There is too much fiction in historical drama. And that’s a fact

How can history possibly compete any more with the juggernaut of historical drama? How can fact rival fiction? Nobody alive was privy to the conversations between Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed in their suite at The Ritz in Paris on the night of their fateful final journey, but the scene portrayed in Netflix’s The Crown, which shows him pathetically begging her to accept his marriage proposal, will linger in the mind, and maybe even fill that narrative void.

Did Dodi ask Di to say I do? Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana and Khalid Abdalla as Dodi al-Fayed in The Crown.Credit: Netflix

Ridley Scott’s new epic Napoleon is full of historical whoppers. Cannonballs were not fired at the pyramids during his Egyptian campaign – although French fusiliers might have nipped off the nose of the Sphinx. The young Bonaparte was not present in the Parisian crowd when Marie Antoinette faced the guillotine. Yet the movie has the potential to shape our historical consciousness far more profoundly than the 60,000 books written about the French emperor. In a battle with Hollywood, scholarly history will almost always be outgunned.

Netflix, under fire last year about The Crown’s storytelling sleight of hand, issued a disclaimer reminding viewers they were watching a “historical dramatisation”. Ridley Scott, the British director of Napoleon, has responded to claims of rewriting the past with a Gallic shrug. In fairness, both are in the entertainment business rather than the elucidation business. However, the closer The Crown has come to the events that I remember and witnessed, the less satisfying Peter Morgan’s depiction of the Windsors has become. Likewise, it irks that in Napoleon we see the French emperor meeting the Duke of Wellington, even though in real life the two men never came face to face. Increasingly, movies such as Napoleon and Oppenheimer are twin-screen experiences: one to watch the action, and another to carry out a fact-check.

Director Ridley Scott and Joaquin Phoenix on the set of Napoleon.

Historical fiction can sometimes be invaluable. Paradoxically, it helps correct the historical record. This is true of Anna Funder’s masterwork, Wifedom, which rescues George Orwell’s brilliant wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy from invisibility. Though overwhelmingly a work of forensic literary investigation, with 40 pages of end notes, Wifedom deploys fiction sparingly to bring Eileen into sharper focus. Moreover, the author signposts clearly when she is switching genres.

Fiction has always served large truths. Orwell and O’Shaughnessy used it to devastating effect in Animal Farm to arraign Stalinism. In mid-19th century America, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did more to bring attention to the horrors of enslavement than any work of non-fiction.

After covering the war in Ukraine, the Australian writer Misha Zelinsky decided to write a novel based on his experiences rather than a work of conventional reportage. His rationale was simple: he thought it would have more cut-through. “I like to believe that facts and figures and logic and argument carry the day,” he told me, but “that’s not the world we live in. People react emotionally to events. They connect to stories and characters and narrative arcs.” At a time when Ukraine has slipped from the front pages, he’s hoping fiction will subpoena the popular imagination. “I’m hoping that people will connect with the story in a new way,” he says, to which I say amen.

Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:

Given the blurring of lines between politics and entertainment – the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky was a comedian, remember, while the last US president was a reality TV star – the problem comes when it is not just high-end drama that plays fast and loose with the past but low-end politicians. If fake history becomes so normalised and morally uncomplicated in drama, there’s a danger the same will be true of real life.

In this month’s Argentine election, Javier Milei – he of the Wolverine sideburns and whirring chainsaw – claimed that the number of Argentinians who “disappeared” during the years of military rule was nowhere near as high as the official record suggests. In lessening the crimes of the military juntas, he’s whitewashing authoritarianism and hinting maybe that he might follow the same path.

To combat what he saw as historical wokeism, Donald Trump commissioned the 1776 Report, which absolved the founding fathers of any blame for their slave-holding, and concluded that America was “the most just and glorious country in all of human history”.

“Totalitarianism demands … the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth,” wrote Orwell. Trumpism relies on the same trick. Polls, after all, suggest that nearly 70 per cent of Republicans believe one of the biggest lies in American history, that Trump was cheated out of the 2020 election.

Australia is not immune. Perhaps the most stunning, and historically dubious, contribution to the Voice referendum came when Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price claimed “there is no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation”.

Globally, the manipulation of history by figures like Vladimir Putin and Trump is especially dangerous. And given that we started with Napoleon it seems fitting to end with Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Nick Bryant is a journalist, author and regular columnist.