It should go without saying that, if you lack sufficient expertise in a subject area to notice an inaccuracy in a movie/show/etc., you won’t be bothered by it. Guns would fall into that category for me; you could probably put a distinctly contemporary rifle in a Civil War movie and I’d have no idea. But I’m interested in those inaccuracies people do notice, and how strongly they react, and why.
Here are some for me. I’m a lawyer with lots of experience in child welfare proceedings and a little bit of experience in criminal law. I appreciate how much of the substantive law they get right on Law & Order SVU. The main ways they tend to deviate from reality are in speeding up the proceedings (you get victims testifying at trial with bruises still visible, DNA results coming back while a trial is already underway, etc.) and the incredible smoking gun forensics (the gravel in the suspect’s shoe matches a type of schist found only at the scene of the murder, and it was mixed with a unique type of pollen that conclusively dates his presence there to the night of the attack!) For me, these things might make me giggle in the middle of a Very Serious Moment, but they don’t detract from my enjoyment. It’s fun to imagine a world in which every case is so fast-paced and interesting, and they do a good job of mostly staying inside the lines of what’s at least theoretically possible.
On the other hand, I’ve been rewatching Game of Thrones recently. While I’m OK with the gratuitous female nudity, I’m really annoyed to see so many women with contemporary pubic hair styles, especially the little Hitler mustache that was a mainstay of pornography for about the last two decades before the show was made. Don’t even get me started on the bald armpits. I’ve also always been bothered by the contrast between how dark Danaerys’s eyebrows are compared to her hair, and how she’s able to keep her hair so perfectly in place, in such elaborate hairstyles, while crossing the desert for days on end. I know, it’s a fantasy, but there’s nothing in the story to explain these particular things, and clearly there are characters who manage to get their hair messy so it’s not some universal thing in this world.
I guess the reason it bothers me is that it feeds into this subtle perception that women can just wake up like this. All my life, I’ve heard men whining about how long it takes women to get ready, how much we spend on beauty products and treatments, and how they hate makeup and plastic surgery and other trickery anyway and just want us to be natural. Yet over and over, they choose and praise the looks of women who do those things they complain about. I’m not saying you can’t have any “television pretty.” But maybe you could either slap some larger merkins on the ladies in the brothel, or else show them getting rid of the excess; maybe you could either let the mother of dragons have translucent eyebrows, or show her handmaidens drawing them on with soot while she plots her next move. And maybe the male viewers would survive seeing a couple of merely average-looking women in the mix.
They did it all the time from at least the '30s and into the '70s. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) is the first film that comes to mind that had accurate gun props. Before that, you’d have Winchester 92s and Cold Peacemakers being used in Civil War movies.
All that sex, and I can’t help thinking ‘They weren’t big on bathing,’ and ‘Toilet paper hadn’t been invented yet.’
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a woman in a movie or TV show not wake up from a good night’s sleep without being in full makeup. Marlo Thomas, Mary Tyler Moore, and Elizabeth Montgomery stand out in my mind in particular.
Forget pubic and underarm hair—a lot of women in costume dramas have an anachronistic style of hair on their heads.
I used to laugh at all the gorgeous naked women longing around the palaces in The Tudors. Not a bush, pot belly, stretch mark, louse, or syphilis sore on any of them!
There are letters in the archives from Napoleon to Josephine informing her that he’d be back in a few days so she should please refrain from bathing. Perhaps Yeats had it wrong: love comes in at the nose, not the eyes.
Anyway, while discounting fun, mindless romps like Maverick- Top Gun, the fact that unless Hollywood portrays the US military in the best possible light, no cooperation whatsoever will be extended. So Daryl Poniscan’s realistic depictions of sailors’ lives in The Last Detail and Cinderella Liberty were made in Canada and Seattle-not-Bremerton, respectively. Both From Here to Eternity and A Few Good Men showed sadistic little tin gods of command-level officers being brought to justice, to the praise of the same organization that elevated them in the first place.
My daddy was retired Air Force. He flew in China in WW2, then continued on in the service to eventually working on the launch computers at Vandenberg, AFB. Daddy felt almost obligated to watch every war movie and all TV shows featuring the military.
He then argued with the TV over any inaccuracies.
I ended up marrying a career Army man, and eventually the two of them would both watch war movies. The arguing over inaccuracies now came in stereo.
The most flagrant offense, the one that caused the most yelling by both of them, was any radio transmission ending with “Over and out.”
It’s not just women —Michael Landon’s hair on Little House on The Praire comes to mind. As well as the rest of cast on that show with longish feathered hair. Most men of that time period had short cropped hair and beards.(in fact the real life Charles Ingalls who Michael Landon played had a long full beard.)
I’ve heard about that, relatively often, but I’ve never heard of anyone else besides Napoleon expressing such a sentiment. So I’d need more evidence before I’ll believe that not bathing was ever widely considered sexy.
Toilet paper equivalents go way the heck back. The Romans used a sponge on a stick, for instance. We have records of people using shells and stones. Rabelais, in Gargantua and Pantagruel, devotes an entire chapter to Things To Wipe With. So even though our contemporary “toilet paper” hadn’t been invented, it’s likely that women (and men) of the Old West or Rome or the fantasy kingdoms of Game of Thrones were till wiping their butts with something.
I served aboard US Navy submarines. There has only ever been one accurate submarine movie, and that is Down Periscope. Don’t even get me started on any movie that involves a submarine nuclear reactor, it might as well be Star Trek.
For me it’s getting cars that are the wrong age in a period drama. In the pilot episode of The Americans I spotted a 1990ish car in the background, when the episode was set in 1981. I know most people wouldn’t notice or care, and the pool of cars available for TV producers to rent might be somewhat slim when it comes to cars from that era, but it’s something I notice.
A variation of this is when a car is technically correct for the time period, but looks like an old beater when it would have been fairly new at the time the show is set. In Freaks and Geeks one of the main characters had a beat up looking 1979 Firebird, which only would have been 2-3 years old when the show takes place. Then there’s the opposite, shows where all the cars look brand new, even ones that would have been fairly old at the time they’re set.
Stranger Things is one show that actually does a good job avoiding these problems. It’s set in the mid-80s, characters with lower socioeconomic status drive 1970s era cars that plausibly would have still been on the road during that time, and those cars actually look old.
Foremost is the animal cruelty that went into movies on the silver screen. I don’t care that the machine-gunned CGI cows in Oh Brother Where Art Thou didn’t look as good as the real thing
Continuing the gun inaccuracies from the other thread:
Alvin York used a Colt 1911, but when Gary Cooper played him in 1940, there were no blanks powerful enough to rack the slide and chamber the next round. So they used a smaller pistol that I won’t look up, rather than use live rounds. And this is back on the era when Jimmy Cagney ducked around a corner right before they shredded the bricks with .45 slugs.
Lawrence of Arabia was filmed in Spain, and the Spanish took up production of broomhandle Mausers after the Treaty of Versailles. So of course they shot Peter O’Tool in the arm with a Spanish Mauser.
In superhero shows, I’m not bothered by super-strong heroes lifting buildings (without collapsing) or punching people (without squishing them), but for some reason I’m always annoyed by scenes with a super-fast heroes repositioning people like they’re Barbie dolls (no, you probably can’t move a regular person’s arm at Mach 10 without breaking it).
How about Das Boot? Or Hell Below? I was impressed by the former (especially after I’d been through the U-505), and I’ve read good things about the latter (but can’t find a copy).
I am not bothered by inaccuracies which are harmless mistakes of grammar or spelling or speech.
I am bothered by educated decision makers who deliberately misrepresent (or reduce to simplistic absurdity) complex issues. This perhaps sounds strange after Trump - but I prefer honesty from people in a way that still respects their feelings and humanity. This usually means avoiding deceitful means, and not considering oneself clever by using weaselly half-truths.
