For years Hollywood has been exaggerating the real story to create a popular movie that is appealing and interesting to audiences and makes them $$$. That glimpse of perfection that Hollywood movies portray is appealing to audiences because it creates a sense of false hope and that everything's okay. A great example of the fabrication and exaggeration of Hollywood movies is Thirteen Days.
The movie Thirteen Days is an inaccurate depiction of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The role of Kenneth O’Donnell (the movie’s in his point of view), is inflated. O’Donnell did not play a significant role. According to Arthur Schlesinger Jr O’Donnell, “had nothing to do with the Cuban missile crisis.” People suspect that the reason behind the inflation of O’Donnell’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis may have been that his son Kevin was bankrolling a buyout of Beacon Entertainment which made the movie. Others say that the reason O’Donnell’s character’s role was significant in the movie was because he was an “everyman”, someone average that was on the inside that the audience could relate to. The filmmakers showed us O’Donnell’s family life and that he went to church, so I can see how they’re trying to portray him as an “everyman” but it’s strange because he’s someone who's in the president’s inner circle. How can we relate to someone who can control the fate of our world? A completely exaggerated and fictional scene from the movie was when O’Donnell called the Navy pilot about to go on a low-altitude flight over Cuba, and told him to lie about getting shot if he did get shot because otherwise the US would go to war with the Soviet Union. The concealment of sensitive information like this is illegal and that scene was absolutely fictional. These are only some of the edits that filmmakers have made to add appeal and dramatize what happened in October of 1962. Although changes to the storyline may not seem like a big deal, they risk influencing the history of the Cold War that gets handed down to the next generation. For someone who knows nothing about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days puts these exaggerated and fabricated events ideas into your head. The audience will not know which events are accurate and which aren’t leading them to believe the story that you give them. Eventually as the story is passed down through the years, the original story will have been lost because one exaggerated story will build upon another. Here are three tips to avoid being suckered into Hollywood Dramatization: 1. Know your history Read some articles prior to the viewing of the movie. Educate yourself about the historical event that occurred and while watching the movie compare and contrast the movie to what actually happened. It’s like watching the movie version of your favorite book comparing the two and screaming when they change something because it was already so perfect (not always like that in history though unfortunately history can be a little bland….). 2. Take a minute and think….Could this actually have happened? Often times all it takes is a little common sense to figure out if the events that occur in a movie actually happened because they’re so exaggerated. 3. Go with the flow
Sometimes just going along with the storyline the movie offers and letting it entertain you isn’t a bad idea as long as you’re aware that you shouldn’t believe everything you seen in movies:)
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AuthorHibah Shafi is a Senior at New Technology High School. Archives
May 2019
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