Mr. Turner: Movies Butchering History

This is the scene: The housekeeper, in her fifties or sixties, is fully clothed in a long dark Victorian dress and bonnet. She has her back to the camera, perhaps dusting. In strides a heavy, hulk of a man: a coarse, fleshy face, his straw-like hair askew.

He scowls at the woman, grunts something undecipherable, rams himself against her, pinning her to the wall, lifting her skirts as he does so. He thrusts again. Mutely, she submits to the brutish attack. He grunts and thrusts again. Finally, satiated, he stalks away. Not a word has been uttered. She stares after him, without resentment, shock, or horror--her homely, lined features etched with resignation.  Obviously, this was not the first time Mr.Turner had had humped her; nor would it be the last.

Mr. Turner, directed by Mike Leigh, is by no means a coherent biography, but a gorgeous film that presents brief, often unconnected excerpts from the latter years of the great British painter William Turner. In a way, Leigh’s lush, gauzy, cinematographic techniques, might be compared to the brilliant, infused style that Turner himself developed to create his shimmering watercolor landscapes.

The problem is I don’t know how much of the film to trust.

One of the starkest scenes, the scene that must stick in the mind of the majority of the viewers, is the one described above—where Mr. Turner—the genius in rendering light long before the French impressionists ever came on the scene—brutally attacks and has his way with his housekeeper.

In some way, that shocking scene will forever change the way those who see the film will perceive the painter.

All well and good you may say. Indeed, it’s to the credit of Mike Leigh that he has given us the great Turner with all his warts and blemishes.

Except for the fact that the scene may never have happened. That’s according to Mike Leigh himself.

In a packed question and answer session following a screening of the film in at the Curzon Cinema in London, Leigh elaborated on the great amount of time and effort he and his staff had put into researching Turner’s life.

But when asked for the factual basis for Turner’s sexual attacks on his housekeeper, Leigh’s answer was along these lines: “Well, we knew that she had been living with him as his housekeeper for thirty or forty years, and.. it just felt right.” There was, Leigh admitted, no hard evidence, that Turner had regularly forced himself on the woman.

To Leigh, that seems to make no difference.

As much as I admire the talent of Mike Leigh, I can’t believe the arrogance of that reply.

The film is presented as “An exploration of the last quarter century of the great, if eccentric, British painter J.M.W. Turner’s life.” There is no indication anywhere that portions are made up, or based on what “felt right” to the director.

Yet, for millions of people who see the film, that is how they will remember Mr. Turner.

Another dramatic scene in the film may never have happened. At one point, Turner has himself lashed to the tall mast of a sailing ship in the midst of a ferocious gale, so he can directly experience a treacherous storm at sea. According to the Tate Britain—which houses a huge collection of Turner’s art—it’s most unlikely that Turner ever attempted that deed.

So, now I’m left with the question about the entire film---what was real and what was invented, because it felt right?

The people who turned out the film try to have it both ways: giving the very clear impression that it is based on fact—otherwise why would anyone go to see it?-- …while at the same time adding in riveting scenes that aren’t true. Are we to believe that they don’t have the box office as well as history in mind?

One might wonder how Mike Leigh would respond to some future biographer taking the same liberties with Leigh’s life story as Leigh did with Turner’s.

“Mr. Turner” is only the latest in a long list of films supposedly based “in fact” “in reality”, “on a real event, or “a true story.  Driven by a mix of arrogance and cynicism, the people who makes those films count on the ignorance of the audience to make their fortunes by butchering history. 

One such thriller, Argo, revealed how several Americans from the U.S. embassy in Tehran were whisked out of Iran at the height of the hostage crisis, by an incredibly brave and resourceful CIA agent. Except the real hero in the true story was not the CIA agent, but the Canadian ambassador to Iran, who sheltered those Americans and came up with the way to get them out.

But who’s going to pay good money to see a movie about a Canadian diplomat? The cliff-hanging conclusion of the film—without which the picture would never have worked---was also totally invented.

Much more egregious, as far as public policy goes, was Zero Dark Thirty, supposedly a totally factual account of how the U.S. tracked down and finally zapped Osama Bin Laden. One stark, scene showing a prisoner being water-boarded, made it clear that it was that torture that led to the biggest breakthrough in the chase: the CIA discovering the identity of the trusted courier used by Bin Laden, who ultimately led them to Bin Laden himself. According to several sources, including the latest Senate Committee report, torture had nothing to do with that breakthrough.

But try to make that point to Dick “torture works” Cheney or anyone of the hundreds of millions of people who have seen the film. 

If you queried the people responsible for that film, they’d probably shrug and say something like, “it just felt right”.

If Gaza's dead were America's dead

On the face of it, the casualty figures in Gaza may seem not that horrific to Americans—unless you transpose that same level of death and mayhem to the United States, 176 times the population of Gaza.

For instance, so far reportedly 571 Palestinians have been killed, including 154 children. Total wounded=3,550, of which 1125 are children.

If the United States were to be hit by a similar onslaught, the number of Americans killed--mostly in the past five days--would be 101,000, of which 27,000 would be  children. The number of Americans wounded would be 627,000, of which 198,000 are children.

Another comparison:

That number of dead would be almost twice the number that the United States lost in 10 years of fighting in Vietnam. (58,000).

It would almost equal the 116,000 American soldiers killed in World War I.

It would be more than one third of the Americans killed (291,000) fighting between 1941 and 1945 in World War II.

It would almost equal, however, the total number of American soldiers wounded. (670,000) in WWII.

And remember:

-- the great majority of those Palestinian deaths have occurred in just five days.

--a large proportion of those dead and injured were not soldiers.

--And the slaughter continues.

AMERICA & IRAQ: A BLACK HOLE OF HISTORY

The last thing the U.S. should do is become militarily embroiled in the conflict raging again in Iraq. But for Americans to shake their heads in lofty disdain and turn away, as if they have no responsibility for the continued bloodletting, is outrageous. Why? Because America bears a large part of the blame for turning Iraq into the basket case it’s become.

The great majority of Americans don’t realize that fact. They never did. So much of what the U.S. did to Iraq has been consigned by America to a black hole of history. Iraqis, however, can never forget.   

In 1990, for instance, during the first Gulf War, George H.W. Bush, called on the people of Iraq to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein. But when they finally did, after Saddam’s forces were driven from Kuwait, President Bush refused any gesture of support, even permitted Saddam’s pilots to keep flying their deadly helicopter gunships. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered.  

[H.W. Bush later denied any responsibility for that uprising, but you can hear his appeal to the Iraqis in a documentary I produced with Michel Despratx, “The Trial of Saddam Hussein.”]

Even more devastating to Iraq was the Draconian  embargo  that the United States and its allies pushed through the U.N. Security Council in August 1990, after Saddam invaded Kuwait.

The embargo cut off all trade between Iraq and the rest of the world. That meant everything, from food and electric generators to vaccines, hospital equipment—even medical journals. Since Iraq imported 70 percent of its food, and its principal revenues were derived from the export of petroleum, the sanctions dealt a catastrophic blow, particularly to the young.  

Enforced primarily by the United States and Britain, the sanctions remained in place for almost 13 years and were, in their own way, a weapon of mass destruction far more deadly than anything Saddam had developed. Two U.N. administrators who oversaw humanitarian relief in Iraq during that period, and resigned in protest, considered the embargo to have been a “crime against humanity.”

Early on, it became evident that for the United States and England, the real purpose of the sanctions was not the elimination of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but of Saddam Hussein himself, though that goal went far beyond anything authorized by the Security Council.

The effect of the sanctions was magnified by the wide-scale destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure —power plants, sewage treatment facilities, telephone exchanges, irrigation systems—wrought by the American air and rocket attacks preceding the first Gulf War. That infrastructure has still to be completely rebuilt.

Iraq’s contaminated waters became a biological killer as lethal as anything Saddam had attempted to produce. There were massive outbreaks of severe child and infant dysentery. Typhoid and cholera, which had been virtually eradicated in Iraq, also packed the hospital wards.

Added to that was a disastrous shortage of food, which meant malnutrition for some, starvation and death for others. At the same time, the medical system, once the country’s pride, careened toward total collapse. Iraq would soon have the worst child mortality rate of all 188 countries measured by UNICEF.

There is no question that U.S. planners knew how awful the force of the sanctions would be.  In fact, the health calamity was coolly predicted and then meticulously tracked by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. Its first study was entitled “Iraq’s Water Treatment Vulnerabilities.”

Indeed, from the beginning, the intent of U.S. officials was to create such a catastrophic situation that the people of Iraq—civilians, but particularly the military—would be forced to react. As Denis Halliday, the former U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, put it to me, “the U.S. theory behind the sanctions was that if you hurt the people of Iraq and kill the children particularly, they’ll rise up with anger and overthrow Saddam.”  

 But rather than weakening Saddam, the sanctions only consolidated his hold on power. “The people didn’t hold Saddam responsible for their plight,” Halliday said. “They blamed the U.S. and the U.N. for these sanctions and the pain and anger that these sanctions brought to their lives.”

 Even after the sanctions were modified in the "Oil for Food Program" in 1996, the resources freed up were never enough to cover Iraq’s basic needs. Hans von Sponeck, who also resigned his post as U.N. coordinator in Iraq, condemned the program as “a fig leaf for the international community.”

By1999 a UNICEF study concluded that half a million Iraqi children perished in the previous eight years because of the sanctions—and that was four years before they ended. Another American expert in 2003 estimated that the sanctions killed between 343,900 and 529,000 young children and infants--certainly more young people than were ever killed by Saddam Hussein.

 Beyond the deaths and wholesale destruction, the sanctions had another equally devastating but less visible impact, as documented early on by a group of Harvard medical researchers. They reported that four out of five children interviewed were fearful of losing their families; two-thirds doubted whether they themselves would survive to adulthood. They were  “the most traumatized children of war ever described.” 

 The experts concluded that “a majority of Iraq’s children would suffer from severe psychological problems throughout their lives.”

 Much more chilling, is the fact that the Harvard study was done in 1991, after the sanctions had been in effect for only seven months. They would continue for another 12 years, until May 22, 2003, after the U.S.-led invasion.

 By then, an entire generation of Iraqis had been ravaged. But rather than bringing that nightmare to an end, the invasion unleashed another series of horrors. Estimates of Iraqis who died over the following years, directly or indirectly due to the savage violence, range up to 400,000. Millions more became refugees.

But there was more. The military onslaught and the American rule that immediately followed, destroyed not just the people and infrastructure of Iraq, but the very fiber of the nation.  Though Saddam’s tyranny was ruthless, over the years the country’s disparate peoples had begun living together as Iraqis, in the same towns and neighborhoods, attending the same schools, intermarrying—slowly developing a sense of nationhood.

That process was shattered by the American proconsuls who took charge after the invasion. They oversaw a massive political purge, a witch hunt, that led to the gutting of key ministries, the collapse of the police and military and other key government institutions, without creating any viable new structures in their place. The Shiites who the U.S. helped bring to power took revenge on the Sunnis, many of whom had backed Saddam.

The result was catastrophic. Frightened Iraqis turned for security to their own tribal or sectarian leaders. Local militias flourished. The violence spiraled out of control. Thousands perished in a horrific surge of ethnic cleansing.

Through bribery and political arm twisting, the U.S. was able to tamp down the conflagration it had helped ignite. Underneath, however, the distrust and hatred  continued smoldering.

And then, in 2011, the U.S. troops pulled out. President Maliki continued pouring oil on the fire, refusing to give Sunnis and Kurds a share of power. And now, fed by the conflict in neighboring Syria, Iraq is once again caught up in bloody turmoil.   

And who is having to deal with all this?  The generation of Iraqis that the Harvard researchers had long labeled “the most traumatized children of war ever described.” The majority of whom “would suffer from severe psychological problems throughout their lives.”

It is they now, who have come of age. It is they who, if they have not fled the country, are the military and police commanders, the businessmen and bureaucrats and newspaper editors, the tribal chiefs and sectarian leaders, the imans and jihadis and suicide bombers--all of them now still caught up in the ever-ending calamity of Iraq.

That, America, is the legacy you helped create in Iraq. How do you deal with it now?

God only knows.