“History is bunk!” said Henry Ford and today we’re sure he was referring to the History channel.
The allegedly non-fiction channel has a lot to answer for: faking it, making it up, getting sloppy, lazy, cheap and downright stupid. That's precisely what pompously-renamed History has done with Houdini’s life story. The seemingly-endless mini-series is riddled with funky clichés, ridiculous howlers and gross historical errors.
Perhaps the rankest historical blunderama concerns Houdini in Europe. Did they get anything RIGHT about this trip, the turning point in his career? Consider:
In real history Harry visited Russia in 1903. But History pretends he was there when young Alexei, heir to the throne, was six or seven years old. That would make the date around 1911. In the next scene, History fantasizes Harry being debriefed by his alleged British spymaster: Harry convinces him that after just one encounter with the Tsar he’s obtained at least two state secrets!
Number one: Russia wants to go to war with Japan.
“Little Japan against Big Russia?” the spy chief marvels, as if he forgot that Japan had the world’s most powerful naval fleet with the exception of Britain’s, and as if Sidney Reilly, Britain’s legendary “Ace of Spies,” were not already on the job in Russia.
“Yes,” explains Houdini, the grade-school dropout. “You see, they all take orders from Rasputin.”
“Oh, ah, him. Why do they keep that loudmouth around, anyway?”
Which leads to State Secret #2: “Why you big dummy, Rasputin is the only guy who can control young Alexei’s hemophilia.” Houdini being the only person outside the royal family who knows about the life-threatening sickness of the heir to the throne.
FYI, in real life that war with Japan did happen, but it took place in 1904, seven years earlier. Japan’s fleet annihilated the Russians in the largest naval battle since Trafalgar. Alexei’s hemophilia stayed a closely guarded state secret until the Russian Revolution (oh, I almost forgot - Harry also predicts this, to the astonishment of the British official ignoramus, who must not have noticed “Bloody Sunday” in the 1905 Revolution; or wait, we're confused, what year are we in??).
This is beyond mangling of history - it’s felonious assault with intent to kill.
Houdini did spend a lot of time in Germany, but History’s entire scene there was fabricated from clichés left on the cutting room floors of early potboilers. None of it ever happened. The scene of Houdini’s stealing the German war plans from an embassy safe was not only completely untrue, it was colossally idiotic. If the British had had Germany’s war plans would World War One have lasted four horrifying years? (Not that anyone cares, but in real life the so-called Schlieffen Plan documents were destroyed, just so no traveling vaudevillians would be able to steal them.)
As the history was mangled, alas, so were the characters.
Nicholas and Alexandra, the Emperor and Empress of Russia, are portrayed as cliché "foreigners," speaking poor English with heavy accents. If History had done its homework it would have known that Alexandra was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter and spoke perfect, unaccented Queen’s English. Likewise, Nicholas spoke English like a native (far better than Harry’s, not to put too fine a point on it). In fact Nicholas and Alexandra regularly spoke English with each other - not Russian, not German, not French.
Houdini’s father - don’t get me started! He is portrayed as a mean-spirited sad sack without a kind word for anybody. This is exactly the opposite of reminiscences of those who knew him (future blog post coming up on this). His career as a lawyer is entirely ignored, and he is portrayed as a fringe-wearing Orthodox rabbi, when in reality he was Neolog - something roughly in between present-day Conservative and Reform. There are only two pictures of him in existence, as far as we know, and in one he is wearing a lawyer’s outfit and in the other he’s showing a huge smile as he plays with Houdini’s sister. God forbid real facts spoil the cliché of the poor schnook Jew.
That reminds me - does anyone dare discuss Bess’ horrendous line: “I’m a dumb girl and you’re a Jew!” Even the Kaiser was more philo-semitic than that.
In addition to rampant historical and character errors, there are serious cinematic distortions. From a long career in documentary filmmaking, we can say with assurance that these were all caused by cheapness and greed on the part of the producers and the network.
The History series was filmed in Budapest, Houdini’s birthplace. But did it ever show the place he was born, the place his mother and father lived? No way. It did use Budapest to reconstruct Appleton, Wisconsin, where the young magician grew up. This was done via ultra-cheap recycling of a local spaghetti Western movie set. If you call yourself the History channel, why not shoot in the real Appleton, which has a large landmarked historic district with 27 buildings still standing just as they were in Houdini’s day? Far from being the hick hamlet portrayed by History, it was a prosperous industrial and university town. Houdini's father reportedly taught at the university, but let's not mention that because it's not schnooky enough.
History heavily hyped its scenes of Adrien Brody, playing Harry, doing a straitjacket escape in a Budapesty recreation of downtown San Francisco. It’s right in front of an ersatz San Francisco Chronicle building, the city’s famous newspaper. Problem is, Houdini did that stunt in front of Hearst’s Examiner building, the age-old rival of the Chronicle. Wrong location. Why?
Paging the fact checkers! Hearst sold the Examiner and now owns the Chronicle. More to the point, Hearst is also joint owner of the History channel! It’s product placement advertising for the network!
This kind of shifty slop rots not only Houdini’s life story but so much of our history. The History channel should be correcting the mistakes of history, not making new, ugly ones.
Now let's take a look at the book the series is based on: Houdini: A Mind in Chains, by Bernard C. Meyer, MD. Meyer was a New York psychiatrist who happens to be the father of Nicholas Meyer, the screenwriter on History’s biopic. The son adapted the script from his father's book, according to the credits. Nicholas Meyer is a writer we've always admired for his best selling Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Seven Percent Solution. He credits his father for getting him interested in films. So Meyer has written Houdini as a tribute to his father - a noble effort. But in honoring his father he has dishonored Houdini.
Bernard Meyer's book came out in 1976, applying Freudian analysis to Houdini’s life. The gist is that Houdini was in some sense mentally ill (“…toyed with madness…”), caught in an Oedipal whirlpool, wracked by bondage fantasies and “sadomasochistic perversions.”
Finally, some writings we can sink our teeth into and handcuff to a bedpost! In History’s version you see Harry, played by Adrien Brody, doing a bondage sex scene. There is not a shred of historical evidence to back this up.
Using Dr. Meyer’s own method, one could surmise that this bondage scene and the lurid kissing Mama on the lips (while Papa scowls in the background) are secret fantasies not of Houdini but of the Meyer boys. Have the father's fantasies visited themselves upon the son? Have the Meyers confused Houdini's sex life with their own, and his mother with theirs?
Lest you think this farfetched, other psychiatrists denigrated Meyer’s book when it came out. In a review for The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, his colleague Eric Carlson, MD revealed that Meyer did not have much in the way of factual sources. So he cribbed from a 1946 fictionalized version of Houdini’s life, The Great Balsamo by Maurice Zolotow. Zolotow, a show business writer, was 12 years old when Houdini died.
Meyer cites Zolotow as a source on Houdini’s sex life. The psychoanalyst even recounts a dream by Zolotow’s imaginary magician about wife stealing! As Carlson writes: “Meyer uses this blend of fictional recreation and unsubstantiated evidence…to buttress his assumptions about Houdini’s sexual fixations….”
Investigating Dr. Meyer further we learn that this was not the first time he was accused of perverting the life story of one of his subjects. Critics trashed his first book, Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography, both as biography and medicine.
“Some biographers have concluded that [Conrad’s] illness was predominantly psychological in origin,” writes Dr. Royse Murphy of the University of Bristol, in the Journal of Conrad Studies, citing Meyer’s writings. After an exhaustive analysis based on Conrad’s own physicians’ records, Murphy concludes that Conrad was suffering not from mental illness, as Meyer asserted, but from Lupus Erythematosis.
Other Conrad scholars accuse Meyer of playing fast and loose with the biographical facts. A review in Comparative Literature Studies by Zdzislaw Najder could easily apply to Meyer’s book on Houdini:
“Dr. Meyer takes … behavior which is quite usual or “normal” as betraying a mark of peculiarity, symptomatic of some deep secrets or complexes….”
As Freud is reputed to have said: “Lighten up, doc! Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Dr. Meyer’s book was written at a time when serious Houdini research was still in its infancy. Unfortunately, Meyer’s influence spread widely to subsequent biographers, who embellished his “scientific” conclusions (e.g.: Ruth Brandon’s bio that claims Houdini was impotent). After this Labor Day premiere - and at least thirteen repeats - it’s now imprinting the minds of a new generation.
History, and all nonfiction television, is supposed to present material based on ... well, history. Facts. When they throw in gratuitous sex scenes, questionable “Semitism” and all the rest of the tiresome clichés being enumerated right now in the blogosphere - it makes you question the entire production. You can do anything you want on television, as long as the audience knows what you're doing. We’re all for historical fiction - we even write it ourselves. But there must be a bright line between fact and fantasy.
Alas, it's not only History that has crossed the line. Nonfiction television, once a source of pride to journalists and filmmakers, has become shark-bait. History's "nonfiction" rival, the Discovery Channel, is also peddling great white lies. According to a widely-disseminated exposé on Vox:
”On Sunday, the Discovery Channel aired a two-hour segment called ‘Shark of Darkness: Wrath of Submarine’ about a 35-foot-long great white shark the size of a sub that supposedly attacked people off the coast of South Africa.
“And, surprise! None of this was real. …The ‘submarine shark’ in South Africa was an urban legend started by journalists in the 1970s who were trying to fool a gullible public. But the Discovery Channel didn't debunk the myth — instead, they offered up computer-generated images and interviewed fake experts with fake names (like ‘Conrad Manus’) about the fake submarine shark.”
Bravo!
ReplyDelete"The History channel should be correcting the mistakes of history, not making new, ugly ones."
ReplyDeleteAn excellent point this. Good work, David.
BTW, don't you think they should have put a disclaimer on the front saying this was a mix of fact and fiction, just as they did on The Great Houdinis in 1976? TV had a whole different set of ethics back then, I guess. :s
ReplyDeleteExcellent idea! Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the 1976 film on TNT? You don't expect documentaries or docudramas there, but you do on History. In my view not admitting that it's fictional is a shameful abdication of history & journalism. It taints everything else they do.
ReplyDeleteNext on History: Space aliens at the first Thanksgiving!
The 1976 film, The Great Houdinis, was on ABC. The 1998 film with Johnathon Schaech was on TNT.
DeleteAh, even more to the point. On ABC they do make a bright line between fact and fiction. As Av Westin, one of the giants of television, once said to me: "You can do anything you want on television as long as you let the audience know what you're doing."
DeleteThank you for your review of the new Houdini mini-series. I am glad that you debunked History (Channel). I posted your interview on History's Facebook page in several places.
ReplyDeleteThanks again.