Misrepresentation & Historical Inaccuracies

What are some examples of historically inaccurate movies or books? (Give one example of a movie being inaccurate to what really happened)  Two movies that immediately come to mind for me are Pocahontas and Amadeus.

Do you think these misrepresentations easily make their way into society, clouding the public’s knowledge on these figures? Or do you think that people are able to separate fact from fiction and do their own research?

Which is ultimately more damaging – portraying a person as a martyr or saint, or portraying them as a villain?

heres an example:

One movie I can remember that I watched again for the 3rd time now is The Wolf on Wall Street movie. A movie based on Jordan Belfort’s crazy and very eventful life. The movie is filled with the craziest and weirdest stories told by none other than Jordan himself and being as he is the one narrating that fact alone is already unreliable due to that he was high or wasted half the time while all the events happened. Surprisingly enough after I had researched a bit after watching the movie for the first time, the events depicted in the film are actually pretty accurate to what is written in his book. Although with every movie there are always some creative liberties that the directors and producers had made which were either more exaggerated than real life or adding in characters that have completely different names to the real people they were based on. Regardless the events in the movie, after much research, were real but because of how crazy the events were to begin with, a person begins to question if what really happened was actually that crazy or was it more of an embellishment from Jordan himself or by the creators of the movie? We won’t ever really know the full truth of what happened or what was accurate or inaccurate.

I know from my own experiences with watching movies that I sometimes overlook when a movie is said to be based on “true events”, I often forget that the story is never told word for word. We all know that of course things need to be rewritten, taken out and changed completely because of entertainment purposes but when someone is watching a movie or tv show we forget about this because of how engaged and entertained we are about the visual representation we are watching. The phenomenome with tv or movies is that we become somewhat attached in a sense to the characters or the story that we sometimes forget or might not even question the historical events or how accurate it really is exactly because we all just assume it must be real and true if it says “Based on true events”. If the public really wants to know the truth of a story they must go off on their own and do their part to research for themselves and find more evidence to learn more about the true story that the movie/tv show is based on. There is definitely a difference between what is true and what is fiction but alot of our society forgets about this especially when watching and a lot of people will reference a movie or tv show but won’t actually look at the factual evidence.

I feel like portraying someone as a saint or as the villian all depends on the movie and what events lead up to determining that the person is either good or evil. Good and Evil are both very opposite yet strong words to use when determining a character’s personality and who they are as a person. Sometimes there are characters that are depicted to be the good one or the hero of the story but in reality the decisions they have made lead them then be considered a villian. While watching movies or tv the viewer is often quick to judge a character’s decisions or to immediately love or hate a character depending on how they act. They don’t take into consideration what good and bad decisions the person has made and are quick to label or judge a character to be the good one or bad one because our society is used to labeling and judging people so quickly, so with even fictional characters we tend to do the same thing. There have been many cases where even I have watched something and despite knowing a character has made bad decisions, in other aspects of the show they show having a good heart and that makes me love that specific character. Having characters like this make the public actually love them more because it shows that not everyone is perfect and that we all have both good and bad sides that we aren’t just 100% one or the other.

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