Hitchens: King's Speech Is Still Bad History
Christopher Hitchens writes in Slate:
Brush even a fingertip against the balloon of Hollywood ambition and prize-mania, and it can burst with gratifying speed, emitting huge gusts of narcissism and megalomania. Ever since I, and one or two others, published some criticisms of The King's Speech, there has been a lovely value-for-money response of outraged ego. Tinseltown reporters have e-mailed and telephoned me to report that Harvey Weinstein goes around saying that all who doubt the perfection of his latest offering are in sinister league with the makers ofThe Social Network. I had some difficulty in believing that this was really true, but it did cheer me up. Yet now the film's screenwriter, David Seidler, has given a foam-flecked interview to the Puffington Host, or whatever the hell it's called, in which he speaks darkly of a "smear campaign" against his baby, a campaign of which I constitute a "prong." So perhaps the termites of paranoia have been dining long and well on the Weinstein Co. cortex. A hitherto almost unpunctuated stream of praise and tribute is not enough—the chorus of adulation must be unanimous. This is what comes of immersing oneself in the cult of hereditary monarchy and of seeking to bask in its tawdry glare.
Seidler first unmasks his batteries by saying that I "accuse" him "of not knowing that Churchill supported David (Edward VIII) not Bertie." I did nothing of the sort. I accused him of deliberately omitting the fact (suppressio veri, or withholding the truth) even as he strongly implied that Churchill's loyalty was to the babbling Bertie, which constitutes suggestio falsi, or the insinuation of untruth. He now tells us that a scene in which Churchill supported the pro-Nazi princeling "David" was cut from the final version, allegedly because it "sagged." Well, why not craft a scene—illustrating the far more fascinating truth of the matter—that does not sag?
Perhaps admitting more than he should, Seidler adds that the decision of the royal physicians to euthanize the dying King George V (by means of an injection of morphine and cocaine, designed to ensure that the timing of the announcement would favor the extreme-right Times of London) was also removed from the film. Did that not-uninteresting detail also sag in the telling? Or would its inclusion, along with the accurate Churchill scene, have made it harder to sustain the uncritical and anti-historical reverence for the palace and for Churchill that the whole movie seems designed to perpetuate?
By a similar mixture of suppressio veriand suggestio falsi, The King's Speechalso part-whitewashes and part-airbrushes the consistent support of Buckingham Palace for Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain and their unceasing attempt to make an agreement with Hitler that would allow him a free hand in Europe while preserving the British Empire.
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