Give me more historical parodies

in praise of genre work

just look at those dainty little feet. give me a Napoleon who is self-conscious about his dainty little feet

A few months ago, we were having dinner in Santa Barbara with a director we know. The director lives in one of the most beautiful homes I’ve ever entered — a wood-and-titanium thing perched on a small cliff over the Pacific Ocean. You walk out on the balcony and see the lazy waves coming in onto the scattered rocks below and everything, I mean everything is beautiful.

We ate dinner at a long wooden table against floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Pacific and the sun sunk into the ocean as we sat there. It was one of those swooning sunsets, all orange and magenta and pink and blood-red. There were about ten of us and somebody put together a batch of gin cocktails and we started talking about movies.

At this time, Babylon had just come out and I wanted to talk about it. Or actually, I wanted to hear what the other people at the table thought about it but that meant I had to move the conversation around to the movie. Nobody at the table loved the film — one woman said it was too long. A short man with a mustache said Babylon felt very much like the film’s Harvard-educated director was trying to prove to us that he went to Harvard and we didn’t.

I thought both of those critiques were accurate and so I nodded along, said something that probably came off as ignorantly simplistic but I didn’t mind because, really, I only wanted to hear what the director thought of Babylon. But when the conversation turned to him, he said something like I don’t know, a lot of people are saying a lot of things — this director is a rare sort in that he’s brilliant and exceptionally kind and thoughtful but not a talkative type. It wasn’t until we started talking about something else that I heard him mutter under his breath it’ll be another ten years before anybody can make another movie about old Hollywood.

That muttered observation was so cutting, so true, that at the first lull in the conversation, I ran off to the bathroom and jotted it down in my notebook. Because of course Babylon was terrible. Astoundingly so. This is a movie with Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Toby Maguire, Jean Smart and Olivia Wilde. And even they couldn’t save it from itself. The London Standard called it “a disaster of biblical proportions, precisely because it had so much potential.”

The potential, obviously is old Hollywood. It was a real place, it really happened with real people and it has all the enchantment of Camelot. So why did the director feel the need to invent all these characters and force us to care about them? I was bothered by this for a while and then I remembered that bit in one of the Karl Ove Knausgaard books where he talks about his growing frustration with fiction. It goes like this:

“Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought, this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs, and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news, and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not … the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it saw the same. This sameness, which was our world, was being mass-produced. The uniqueness, which they all talked about, was thereby invalidated, it didn’t exist, it was a lie. Living like this, with the certainty that everything could equally well have been different, drove you to despair.”

Of course, Karl Ove Knausgaard is being overly dramatic — that’s kind of his thing. But still, why invent all this fiction when you can just play a bit with the truth? That, in my opinion, would have been far more satisfying. Maybe that’s why Once Upon a Time in Hollywood worked when Babylon didn’t. The historical parody element of it. Give me more of that, give me dark historical parodies all day long.

I got to thinking about this because I’m really big into this show called The Great on Hulu. It does nothing exceptional, just toys around with the story of Catherine the Great. Some of the characters were real people but they’re not played in their real roles. And at other points, the show straight-up picks jokes at the behest of history. For example, there’s one side scene during the palace coup where a drunkard named Molotov invents the Molotov cocktail (it’s actually named after a Soviet-era politician). And in real life, Voltaire and Catherine the Great were pen-pals. In The Great, Voltaire arrives in the palace and fucks his way through the Russian court.

Because the thing about history is that it’s thick with characters who undoubtedly led funnier lives than they have in the history books. Sure, power and world domination are very noble aspirations, but they’re also profoundly stupid and the people chasing them are as often as not, bumbling jackasses.¹ I love the scenes of high-stakes historical black comedy. Like the coup scene in Death of Stalin or the Hollywood communist plot scene in Hail Caesar.

Give me more of that. Because it doesn’t take much to make your way into the history books. Consider freshman Congressman George Santos. He’s probably the most successful political con man of the 21st century (depending on whether you count Donald Trump as a con man). But he’s no genius (and neither is Trump). George Santos is a bumbling idiot, who happened ass-backwards into Congress. That’s funny. And, as awful is it is to say, so is the catch-22 of Dianne Feinstein — if Dianne Feinstein had any awareness of the world at all, she’d leave the Senate. And yet she won’t leave the Senate because her mental capacity has deteriorated beyond that point. That’s funny too. I mean, it’s awful and it’s dark. But it’s also funny.

Maybe it’s too soon to make a show about senile Californian senators or swindling New York congressmen. And maybe nobody will be able to make another movie about old Hollywood for another ten years, but history is rife with material. Give me a comedy about Caligula’s antics and the guys who finally assassinated him. Or about the Children's crusade or the Great Emu War or the Oyster Wars or the Men’s Marathon at the 1904 Olympics or that point in the 15th century Catholic Church when there were three popes. Hollywood doesn’t need to invent all these new worlds for us to laugh and cry over, we already have one that does all that.

PS. — also, for The New Republic last week, I wrote about the schism between Republican billionaires and voters. read it if you feel like it.

1. I wrote about this when I was at Playboy, but that’s why everybody in DC loved Veep, because it parodied all the true parts of Washington