I know I’m dating myself, but I love the movie Braveheart. Battles, romance, intrigue, it has it all. There’s one particularly memorable scene (spoiler alert!) in which England’s King Edward I, Longshanks lies dying and unable to speak while his daughter-in-law, Isabella of France, played by 29-year-old Sophie Marceau, describes to him how she’s pregnant with Wallace’s child and plans on murdering Edward’s son.
“You see? Death comes to us all. But before it comes to you, know this: your blood dies with you. A child who is not of your line grows in my belly. Your son will not sit long on the throne. I swear it.”
-- Isabella
It’s a great scene which gives the evil Longshanks gets his just reward. The only problem is that the real Isabella didn’t marry Edward II until he was already king, and Wallace had been dead for 7 years. Oh, and she would have been 3 at the time of her affair with Wallace. The movie is full of historical inaccuracies but that’s “Hollywood History” for you, why let truth stand in the way of a good story? The movie is still great, you just need to remember not to use Hollywood as the source of you historical knowledge (cough, cough, Bridgerton).
I mention this because, while I have, on numerous occasions, argued that one should not trust the media to provide the unvarnished truth and warned that we must be conscious that the media have taken sides and spin much of the news for political reasons, I have largely ignored entertainment.
You have now been warned! Fortunately, we can still trust documentaries. Right? Right?!? Clearly not or I wouldn’t be writing this. I’m not going to argue that every documentary is nothing but lies, but I will point out that even documentary film makers have agendas. It could be the same agenda that we all share, to get paid, or it may be to become famous or push a particular agenda. The point is that everyone has some bias, conscious or otherwise, and to bear that in mind.
This “warning” was triggered by the recent death of documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock. Spurlock rose to fame following the release of his documentary, Super Size Me. If you’re not familiar with it, Spurlock tracked his health during a period of time in which ate solely at McDonald’s and followed these specific rules:
He had to eat three McDonald's meals daily: breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
He had to consume every item on the McDonald's menu at least once over the course of the 30 days (he managed this in nine days).
He had to ingest only items offered on the McDonald's menu, including bottled water. All outside consumption of food is prohibited.
He had to Super-Size the meal if offered, but not otherwise.
He had to attempt to walk about as much as a typical US citizen.
At the end of this experiment “Spurlock had gained 24.5 pounds (11.1 kg), a 13% body mass increase, increased his cholesterol to 230 mg/dL (6.0 mmol/L), and experienced mood swings, sexual dysfunction, and fat accumulation in his liver.” Few are likely surprised at his weight gain and increased cholesterol level but the fat accumulation in his liver surprised the examining doctor who compared it to that of a heavy drinker. This is hardly surprising as Spurlock confessed in 2017 that he’d been drinking since he was 13 and hadn’t “been sober for more than a week in 30 years.” This contradicted his claim in the film that he hadn’t been drinking. Does this mean too much fast food doesn’t cause liver damage? No, but it certainly casts doubt on it as well as every other claim Spurlock made in the movie.
Spurlock’s drinking lie is just one in a long example of documentaries that seize the public’s attention, but which have serious inaccuracies. Other examples include:
Nanook of the North – a 1922 film by Robert J. Flaherty purporting to tell the story of Nanook and his family as they “travel, search for food, and trade in the Ungava Peninsula of northern Quebec.” The film is riddled with falsehoods and staged events including using Flaherty’s common law wife as a stand in for Nanook’s and showing Nanook hunting with traditional Inuit equipment when he usually used a gun…oh, and Nanook’s name was actually Allakariallak, “Nanook” just seemed more genuine and marketable to Flaherty. The “inaccuracies” can be blamed on Flaherty’s belief that “one often has to distort a thing in order to catch its true spirit." It was 1922 though so let’s chalk this one up to it being filmed before documentaries were a clearly defined genre.
By Robert J. Flannery / Pathe Pictures - Previously uploaded to en:Wikipedia 23:01, 28 May 2005 by en:User:Tarnas, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1110572
White Wilderness – The 1958 documentary by Walt Disney Productions that led the world to believe that lemmings would run off cliffs to their deaths. While this did lead to the great 1991 video game of the same name, it was a hoax which required the lemmings to be “jostled on turntables, and repeatedly shoved off a cliff to imply mass suicide.” Ladies and gentlemen, the magic of Disney!
By The Walt Disney Company - The Walt Disney Company, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67235240
Bowling for Columbine – In the opening scene of the film Michael Moore is shown being given a gun for opening an account in a bank. While not a complete lie, the process actually involved performing a background check on anyone before they were given a gun. Moore edited the film to make it fit the message he was trying to convey. He has also been accused of fabricating an entire interview with Fred Barnes, the executive editor of The Weekly Standard. For this he won the Academy Award. There’s little doubt Moore is a great film maker but his relationship with the truth makes his documentaries untrustworthy.
By The poster art can or could be obtained from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1042776
An Inconvenient Truth – Vice President Al Gore’s 2002 Academy Award winning documentary (are we seeing a trend here?), while loved by many and arguably launching the modern climate movement, has been accused of alarmism, exaggerating “some dire scenarios,” and leveraging the most pessimistic scenarios for effect. Examples include:
Depicting much of Florida sinking beneath the sea despite even the most pessimistic scenarios indicating that if it did happen it wouldn’t be for several centuries.
Encouraging viewers to associate global warming with Hurricane Katrina by repeatedly showing it’s “deadly aftermath.”
Gore predicted that "within a decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro" however Doug Hardy, the University of Massachusetts scientist who co-authored the science leading to Gore's statement called the Vice President’s comments as “a little literary license.”
By UC Riverside, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5105566
13th – This 2016 Academy Award nominated documentary explores mass incarceration and the “prison-industrial complex.” The title, which refers to the Thirteenth Amendment which abolished slavery in the United States makes the argument that the exception for convicted criminals is being used to “continue the practice of involuntary servitude in the form of penal labor.” As my PhD thesis was to be on mass incarceration, I watched this film and know how riddled it is with inaccuracies and propaganda but don’t take my word for it, here is what Dan Berger of Black Perspectives had to say:
“It states that arrests spiked after the 1994 Crime Bill when arrests have actually fallen since that time.”
“It shows a graph claiming that the prison population has expanded dramatically since 2010, when incarceration rates have plateaued or even fallen.”
“It says that Black men account for 40% of the prison population, which has not been the case for several years.”
It “implies that mass incarceration is driven by private prisons and prison labor, and that ALEC oversees this nefarious scheme. These claims are simply false.”
By The poster art can or could be obtained from the distributor., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51759818
Conclusion
Of course, it is important to remember that there are plenty of good documentaries. Hot Coffee*, which tells the story of Stella Liebeck, who was awarded $2.86 million after being severely burned by hot coffee comes to mind. There are also ones that almost everyone will take with a grain of salt such as those describing alien autopsies, bigfoot, and the Lock Ness Monster. The danger lies with those in the middle, the ones that appear truthful, but which contain just enough lies to make them dangerous. How do you tell the difference? Sometimes research can reveal inaccuracies but often it’s impossible to assess the accuracy and honesty of a film. For example, prior to 2017 there was likely no amount of online research that could have been done to prove a diet of McDonald’s food didn’t cause liver damage. It took Spurlock’s confession to bring that to light. Not falling for slanted documentaries is difficult. I for one am a proponent of skepticism and consequently recommend that all documentaries be viewed, not as scientifically or historically accurate films, but as entertainment. It also never hurts to remember the warning of Edgar Allen Poe: believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.
* Note: spoiler alert: Liebeck wasn’t burned because she didn’t know the coffee was hot but because McDonald’s kept it’s coffee 50 degrees hotter than necessary. She also tried to settle for the $20,000 her medical expenses were expected to cost while McDonald’s only offered $800.
Very true. I approach documentaries these days with one eyebrow raised. Often the outright lies are subtly wrapped, but the truly nefarious lies are the omissions and the editing. I treat them now as I would a “historical” film - as you’ve said they are entertaining perhaps, but should viewed as a prompt to read and research and not taken at face value.