Accuracy in Historical Fiction (2013)
<i>In a real historical piece, if they tried to make everything slavishly right any show would be unwatchable, because there would be too much that the audience couldn’t understand.  The audience would be constantly distracted by details like un-filmably dark building interiors, ugly missing teeth, infants being given broken-winged songbirds as disposable toys to play with, crush, and throw away, and Marie Antoinette relieving herself on the floor at Versailles.  Despite its hundreds of bathrooms, one of Versailles’ marks of luxury was that the staff removed human feces from the hallways regularly, sometimes as often as twice a day, and always more than once a week.  We cannot make an accurate movie of this – it will please no one.  The makers of the TV series  Mad Men recognized how much an accurate depiction of the past freaks viewers out – the sexual politics, the lack of seat belts and eco-consciousness, the way grown-ups treat kids.  They focused just enough on this discomfort to make it the heart of a powerful and successful show, but there even an accurate depiction of attitudes from a few decades ago makes all the characters feel like scary aliens.  Go back further and you will have complete incomprehensibility.</i><p>This perfectly explains why I like reading historical and anthropological writing alongside historical fiction and science fiction. People have already in other times and places <i>been</i> aliens more remote from 20th century middle class Americans than any rubber-forehead creature Star Trek ever showed.<p>It also explains why rubber forehead aliens are a lot more popular than really weird (in belief or biology) aliens [1].  Most people prefer palette-swapped adventure stories over the dauntingly weird aliens that I love. And that&#x27;s fine! People enjoy seeing those adventures and the writers and actors enjoy having an audience and pay checks. (I generally prefer familiar-sounding music of certain types over anything labeled avant-garde or experimental. My appetite for novelty is not unlimited either.)<p>[1] Apart from the ease and affordability of costuming a human actor vs. depicting, say, a feathered amphibious octopus creature.