I saw the recent 300 Rise of an Empire as more of a popcorn flick. I did like the 300 graphic novel and film. Obviously these are not historical documentaries. But it got me thinking about a couple of things:
They say history is written by the victors. It seems like its human nature to glorify victories by our own culture/civilization/nation/etc. The events often get exaggerated, stories mistranslated or re-told through the lens of a different culture. Over hundreds or thousands of years, the end results might have nothing to do with the original event. Or would they?
I was talking to my wife about the movie 300, and how a Spartan might interpret our modern story. She said he wouldn’t understand any of it (aside from obviously the language, mysterious moving pictures, etc) because too much of our present culture would be inserted to be relevant. I said I wasn’t so sure, because the whole point of telling tall tales is to make them larger than life. Maybe that Spartan would be mighty impressed people 3,000 years later were talking about some decisive battle fought between 300 Spartans and half a million Persians. Who knows?
It got me thinking about the future. How might future generations bastardize our own era? I mean, people can’t accept historical facts about things that happened in the present, so I can’t imagine that people 3,000 years from now will be terribly objective about it either. What kind of popcorn flick would people have beamed into their brains?
On a more serious note, I secretly hope that Hitler will remain the great symbol of pure evil in history and not be supplemented by someone committing worse crimes against humanity.
Oh man, I am imagining a futuristic series like Pirates of the Caribbean-
The Hero and Jack Bin Laden are fighting with plasma scimtars in some vaguely-mediterranean looking place
Hero has Jack Bin Laden cornered Jack Bin Laden pulls out his smart phone, pushes button, a nearby car explodes
Hero: You blew up my hovercar!
Jack Bin Laden: shrugs Al Queda!
We’ve already seen in a recent thread how people with a 21st century sensibility couldn’t imagine the mechanics of how someone might end up being kidnapped into slavery without getting the police involved. I imagine the details of many current political processes and events will inevitably be lost (in the popular mind if not to historians), so that, for example, World Wars I and II, the Maoist revolution and the Cold War, all sort of get mashed together into one century-long intermittent conflict.