July 31, 2006
More on Fred Smoler Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:00 PM EST Taking up a number of points raised by Fred Smoler in his recent posts:
1. “Is it damning to note that ‘the whole trial [was] basically a publicity stunt?” No, of course not. That’s why I never said it was damning. Nor did I suggest that Darrow was wrong, or say anything about Winston Churchill or Dred Scott, or express an opinion on Scopes’s heroism, or make any attempt to defend Tennessee’s legislature.
2. “Does the fact that Bryan didn’t consider himself humiliated mean that he was not humiliated in the eyes of history?” Yes, it does. Eleanor Roosevelt said it best: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Lawrence and Lee, those champion liars, depicted their Bryan character stammering and crying on the witness stand, so greatly surprised by the Darrow character’s elementary questions that the audience turns on him. Many other historians, scholarly and popular, describe or allude to something similar. But it never happened. The real Bryan never cried, never sputtered, and fielded all Darrow’s questions, which he had been studying and writing about for years, with ease. The audience cheered him loudly and repeatedly and never expressed the slightest disapproval. That doesn’t mean Bryan was right, but it does mean that he was not humiliated by any stretch of the imagination. This is a fact, not an opinion, and since history is concerned with facts, “in the eyes of history,” as in the eyes of everything else, Bryan was not humiliated.
3. “Does the play unduly distort history when it compresses the sprawling chaos of real cross-examination into an ahistorically-dramatic form?” No, the simple act of compressing the cross-examination is not what makes the play a ludicrous piece of propaganda. What makes it a ludicrous piece of propaganda is that it falsifies virtually every fact from the real Scopes trial because the true facts of the case did not suit Lawrence and Lee’s political views.
4. In his post about technology, Mr. Smoler says in the second paragraph that technologies take a long time to develop. That’s exactly what I said was happening in the 1970s and 1980s. So do we disagree? If so, he doesn’t say how.
5. Cable and VCRs were important, to be sure, but I don’t think they had anywhere near the impact that television itself did. A few successful TV series still dominate the entertainment landscape, just as they did in the 1970s. In fact, VCRs and DVDs have contributed to this by making it easier to tape episodes you missed and watch boxed sets of previous seasons.
6. Precision-guided missiles are also important, but the item I wrote was concerned with consumer technologies. My point was that a description of an average person’s daily life in the mid-1970s could fairly easily pass for the early to mid-1990s. The two eras were not exactly identical, to be sure, but they were fairly close, whereas when you go from the early 1990s to today, the differences in the average person’s daily life are enormous. VCRs and cable have given consumers much greater choice about what to watch and when to watch it, but with or without them, you still spend four or five hours a day sitting on the sofa watching bubbleheaded actresses try to resuscitate stale jokes. But mobile phones, the Internet, e-mail, and high-level computer games were things that, for the great mass of people, did not exist 15 years ago and are now ubiquitous. That’s all I was saying.
July 31, 2006
Inherit the Wind, Continued Posted by Ellen Feldman at 01:30 PM EST Fred Smoler's excellent piece on Inherit the Wind makes me hang my head in shame. He is quite right that even if Darrow and Scopes were not the flawless heroes portrayed in the movie, they did wear the white hats in this particular battle. He is also correct that Darrow makes clear Bryan's former greatness, and I think that aspect of the script does a good job of showing how complicated this towering figure was.
Perhaps what I was bemoaning was my own naiveté. Inherit the Wind was one of my favorite movies of my youth. I still love it. And I think I felt betrayed when I discovered that the trial was, not a publicity stunt—I think that's too harsh—but a calculated undertaking by organized forces. I say this with admiration, not condemnation. The play and the movie appeared at a time when the American public was still willing to view leaders as heroes. Their private lives were, well, private. The organized efforts of a group of people working for a cause were viewed as less admirable, for some reason, than one man’s, or in this case two men’s, fight against ignorance. Or perhaps the truth is simply less dramatic. An interesting question is, if the movie were made today, with all our supposed cynicism, would it be shot any differently?
Smoler is entirely correct that any play or movie that depicted actual trial testimony would send viewers running to the exits in droves. (Having just finished reading 800 pages of testimony from one of the Scottsboro trials, I can attest to that fact.) And I certainly never meant to suggest that Inherit the Wind was alternate history. I think it’s a stirring portrayal of a critical moment in our past. It has probably reached millions of people who would never have opened a book on the Scopes trial. If it taught the story in primary colors rather than subtle shades of gray, that’s a small price to pay. Thanks to Fred Smoler, I remember that I find much more to love in the play and movie than to censure.
July 31, 2006
Coincidences Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:20 AM EST One of the nice things about writing history instead of fiction is that while what a novelist writes has to be believable, what a historian writes only has to be true, however improbable. I confess to a great weakness for coincidences that are incredibly unlikely but nevertheless happened. Here are a few that I have collected.
1) Probably the most famous coincidence in American history is that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day. And it was not just any day but July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The cherry on top is that Adams and Jefferson were the only two signers of the Declaration to later become President. We will never know, of course, but I’ve always suspected that both Jefferson and Adams, old and rapidly failing though they were (Adams was 90, Jefferson 83) were aware of what day it was and perhaps at some level decided that it was a good day to die. President James Monroe also died on July 4, in 1831. So more than 8 percent of deceased American Presidents have died on the nation’s birthday, and three of the first five did.
2) The town of Codell in western Kansas had never been struck by a tornado until May 20, 1916, when one roared through town. A year later, again on May 20, the town was hit a second time. On May 20, 1918, it was struck for a third time. It has not been hit since.
3) In the 1940s two of the mightiest and most iconic of American industrial corporations were General Motors and General Electric. The president of GM from 1941 until 1953 was a man named Charles E. Wilson. The president of General Electric from 1940 to 1950 (except from 1942 until 1945, when he worked for the government) was a man named . . . Charles E. Wilson. They were unrelated and were known as Engine Charlie and Electric Charlie to keep them separate. (Runner up in this category, perhaps, is the fact that Chief Justice Earl Warren was succeeded in office by Chief Justice Warren Earl Burger.)
4) It is a very rare event for a meteorite to hit a building, for the fall of a meteorite is very uncommon and buildings occupy only a tiny percentage of the surface of the earth. Nonetheless, one weighing 350 grams (about three-quarters of a pound) struck a house in Wethersfield, Connecticut, on April 8th, 1971. Only 11 years later, on November 8, 1982, a second house in Wethersfield was also hit by a meteorite, this one weighing 2760 grams (about six pounds). Wethersfield is only 12.4 square miles in area.
I would be very happy indeed to have readers contribute more historical coincidences, preferably with citations. The more improbable (but true) the better.
July 29, 2006
More on Technology Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:40 AM EST Fred Schwarz wrote that “the 1970s and 1980s were an era of unusually slow technological change—or, more accurate still, that they were characterized by great advances that did not reach the saturation point until the end of the century.” John Steele Gordon concurred: “There had been a hiatus for four decades in apparent major technological change from the introduction of television (effectively late forties) to the late eighties, when the personal computer began to enter American households in large numbers.” I am not sure I agree. Fred Schwarz referenced “railroads, telegraph, telephone, electric lighting, automobiles, aviation, movies, radio, television,” but these technologies were developed over the course of more than a century. Stephenson’s steam locomotive was 1829, and however you date the invention of television, a contentious subject, in 1933 there were only a couple of hundred TV sets on the planet. Generations passed between the use of steam for cotton spinning and its use for rail travel, another generation before modern industrial chemistry (when I was in school, that was called “the second industrial revolution”), and another before mass use of electricity. I am not sure that the 1970s and 1980s were particularly impoverished as two-decade periods go. John Steele Gordon talked about technologies that affected everyday life. Were there any such big new technologies in the 1970s and 1980s? I have thought of a couple: the VCR and the spread of cable television. Between them, I think, these irretrievably changed the world I grew up in, which had three national TV networks sustained by advertising. I spent a fair amount of my 1950s and 1960s childhood knowing that a given show was broadcast at a given hour. If you wanted to be part of the national conversation, you had to be in front of a TV at certain times each week, but the VCR, very widely distributed by the end of the 1980s, meant that you could watch a program whenever you wanted, and fast forward through the commercials that financed network TV. Cable TV is an older technology, but it took off in the 1970s and 1980s. The proliferation of cable meant the segmentation of the market and the proliferation of what I once heard described as “narrow-casting.” Between them, I think those two technologies shattered a mass culture made possible by broadcast TV as it existed in the decades after World War II. In the first postwar decades, national news programs had to avoid offending any large number of people; but narrow-casting means that you can name your poison, Fox or John Stewart. Three big networks provided a remarkable number of common cultural reference points for people all over a very large country, but I wonder how long TV will continue to do that. Another key technology, developed over decades, really arrived in the 1970s and 1980s: precision guided munitions. Wire-guided antitank weapons and infrared- and radar-guided surface to air missiles were over-touted when they first came to public notice, in the October War of 1973, spawning predictions that they would end the effectiveness of tanks and fighter bombers, and that hasn’t happened yet. But PGMs include smart bombs, and those have had an enormous effect. Precision-guided munitions were used very late in the Vietnam War, and while they have been replacing unaimed bombs ever since, the process has been slow: only 10 percent of munitions dropped in the first Gulf War were PGMs. But 90 percent of the munitions used in Afghanistan were PGMs. During World War II, indeed during the Vietnam War, hundreds and sometimes thousands of bombs were necessary to destroy specific targets. American air-launched munitions now generally land within at least a few yards of their targets, and in many cases a single bomb will destroy a target. In the wake of frustrating counter-insurgency warfare in Iraq, PGMs have not impressed most Americans as technology that has transformed the strategic environment. But from the perspective of a Chinese general or admiral looking at the speed and totality of the American victory over Saddam Hussein, PGMs apparently look rather different: They are a technology that has changed the world, by vastly increasing American effectiveness in conventional warfare.
July 28, 2006
More on Inherit the Wind Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:40 PM EST I have been mulling over Fred Schwartz’s and Ellen Feldman’s strictures on Inherit the Wind, and I am stuck with the feeling that they are a little too hard on the dramatic and historical vision expressed by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, who wrote the original play. It is true that Bryan was a great man–and my memory is that in the play Darrow insists on that very fact. But Bryan was not being a great man when he sought to employ state power to suppress the teaching of modern biology. Darrow, too had feet of clay–most people do–but he was fighting a very good fight in Tennessee. The play does not note the clay feet, but I do not think the play is obliged to do so. Would a play about the Munich crisis be obligated to note Churchill’s idiocies about Gandhi? Over Munich, Churchill was right, and heroic–as Darrow was in Tennessee.
Is it all that damning to note that “the whole trial [was] basically a publicity stunt”? Finding a test case is an absolutely legitimate tactic, and publicizing a perceived abuse of state power is what citizens in a democracy are supposed to do. Does the fact that Scopes didn’t risk imprisonment make him no kind of hero? I think Scopes was braver than I’d have been, if my teaching job was at stake, not to mention in a world where the Klan was a real force. Is it much of a defense of the local legislature to note that Tennessee did not criminalize all classroom teaching that conflicted with Biblical literalism, only some such speech? Not by my lights. Should the Tennessee legislature be in the clear because the 1925 Supreme Court might have upheld its anti-evolution law? Well, the 1857 Supreme Court upheld the Missouri legislature against Dred Scott, and that hasn’t done much for posterity’s opinion of the ante-bellum Missouri legislature.
Does the fact that Bryan didn’t consider himself humiliated mean that he was not humiliated in the eyes of history? The play, if I remember it correctly, thinks that Bryan damaged his historical legacy. When I was a boy, that was still true, and I suspect it will remain true. The play has a tragic sense of Bryan and a nice, complicated sense of populism: Bryan articulated some of the best and the worst of what many of his countrymen thought. If the people were always right, and the elites always wrong, or if the reverse was true, history and politics would admittedly be a lot simpler. The play has a figure–Hornbeck, the Mencken-surrogate–who shows the potential moral limitation and imaginative poverty of elite sneering at popular passion and piety. The play may too simply make Darrow a Golden Mean, but it does not cheaply mock Bryan.
Does the play unduly distort history when it compresses the sprawling chaos of real cross-examination into an ahistorically-dramatic form? All the litigators I know bemoan juries’ expectations that Perry Mason is liable to show up in front of them, but dramas are supposed to dramatize, and they necessarily do so at a price in verisimilitude. How much that matters is lost when Lawrence and Lee compress and sharpen that confrontation? It’s a matter of taste, I suppose, but I am not offended. It is good theater, and I don’t think the play’s version of history is anything like fanciful enough to call it alternate history.
Ellen Feldman wisely notes that a defense of Bryan resting on the fact that 1920s evolutionary theory had some nasty links with Social Darwinism and the Nazi version of that creed remains implausible. The play indeed has some heroes–Darrow and Scopes–and in 1925 those two men, by my lights, remain more heroic than those who defended the state’s power to punish, however lightly, a man who was teaching plausible science in a public school. Liberal elites can be wrong about all sorts of things, but I am not sure they are wrong in admiring Darrow and Scopes. There is, in any case, a notion that good history does not judge any actors right or wrong, with 20/20 hindsight, or judge at all; it instead seeks to understand the past in its own terms. On that theory, Bryan’s self-understanding is most of what matters. Whether or not that is a good theory of history, I do not think it can be fairly deployed against historical dramatists.
July 28, 2006
Time and Technology and Groceries Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST Fred Schwarz the other day noted that technology develops in fits and starts, and that is surely true, especially if measured by technology that affects everyday life. He also noted that there had been a hiatus for four decades in apparent major technological change from the introduction of television (effectively late forties) to the late eighties, when the personal computer began to enter American households in large numbers.
I can bear witness to this, being about as young as an American can be and still remember the very first time I saw television (it was late in 1949 and the program featured good guys in white hats chasing bad guys in black hats across a desert landscape, doubtless located close to Los Angeles). I can also remember, circa 1952, pointing out to a friend that the Oldsmobile parked on east 82nd Street in New York that belonged to my aunt’s brother had, mirabile dictu, only two foot pedals because it had an “automatic” shift. The switch from dial phones to push-button models came along about 20 years later. But those are relatively small potatoes.
Of course, much was going on below the surface. The first TVs used vacuum tubes. The transistor soon made them cheaper, smaller, and much more trouble-free (TV repairmen used to do a brisk business coming to people’s houses and fixing whatever ailed the set, usually a blown tube; today that occupation is as dead as the iceman). In 1969 the microprocessor once again radically reorganized and miniaturized the insides of television sets and other electronic devices.
Then, as the microprocessor got ever smaller and cheaper and more densely populated with transistors (in other words, as Moore’s Law worked its inevitable way), they started showing up in more and more applications that affected everyday life, beginning with the handheld calculator that sent the slide rule to the Smithsonian beginning about 1972. (And good riddance to it. I never could get the hang of a slide rule.)
Then for the last 20 years there has been an incredible flood of everyday technologies undreamed of when the push-button phone was the newest wonder of the world: CDs, cordless phones, cell phones, GPS systems in everything from automobiles to dog collars, DVDs, satellite TV, TIVO (imagine telling someone who died in, say, 1970, that you can pause live TV when your mother-in-law calls and wants to tell you, at great length, her latest adventures).
Today I was introduced to the newest child of the microprocessor and fell instantly in love with it: the Shopping Buddy. It’s about the size of a book and fits into a shelf on the handle of a supermarket shopping cart. You scan in your store card and then scan items as you add them to your cart. It keeps a running total of how much you have spent and, because it’s hooked up to a GPS system, tells you about specials in each aisle as you enter it, and other useful information. You can even send in your shopping list ahead of time and it will remind you of what’s on it as you pass the right sections.
When you’re done, you just go to the automatic checkout counter, scan in your card again, transfer the information from the Shopping Buddy to the main computer—you push one button to do that—it debits your bank account, you load up, and off you go.
For someone who can remember grocery stores where the grocer, while you stood at the counter, went and got the items for you (using a gizmo on a long stick to reach things on high shelves), it is truly a new age.
July 26, 2006
How Young Is Young? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:50 AM EST Yesterday, by a vote of 65 to 34, the United States Senate passed a bill making it a criminal act to transport a minor across state lines for the purpose of evading parental consent or notification laws governing abortion in her home state. By a vote of 270 to 157 the House passed similar legislation last year (HR748, #144, 4/27/05).
The House bill goes a step further in requiring that out-of-state doctors notify the parents of underage patients and wait 24 hours before performing the procedure, to give the parents an opportunity to intercede. The House bill also allows parents to sue out-of-state doctors who do not comply with these regulations. If the two chambers work out their differences in a conference committee, President Bush has indicated that he will sign the legislation.
Before I proceed, I’d like to make clear that it’s not my intention to delve into a discussion about abortion. Reasonable people can disagree about its morality and about the legal reasoning behind Roe v. Wade. My historical interest in the recent congressional votes has to do with age.
The National Right to Life Committee claims that the proposed law would apply to underage women in 26 states that currently enforce parental notification or consent laws, though by my count, using data provided by the Center for Reproductive Rights, 34 states have such laws on the books pertaining to women under the age of 18 (several other states have such laws pertaining to women under the age of 16 or 17).
Under current law, a 17-year-old can enlist in the armed services. Even conceding that the law requires 17-year-old enlistees to receive parental consent before joining one of armed forces, is there not a contradiction in allowing a young woman to fight and die in Iraq, but denying her the right to make her own health care decisions?
Again, this isn’t about abortion. It’s about age. For purposes of this discussion, women have a constitutional right to abortions because the Supreme Court says so. To quote the late Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, “the Constitution is what the judges say it is.”
Americans engaged in a similar debate in 1970, when Senators Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Birch Bayh (D-Ind.) fastened a provision onto the re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. Their argument was twofold. First, in Bayh’s words, by virtue of near-universal high school education, young people were “better prepared to exercise the responsibilities of citizenship than at any previous time.” Second, if 18-year-olds could fight and die in Vietnam, they should be given the chance to vote in federal and state elections.
So convincing was this argument that when the Supreme Court ruled in 1970 that the voting proviso was constitutionally binding only in presidential elections, Congress quickly passed a constitutional amendment lowering the voting age to 18, and in just three months, 38 states ratified what became the new Twenty-Sixth Amendment.
There’s something perverse about Congress authorizing a war in Iraq but denying full constitutional rights to women who are eligible to fight—and who may, in fact, die—in that same war. The same applies to drinking laws, I suppose. Since the Iraq war began, over 2,500 American servicemen have been killed in action. Of these casualties, many were not yet 21 years old, the legal drinking age in America.
Social historians have done some fine work demonstrating that definitions of childhood, adulthood, and adolescence are socially constructed ideas, and fluid ones at that. It’s therefore imperative that we reexamine our laws with an open mind. The contradictions governing our current ideas about age need to be ironed out, for, surely, if someone is old enough to take a bullet in a foreign war, she is old enough to make her own medical decisions or order a beer.
July 25, 2006
Nixon: A Gracious Loser? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:15 PM EST Apropos of our ongoing dialogue on Richard Nixon, it’s worth mentioning that some relatively new scholarship has changed our understanding of the 1960 election, whose results, John Steele Gordon reminded us in his last post, were painfully close and potentially tainted.
Around the time of the 2000 election, the historian David Greenberg and the author Gerald Posner published articles in two online journals, Slate and Salon (respectively), revealing that Nixon had not accepted his loss to John F. Kennedy so graciously after all. Contrary to Nixon’s carefully designed election lore, President Dwight Eisenhower did not encourage his Vice President to contest Kennedy’s victory; Ike rejected a recount a day after the results were announced. Instead, while Nixon maintained public silence on the matter, his campaign aides Bob Finch, Len Hall, and Peter Flanigan began investigating possible irregularities in Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey, while Republican national chairman Thruston Morton began officially seeking recounts in all three states.
The tangled history of November and December 1960 is a fascinating one, best chronicled in Greenberg’s and Posner’s articles, which can be found at Slate and Salon.
July 25, 2006
Richard Nixon Reconsidered II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:20 PM EST Oh, dear. Once again Joshua Zeitz and I agree, this time about Richard Nixon. This is getting scary. Grasping the essence of Richard Nixon’s character is indeed difficult. As I suggested, we need a Shakespeare to fully capture it, and Shakespeares are always in very short supply. Nixon will never rank high in the presidential ratings that come out periodically (the most recent that I know of is Presidential Leadership: Ranking the Best and the Worst in the White House, edited by James Taranto, to which I contributed the chapter on Martin Van Buren). But he will rank high, probably very high, in the biography index. And what, you may well ask, is the biography index? It’s a thought experiment. Imagine that it’s the year 2106. Stack up all the biographies that have been written about twentieth-century Presidents and compare the stacks. The first one, Theodore Roosevelt (McKinley barely made it into the new century, so we’ll ignore him), will have a very big stack, due both to a highly successful Presidency and to one of the most extraordinary personalities and lives in American history. William Howard Taft will have a much smaller one. His Presidency was largely a failure (although he later made a very successful chief justice, a job he vastly preferred), and no one has ever accused him of having an extraordinary personality. Wilson will have a large stack because of the events during his time in office, despite his schoolmarmish and self-centered nature. FDR will have an enormous stack, of course, and Calvin Coolidge not much of one. (Told of Coolidge’s death, in 1933, The New Yorker writer Dorothy Parker is said to have replied, “How can they tell?”) Among more recent Presidents, Jimmy Carter will, I predict, have a very small stack. His Presidency was largely a disaster and his personality whiny and humorless. Ronald Reagan will have a massive stack. And so will Richard Nixon. Like all politicians, Nixon was motivated by a yearning for power. But like Bill Clinton and unlike Ronald Reagan, he had no clear, articulated philosophy he wanted to govern by. What strikes me about Richard Nixon above all is two things. First, there was his utter determination to reach the White House despite numerous political handicaps. He wasn’t good looking, he wasn’t naturally gregarious (indeed just the opposite), he was buttoned-up to a fault—remember the picture of him walking on a California beach wearing a suit and tie—and he had a mean streak that he couldn’t, and often didn’t try to, hide. Second, he had a self-destructive impulse that was truly Shakespearean. Over and over again he made a giant step in the direction of his goal, and time after time he came close to disaster by his own actions. Plucked from relative political obscurity by Eisenhower to be his running mate, only the famous Checkers speech saved his place on the ticket when a slush fund scandal broke. Nominated for President in 1960 he ran a very bad campaign, and Kennedy barely squeaked out a victory. (Memo to Al Gore: One could argue that Nixon’s refusal to contest his very close losses in Texas and Illinois, where fraud was almost certainly involved, was his finest and most unselfish hour.) He lost the governor’s race in California in 1962 and held a maudlin press conference where he said that the press “won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore.” Yet six years later he became the only man in American history who, having lost his first run for the White House, went on to win it in a second try. Four years later he carried 49 states in a landslide. He had reached the mountaintop of American politics. And then came Watergate. Named for a luxury Washington office and apartment complex (and a singularly ugly one, I might add), Watergate was by orders of magnitude the greatest scandal in American political history. Indeed it was so great—so all-consuming of media attention at the time, for month after month after month—that it has entered the language not just as a word, but, far more impressively, as a suffix. Today Merriam-Webster defines -gate as indicating a “political scandal often involving the concealment of wrongdoing.” Forced by his own gross mismanagement of the scandal to become the only President to resign the office—for impeachment had become certain in the House, and conviction near certain in the Senate—his life’s ambition was in irretrievable ruin. Nevertheless Nixon picked himself up, dusted himself off, and spent the last two decades of his life in a successful effort to build a reputation as a foreign-policy sage. Richard Nixon may not have been likeable or even admirable in many ways, and he will carry a scarlet W down through eternity. But he was never boring, which is why historians—and, I hope, some future Shakespeare—will be writing about him for a very long time.
July 25, 2006
Time, Life, Books II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:15 AM EST I couldn’t agree more with Fred Schwarz about letting the reader know where he is in time as well as in space.
A few years ago a movie called The English Patient won every Oscar in sight. I hated it.
It begins with a biplane flying over the desert. I knew it was about war, and I immediately assumed, given the biplane, that it must be World War I. For the next hour I sat in the theater becoming ever more confused until something finally clued me in that it was World War II we were dealing with. A simple caption (The Western Desert of Egypt—1937) would have done the trick and allowed me to enjoy the movie. Actually I doubt that, as the movie was endless and a great example of a director (Anthony Minghella) so in love with every frame he shoots that he makes the audience watch them all. His later movie Cold Mountain had exactly the same problem, with whole sections that were completely irrelevant to the story he was telling.
One movie that famously if quite unnecessarily tells its audience when as well as where it takes places is Star Wars, which begins with a crawl saying “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Of course, that distant galaxy was technologically so far ahead of planet earth today, that the fact that the movies takes place “a long time ago” is completely irrelevant. Oh, well, it was a great beginning to a great movie anyway.
An author who was notorious for not setting his books in a particular time was Charles Dickens. With a few exceptions, such as A Tale of Two Cities, his novels are quite free of time references. And technology seldom helps. Dickens did not like the “heaving, tumbling age” (his contemporary James Gordon Bennett’s phrase) in which he lived, with its rapid technological change (even, apparently, the technologies that made Dickens the richest author who had ever lived). He seldom mentions things like railroads, telegraphs, steamships, indoor plumbing, etc. Instead his novels exist in a sort of temporal limbo.
Of course, being the storytelling genius that he was, it doesn’t matter. For less celestial talents, it usually does.
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