How acceptable is it that movies use references to historical atrocities to evoke emotions? Prof. dr. Kees Ribbens was interviewed about this for Wired. Ribbens is endowed professor in history at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (ESHCC) and senior researcher at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
On Wednesday 3 November, Wired released an article about the use of historical atrocities in movies to evoke emotions amongst the audience. According to Wired author Amelia Tait, Marvel’s Eternals forms just one example of this “distasteful and cheap” practice. In one of its scenes, the movie alludes to the bombing of Hiroshima. As such, Tait contends, it turns a horrible event into a tool that adds pathos to a movie about superheroes.
But why do moviemakers make such allusions in the first place? Ribbens explains that such references to historical brutalities can make movies “less vague, less unapproachable”. “There is perhaps also some laziness on the part of the creators,” he continues, “they know that both world wars almost always appeal to contemporary audiences, because the wars are not only highly recognizable but also act as moral benchmarks for right and wrong.”
The question arises whether there should be rules regarding the loose use of traumatizing events in contemporary moviemaking. Ribbens warns that this is a challenging task: “there are no unambiguous, unchanging criteria”. “We in the West find it OK to wear a T-shirt with a portrait of Mao, but a T-shirt with the image of Hitler—another 20th century mass murderer—is much more sensitive,” he illustrates. In the end, it may be a matter of personal taste. That is to say, not liking Nazi-depictions in modern video games does not mean they are per se distasteful. According to Ribbens, “the imagination and appropriation of the past is not exclusively in the hands of historians.”
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Read the full article on Wired.
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