Mr. Hill, telling why he had to fiddle with facts, said: “The audience doesn’t go to a movie for a history lesson; it wants entertainment. At the same time, they don’t want something that trashes history; so it’s a delicate line.” Ny Times, December 5, 1993
It is a very delicate line. The line, unsaid, is “audiences want the illusion of something serious and historically accurate without actually having to make the slightest effort to learn anything or to actually think beyond stereo-types and clichés: we cater to the audience’s prejudices; let’s leave education to the schools.” No no– we say they want to be “entertained”.
Firstly, the idea that maintaining a semblance of historical accuracy when using historical events to titillate audiences could cause boredom is utterly untrue. It’s not boring: it’s just not titillating and comforting.
Or I could say, “it’s just entertainment”. Not art. Not serious.
But that overlooks the fact that the changes made to make it more “entertaining” are often not related to action or visualization or sound or any of the aesthetic traits of the story. For example, the Hollywood film about the capture of the Enigma machine made the submarine American instead of British. Does that actually increase the entertainment value of the film? Not artistically. But it opens the film to an audience of small-minded parochial viewers who don’t really care about history at all.
Geronimo did something sickeningly awful. During one of his raids, he took a young white girl and hanged her, alive, on a meat hook.
John Milius wrote this incident into his original script for the movie but it was deleted in re-writes. Milius might argue that leaving incidents like this out distort the picture of Geronimo given to the viewers of the movie. That is true. You could argue, however, that it is in the nature of movies that single events can become sensationalized, and can assume an importance out of proportion to other events, like the slaughter of women and children by the U.S. Calvary and by white settlers. You could make that case.
Late in life, Geronimo became a Christian. He then spoke about how well-treated he was by “the white-eyes”, which he contrasted to the treacherous Mexicans. Is the fact that he became a Christian related to his whitewash of American-Indian relations? If so, that is a very, very sad comment on something.
Second Lieutenant Britton Davis, a man with very respectable credentials, described Geronimo thusly: “This Indian was a thoroughly vicious, intractable and treacherous man. His only redeeming traits were courage and determination. His word, no matter how earnestly pledged, was worthless.”
That seems about right, in respect of the historical record.
As much as we would love to see shades of gray here, the Apaches were a violent, ruthless tribe that raided neighboring tribes and peoples for livestock and goods, and brutally murdered anyone who got in their way– before they were themselves tricked and destroyed by the powerful Americans.
Geronimo died of pneumonia in 1909 after he fell off his horse and lay in a cold ditch over night. Do not consider the fact that he was stoned out of his mind at the time.