The play's
not
the thing
by sonya hammond
The right person, in the right place at the right time, can make all the difference ... change just one element of the equation, and the history as we know it disintegrates.
Hollywood, for instance, in its eternal quest to spend more money on one film than the accumulated Reagan years' national debt, tends to tinker a lot with history in the name of 'creative license' [read box office receipts], but although they have contributed more than their share of historical discrepancies, their 'factual' epics usually [Titanic is a notable exception] pretty much stick to the original cast of characters.
Considering a recent bid by Hollywood's most persistent historical personage depicter to win the Dan Quayle Foot in Mouth Disease Award, we must be grateful that stars are not usually licensed to kill the basic facts regarding the characters they are hired to depict.
It's bad enough that they're free to take on political roles, but allowing this particular 'Star' the artistic freedom to make changes to promote his personal convictions in his films, could have brought history to a shuddering halt ...
4,000 BC: Faced with the obstacle of a large body of water, Moses hires one [1] armed guard to fight off Pharaoh's men while he and the children of Israel swim for it. The Israelites were desert people not famous for their aquatic skills, and guns had yet to be invented, but all that's arguably less far fetched [and considerably cheaper] than the idiotic idea of one guy waving a staff to part the Red Sea ...
44 BC: Mark Antony heads off an angry group of knife-toting guys wearing togas, by making by a long speech [later abridged by Shakespeare] on how taking out Caesar is really a one[1]-Roman job, and since he can shoot from behind a pillar, Julius will never know who hit him. Of course they still didn't have guns at the time, and it screws up the 'Et tu Brutus' line, but who knows if he really said that anyhow ...
AD: Pissed off at orders to paint a ceiling, Michelangelo shoots Pope Julius in what is later ruled justifiable homicide, since the cardinals were fed up with all that paint and plaster dripping on their heads, and Rex Harrison had far too many lines to begin with. The screen writers are still fighting over who gets to finish the ceiling [my vote goes to Raphael who was played by a really cute guy who had hardly any lines at all] ...1509
AD: Cardinal Richelieu, fed up with being constantly one-upped by the 3 and/or 4 Musketeers, and forced to spend all his hard-earned and ill-gotten gains on hiring spies, shoots Louis XIII ... they actually did have guns by then ... and forces the queen to have sex with him, which was obviously what he had in mind all along. This may or may not put Louis XIV's parentage in question since the Cardinal is admittedly much more of a stud than the King ...1624
AD: General Charles G. 'Chinese' Gordon shoots the Mahdi [depriving Laurence Olivier of one of his niftier opportunities to do that eyeball rolling back into his head trick every 3rd close-up], thus averting the attack on Khartoum and allowing the British soldiers who would have been sent to rescue Gordon to go off to attack India or some other recalcitrant British colony. Of course, the Mahdi's followers were understandably annoyed, and since the Brits never came back to force them to do it, nobody put up a statue of Gordon, who pouted for the rest of his life.1885
None of which made cinematic history, thanks to an unwritten Hollywood rule that 'Stars', no matter how highly paid, don't get to re-write their characters unless, of course, they're producing the film
, in which case they can do whatever they damned well please, so we get stuff like Ed Wood creations.Unfortunately, this does not keep them from making proclamations, and since they are 'Stars', for some unfathomable reason people actually listen to them and take their words as rational, logical, and even productive.
Still, it is difficult to imagine that anyone could ascribe those qualities to Charlton Heston's recent opinion that "If there had been even one armed guard in the [Columbine High] school, he could have saved a lot of lives and perhaps ended the whole thing instantly."
As it turned out, there was an armed guard at the school. So much for that theory. But not so much for guns, if Mr. Heston and his NRA have their way.
There will continue to be young people who arm themselves, because it is far too easy for them to find ways to do so. The problems they can see no other way to solve are diverse, and their reasons for killing may vary, as do the methods society must continually take to protect itself from them
. But the 'final solution' of choice for these children and young people is to take the lives of others into their own hands ... which are holding guns. Invariably and always, guns.We must find the ways to make the acquisition of those guns extremely difficult, if not impossible.
We are not arming the 'militia' for which the 2nd Amendment provides. We are arming children. Until we stop doing that, a history no one can rewrite will continually come back to haunt us.
No actor can ever convince us otherwise.
©sonya hammond 1999