The Kingdom of Excrement

Wisdom isn't learning from experience, it's learning from others' experiences. James Bowman has spared me the experience of watching "Kingdom of Heaven":

Sir Ridley Scott's Crusades movie, Kingdom of Heaven, though visually impressive as we might expect, is shockingly unhistorical. I know that this is not supposed to matter and probably will not to the historically illiterate 13-year-olds who will make up its main audience, but the rest of us might at least want to be aware of the crudeness of the historical mise-en-scene, which could scarcely be greater if Sir Ridley and his screenwriter, William Monahan, had had their 12th century knights riding into battle in Humvees. But because most of the anachronisms he deals in are moral rather than material they will probably pass unnoticed. And what, you may ask, is the moral of the story? Well, it's not as if you couldn't guess. Turns out that the Crusades were not the struggle between Christians and Muslims that you might have thought they were, but between both Muslim and Christian religious fanatics on the one hand and modern tolerant liberals like the film-makers -- oh and, by the way, everyone else in Hollywood -- on the other. Who knew?

The most hilariously idiotic of the film's many historically stupid moments comes at the climax of the battle for Jerusalem in 1187 when Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), the commander of the city's Christian defenders, has a parley with the leader of its Muslim besiegers, Saladin, here invariably given his more authentic moniker, Salah al-Din (Ghassan Massoud). Nice that they insist on accuracy in something. Balian tells his adversary that he will surrender the city if the Muslim army will give its Christian inhabitants a safe-conduct to the sea, where they may take ship to return to Europe. The terrible alternative, Balian tells him, is that he will give the order for all the religious sites in the city to be destroyed: "Your holy places, ours -- everything that drives men mad." It's hard to imagine a more perfect example of Hollywood's view of religion -- or of a thought that would have been more unthinkable to the person supposedly uttering it.

Such words would have been sheer gibberish -- evidence of madness themselves -- in an age in which "religion" was inseparable from the culture. Another character says, "I put no stock in religion," and generally speaking we are to understand that neither does anyone else who is in the least sympathetic here. The only true religious believers, at least on the Christian side, are thugs and murderers. But at the time of the Crusades "religion" wasn't the optional Sunday-morning pastime it has since become. It was a matter of identity. For someone to say, "I put no stock in religion," would have been as nonsensical as saying, "I put no stock in being my father's son." People's religion wasn't just what they believed, it was what they were. In other words, like so many moviemakers before them, Scott and Monahan have looked into the past and seen nothing but their own silly faces looking back at them.

The era of the Crusades is intensely interesting for even novice students of history. Why Hollywood is incapable of an honest treatment of the subject is beyond me, but given how few G movies are made (the most profitable movies made run from G, to PG, to PG-13, to R, to NC-17, high to low), I doubt it has anything to do with money but everything to do with ignorance and arrogance.