Really Fake

More fuss today in The Globe and Mail (think you may need a subscription for that link) about the veracity, or lack thereof, in Prairie Giant, the CBC docudrama about Tommy Douglas that aired a few months back. People have taken the creators to task for not letting the facts get in the way of a good story, in particular the descendants of the late Saskatchewan Liberal politician Jimmy Gardiner, who object to his portrayal as a redneck drinker. Shirley Douglas (mom of Kiefer Sutherland, daughter of Tommy) also apparently withdrew her support from the project after finding the script played fast and loose with facts. The CBC has withdrawn the mini-series from repeats and DVD sales. The director and screenwriter, as well as the Directors' Guild on their behalf, are trotting out the usual argument that because it's a drama, it doesn't have to be accurate. They're crying censorship.

While I see their point, I admit I'm getting tired of the degree to which history is knowingly distorted in the service of dramatic exigencies. I know it's hard to create a script that sticks to the facts while at the same time making the film easy to follow, entertaining, and affordable. And no one's version of the "truth" is ever the truth. But I think deliberately changing verifiable facts about real people is dangerous, at least when you sell your product as docudrama. A novel that speculates about the inner life of a real person is one thing, and so is a theatrical film based on such a novel. But a CBC miniseries about a politician whose story is intricately tied up with that of the nation raises certain expectations in the viewer that, if not met, will come back to bite the producer in the ass.

Perhaps there's nowhere to draw the line with drama. But I did watch Prairie Giant, and was much more bothered by the anachronistic details that I find so common to these productions, where people in a historical context exhibit the social behaviours of today rather than of the period. For example, there's a scene where a boy, perhaps in his early teens, accompanies Tommy Douglas, then a Baptist minister on the Depression-racked prairie, to bring a box of old clothes to a poor farm family. As they approach the house, the boy says to Douglas that Mrs. So-and-So "must be pregnant."

When I was growing up in small-town Canada in the 1960s, no boy would ever have used the word pregnant when speaking to an adult, much less the Baptist minister. He'd have died of embarrassment first. In fact, no adult I knew ever used that word in front of children. Possibly boys might have used it when speaking to each other, but I can count on one hand the number of times I heard that word from an adult in the first 18 years of my life. A woman was "expecting," in the parlance of the day. Saying "pregnant" was a little bit like saying "toilet," an awkward word for Canadians. And adults avoided pointing out a woman's condition at all to children if they could possibly help it. Am I mistaken in believing that the 1920s and '30s would have been even more conservative than the '60s? (When Demi Moore appeared pregnant and naked on the cover of Vanity Fair in the early 1990s, it marked the first time I'd ever seen a pregnant woman's body, and I was in my mid-30s at the time. Today women's bared, pregnant midriffs are everywhere in the celebrity mags -- I think they're quite beautiful -- and famous women's "bumps" are magnified on tabloid covers. That's a whole other topic.)

There were a number of other gaffes of that nature in Prairie Giant that didn't jibe with my experience of how people used to behave, especially church-going people. Part of the series was dull, and part was rather exciting. Realistic? I don't know. I voted for Tommy in the CBC's Greatest Canadian competition (and he won). He deserves better.