In 1644, John Milton was confident that truth would emerge in a free
marketplace of ideas. Though falsehood might grapple for a while, human rationality
would eventually make the distinctions, since the universe could not end on a lie.
In 1985, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck began to forge a new vocabulary based on clinical
observations that desrroy their lives. 14 Perhaps human rationality is not as powerful
as the great liberal democrats believed. And if not, is truthtelling all the more
a moral imperative, as fragile of understanding as we are?
Is the docudrama genre a powerful vehicle for reviving our culture's important
stories, or a cheap distortion based on television' s insatiable need for new material?
In favor of docudrama: How many students would know or care about kent
State's Allison, jeff, Sandy and Bill were it not for the efforts of NBC, albeit profit-tinged,
to give new life to that fateful spring weekend in northeast Ohio? Few, we
suspect. How many dry eyes and stoic hearts walked out of theaters after Missis-sippi
Burning (a film about three murdered civil rights workers that fictionalized
the FBI investigation) unmoved by the suffering and careless about the future of racial justice?
Journalist Bill Minor covered the Freedom Summer of 1964 and won
the Elijah Lovejoy award of "most courageous weekly editor in the nation" after
his exposre of Klan activity in Mississippi" He defended Mississippi Burning as "a
powerful portrayal. "For viewers who depend on film for stories not experienced
firsthand, the movie "got the spirit righe."15
if a file re-creates the texture of an event such that participants can affirm
the veracity of context and stuggle, is the not sufficient? History is more than
mere facts, and no story corresponds exactly to events. Perhaps the docudrama is
our best vehicle for keeping at bay the who claim the Holocaust, for example,
never occurred. yet audiences can do amazing things with a story One high
school audience admitted to believing after seeing Stone's version of the 1960s,
that Lyndon Johnson had cospired to murder john Kennedy. When congronted
with that reaction, Oliver Stone replied: "I am not responsible for the interpretation
that an audience takes away. Sometimes it [the film] is nisinterpreted."16 But
in this case, apparently, no one is saying.
The crucial variable is the judgment of the subject. If a docudrama wins the
approval of those closest to the real-life drama, viewers are assured that a truthful
perspective on events survives the dranatic process. If the subject cannot recog-
nize his of those closest to the all the romantic cliches and garbled characterizations,
we rightly worry that rampant revisionism threatens to obscure and distort the
meaning of the past. Morally sensitive producers of docudrama will incorporate
fictional elements without padding history of violating the pain of those whose
stories they tell.