unstoppable.

Crystal Palace Station is Needlessly Magnificent

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jago Hazzard
Published 9 Aug 2023

Crystal Palace and the station built for it. Well, one of them.
(more…)

QotD: Political language mirrors the ritualized nature of political life

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Elected officials speak in a language that’s unique to their status group. If you’ve ever tried to attend a city council or school board meeting, you’ve watched them open with the onanistic portion of the thing, handing out certificates and doing grip-and-grins. “Bob, I just want to echo your wonderful comments about this amazing program.” They see themselves first, then others of their class, then they go blind. The first duty of a public official is to take a lot of selfies.

In a crisis, they recite. We’ve all watched them do this. “This is not who we are.” “Let me be clear: Hate has no home here.” You know what they’re going to say before they say it, and you know the tone before you hear it. The current mayor of Los Angeles is very fond of “our message has been very clear” and “we’re going to link arms and stand together”, so you’re not surprised to hear her respond to a question with something like, “Well, Maria, thank you for that great question. Our message has been very clear: We’re going to link arms and stand together.” Listening to elected officials speak is qualitatively different than listening to people speak. They perform the ritual behaviours of their status group.

[…]

They become debilitated by a lifetime of ritual language. If a staffer hasn’t told them to look somber and say “I’m sorry for your loss”, they don’t know how. It isn’t a line they’ve been equipped with for the event. Hey man your kids burned to death I almost lost my Corvette once, man. All kiddin’ aside, man!

[…]

They aren’t people anymore. They can’t talk like people. They don’t have normal human affect. What’s particularly interesting is that this learned inability to read human cues is recent and narrow. Bill Clinton, as much a politician as anyone who has ever lived, had a well-known ability to see people and signal his empathy, or at least to do a brilliant job of faking it. Similarly, Donald Trump is obviously very very fond of Donald Trump, who is amazing, trust me, everybody says so, but he has a normal human ability to spontaneously bullshit with the normals. Elite disconnection isn’t inevitable.

The broken personal thing behind all the broken institutional things is a loss of basic human connection and behavior. It’s a learned disconnection, and they can’t hide it.

Chris Bray, “The Mask Becomes Your Face”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2023-08-22.

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