Not 'based on a true story'

You’re at the cinema, and a movie comes on. After the title appears, you see the words “Based on a true story.” Anymore you have to wonder what this means. 

Every year, it seems, we encounter in the media a debate about the veracity of certain dramatic film portrayal of historical events. This year is no different. 

The historical events that inspired the making of Selma are the marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, led by Martin Luther King Jr. and how these helped lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 

But with the release of the film has come much criticism of it, particularly its depiction of President Johnson (LBJ) and his differences with King.  

As Elizabeth Drew writes in the New York Review of Books (Jan. 8): “The film suggests that there was a struggle between King and Johnson over whether such a bill should be pushed following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, signed into law in July of that year.” She says this is “pure fiction.” 

Amy Davidson, writing in the New Yorker, disagrees. She says the film “is fair to Johnson; the portrayal is multifaceted and respectful and fully cognizant of his essential commitment to civil rights.” 

Another recent film, American Sniper, is based on the life of Navy SEAL marksman Chris Kyle. The Clint Eastwood film depicts his life in “mythical proportions, avoiding more disturbing aspects of his life,” according to Jake Coyle of the Associated Press. Meanwhile, the real Kyle boasted of killing looters after Hurricane Katrina. 

To illustrate the pressure directors may face, Kyle’s father reportedly told Eastwood before production started: “Disrespect my son and I’ll unleash hell on you.” 

Another recent film, The Imitation Game, has also come under fire. Based on the life of Alan Turing, a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and pioneering computer scientist who led a team of cryptanalysts in breaking the Nazis’ Enigma code during World War II. Christian Caryl in the New York Review of Books (Dec. 19, 2014) says the film “represents a bizarre departure from the historical record.” 

There was an outcry two years ago over Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty because it showed that intelligence gathered through torture helped lead to Osama bin Laden’s capture. Senators Diane Feinstein and John McCain claimed the film was “perpetuating the myth that torture is effective” and told the film’s makers they had “a social and moral obligation to get the facts right.” 

Bigelow responded, “We’re not making documentaries.  

Drew takes a different view. “No one is asking for a documentary,” she writes. However, “our history belongs to all of us, and major events shouldn’t be the playthings of moviemakers to boost their box-office earnings.” 

Ava DuVernay, who directed Selma, says the concern is not box-office earnings but the director’s artistic vision. “You can look at everything with a lens of scrutiny and miss the greater truth that the artists are trying to share,” she said in an interview. 

Even historians have to condense and simplify their telling of events. You just can’t include everything and every nuance. And directors of dramatic films are interested in a dramatic story that fits their larger vision. 

That doesn’t excuse portraying falsehood. It hurts the film’s credibility when such inaccuracies are part of it. 

Maybe that’s why eight of my top 10 films of 2014 don’t claim to be based on a “true story.”  

Torture doesn't work, in spite of what movies say

For years it’s been common knowledge that the CIA practices torture but won’t admit to it. Officials in the George W. Bush administration, notably Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA director Michael Hayden, have defended the use of torture in investigation of terrorists.

Then, on Dec. 13, 2012, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved a report concluding that “harsh interrogation measures used by the CIA did not produce significant intelligence breakthroughs,” writes Greg Miller in the Washington Post (Dec. 14, 2012).

The Democrats on the committee adopted the 6,000-page document over the objections of the committee’s Republicans (big surprise), even though the CIA’s use of water boarding and other severe interrogation techniques were banned four years ago.

The report is significant, nevertheless, because it is independent and details the agency’s efforts to “break” dozens of detainees through physical and psychological duress.

Some question the relevance of the report because, writes Miller, “the agency abandoned its harshest interrogation methods years before President Obama was elected, and the Justice Department began backing away from memos it had issued that had served as the legal basis for the program.”

Still, the report is important because it confronts a popular perception, predominant in many movies and TV shows, that such torture does produce helpful information. The recent film Zero Dark Thirty is a case in point.

The film chronicles the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May 2011. It shows torture in its graphic horror. Yet it also depicts CIA agents obtaining information from detainees who have been tortured, though the information comes when the detainees are being fed or treated kindly.

Steve Coll in the Feb. 7 issue of The New York Review of Books goes further and calls the film "disturbing" and "misleading." While acknowledging artistic license and the need to condense actual events, he says "the filmmakers cannot, on the one hand, claim authenticity as journalists while, on the other, citing art as an excuse for shoddy reporting about a subject as important as whether torture had a vital part in the search for bin Laden."

Evidence shows that useful information rarely comes from torture. Treating detainees kindly and building trust has been shown to be much more effective in obtaining accurate information. For example, read The Looming Tower: Al-Quaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (Knopf, 2006), which shows an FBI agent obtaining information after developing a relationship with a prisoner and gaining his trust.

While CIA activities are largely secret, there is evidence from FBI agents present at "black sites" where CIA conducted "enhanced interrogation," i.e., torture, that they found these techniques "counterproductive and morally wrong," writes Coll.

The film also depicts the use of secret prisons around the world where detainees were sent to be interrogated, i.e., tortured. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chair of the committee, issued a written statement that called the decisions to use these secret prisons “terrible mistakes.”

While all but one of the Republicans on the committee opposed the report, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, issued a statement saying the committee’s work shows that “cruel” treatment of prisoners “is not only wrong in principle and a stain on our country’s conscience but also an ineffective and unreliable means of gathering intelligence.”

No one knows when or if the report will be made public. For now, it has been turned over to the Obama administration and the CIA to provide a chance for them to comment, writes Miller.

Miller reports that “earlier this year, the Justice Department closed investigations into alleged abuses, eliminating the prospect that CIA operatives who had gone beyond the approved methods would face criminal charges.”

While any final report may not have much impact on government practice, it could help counter the public perception, based mostly on fictional treatments, that torture is effective.

The deeper truth is that, whether or not torture is effective, it's just plain wrong.