Altering History to Serve the Story

To a greater or lesser extent, all authors have Charles Dickens as a pebble in their shoe. No matter how much I want to forget his narrative mastery, he is always there, trashing any delusions of grandeur, making me feel like a complete klutz.My childhood preferences always went to Great Expectations, and later, somewhat more grown, to Scrooge’s second chance in A Christmas Carol. But it is in this wiser age that A Tale of Two Cities astounds me, above all for the perfect musical cadence of its first page. For that very reason, a week ago, I naively thought I could rejoice in the new series Amazon made. And into a well all my joy fell.To excuse the butchery of A Tale of Two Cities, critics offer a lazy false equivalence: Dickens took liberties with the French Revolution, so screenwriters and casting directors can take liberties with Dickens. Égalité, perhaps. But there is a vast gulf between a 19th-century novelist harnessing history to serve the story, and Amazon destroying the story to serve compliance.This “Tale” fits what has become a predictable pattern among literary adaptations, and period pieces in general. The artificiality isn’t just about painted backdrops and CGI mobs. It’s about overly noble characters, their stagy exchanges, the manicured squalor of the poor, and, for the rich, an opulence that might have arrived courtesy of Wayfair. Again, this isn’t something specific to A Tale of Two Cities or its presenters. There seems to be a stylistic monopoly at work among the streamers of “original content” that renders innovative storytelling—and any semblance of cinema—invalid.This afflicts nearly all historical dramas today, and I despise it. I don’t want to watch a period drama with all the characters acting like contemporary people. Part of the allure of period pieces is seeing how people at the time acted and felt, and how profoundly that differs from today.Nor do surface details escape this contamination. A production will invest heavily in authentic townscapes and domestic architecture, only to cap the illusion by adorning the women with modern hairstyles foreign to the epoch. The visual slip is telling, but the psychological anachronism runs deeper: their sensibilities are neatly calibrated to satisfy a contemporary ideological template, entirely severed from historical reality.By the way, I have no problem with Black actors finding employment, but the clear violation of historical accuracy is jarring. The so-called color-blind casting only goes one way. Imagine the outcry if a white actor played Martin Luther King.It is fascinating how we have fallen headlong into such stupidity, how we are wrecking our immense cultural capital without anyone raising an eyebrow or protesting, simply for fear of being called a racist. Though this we actually deserve—we’ve even begged for it! Because I must force my memory to recall any actor playing Jesus who was a Jew, instead of an Aryan with blue eyes and a blond mane. Or an actress playing Cleopatra who was truly Egyptian and not an American beauty like Elizabeth Taylor.George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens: “When one reacts very strongly to an individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have.” While Orwell points to the reader’s kindness toward the author, by the will and grace of the imagination, this gives no moral ground for us to adapt however we please, in accordance with the idiot narcissism of presentism. I remember very well my efforts to reflect the historical truths of a medieval trilogy, thinking how I was going to put down in black and white the fear of being skinned alive in the woods of France by brigands during the Hundred Years’ War.Two thousand years ago, Cicero made the function of the fiction writer quite clear in Latin: docere, delectare, et movere—to show, to entertain, and to move.Call me a dreamer, but if I write, it is because reading Charles Dickens convinces me that one can show without plagiarizing a Wikipedia entry on a historical epoch, and naturally, without appending the clumsy wedges of overt indoctrination; entertain without collapsing into delirious fantasies, endless pursuits, and wholesale slaughter; and move an audience without indulging in the cringing, nowadays-fashionable victimhood, which poses as though we had endured the indignities of a savage African war. That is simply laying it on thick.While Dickens shows, delights, and moves us through the horrors of the workhouse and child labor during the Industrial Revolution—as he did in David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Hard Times—he never once strains to impose a Marxist analysis, which carries a rich, dark irony, given that he was a c