December Issue
By Jawad Asaria for Cinementongraphe
February
“Excuse me mate, were you there?” retorted the venerable director Ridley Scott after fielding a barrage of questions relating to the historical accuracy of Napoleon, a uniquely average film in an industry where only the extremely brilliant and the extremely harrowing are etched into history. Yet, Ridley Scott, though childishly defensive, was correct in drawing the line between the history of Napoleon, the figure, and the events of Napoleon, the film. Ridley Scott is not a historian, but an artist. Ridley Scott’s 2000 film Gladiator, then, is the well from which I have decided to draw contrasting comparisons, rather than Napoleon: A Life, the nine-hundred-and-seventy-six tome by Cambridge PhD historian Lord Roberts, often seen as the most authoritative source on Napoleon’s journey on these temporal lands. However, I’m sure the French will be happy to know, even by analyzing Napoleon not as a historical piece, but a historical fiction, it is still far from unshriven.
The most essential aspect of historical fiction is credibility, not accuracy. Otherwise said, historical fiction can be enjoyed and lauded if the story exists far from realms of commonly accepted objectivity as long as it is also representative of what could plausibly have happened. Gladiator may have completely falsified the existence of Maximus, the titular gladiator that falls from general to slave, the presence of Christianity in the given time period, the weapons of war, the character of Lucila, and the very core of Roman democracy. If each historical inaccuracy rewarded the director with a dollar, dear old Ridley Scott may have had enough money to recoup his multi-million loss at Napoleon’s box office. But, knowing all of these errors, some as egregious as including Xulu war chants, why is Gladiator enjoyed?
It is the credibility of Gladiator. Yes, Maximus was a figment of Scott’s imagination, but he is driven by honor and duty in a fight of man against state. It is something an average audience member will typically associate with Ancient Rome. Yes, the moral damnation cinematically prescribed to Commodus was harsh, but dictatorship, demagoguery, and the fight for political and personal representation are recurring themes in the history books related to Ancient Rome. For every British accent in Gladiator, there existed – verifiable, though morphed, representations of life in Ancient Rome, such as the character of Marcus Aurelius, and the Germanic Wars.
Napoleon is similarly historically inaccurate. Napoleon did not shoot the nose of the sphinx. Napoleon was never at the frontlines. Napoleon never met Wellington. Napoleon never witnessed the execution of Marie Antoinette. Napoleon never forced his opponents through a frozen lake in the Battle of Austerlitz, nor was there even a frozen lake. Napoleon
never came from nothing, nor did he conquer everything. So, why does the average viewer get the impression that Maximus, an entirely fictitious character, is more real than Napoleon, one of the most important people in history? I assert it is because, whilst both Gladiator and Napoleon are not historically accurate, the latter is not credible.
In Napoleon, the eponymous figure’s main conflict is that of a man cuckolded and restrained by Josephine. Napoleon is a gloomy and petulant manchild who continuously makes errors in the battlefield, possesses a Simian repertoire of emotional responses, and seems to have done nothing good for France except for finally being exiled. He is, for all intents and purposes, presented as a buffoon. He sulks and Ridley Scott defiantly claims, through this film, the purported downfall of the ‘Great Man’ archetype , an idea popularized by historian Thomas Carlyle, that history is a carefully sculpted narrative shaped by a few extraordinary men and women. The problem with using Napoleon to dispute this is that he undeniably did shape history, perhaps more than any other single person in Europe. It is most closely equivalent to using Dante Aligheri, the brilliant poet who pined after Beatrice his whole life and featured her in his seminal book the Divine Comedy, to disprove the ‘Unrequited Love Last Forever’ trope. The audience will forgive historical inaccuracies, as we saw with the Gladiator, but they will not forgive historical incredibility. They will not forgive what is not credible. Historical films are not blank slates with which we can put our own characters, narratives, and storylines, only with fancier costumes and a sepia lens. Simply said, Napoleon’s film is dominated by modern social and cinematic themes and, if the audience wanted to see films that disprove the ‘Great Man’ narrative, featuring men as buffoons trapped by strong and independent women, and commit ineffectual acts to no beneficial end for their own social environment, they are hardly starved for choice.
In conclusion, Napoleon should not be judged as a bad piece of history; that would be doing a disservice both to Napoleon and every history-adjacent film that came before and will come after. Rather the reason for its failure exists in its inability to be a good historical fiction. It is simply not credible. Perhaps, the next time Ridley Scott tries to take aim at the ‘Great Man’ narrative, he should turn the gun’s crosshairs on himself, for no single man can reprogram an audience's sensibility to discerning historical credibility in works of fiction with a one-hundred-and-fifty-eight minutes of drivel.