A history in the making up
As long as it looks cool, who cares if it’s accurate?
BY Chris Eng
Photography courtesy Twentieth Century Fox
OK, see if you can spot what’s wrong with this story.
Life is simple and tranquil in the late-ninth-century New York state. The Wampanoag Indians go about their daily lives as they always have—hunting, gathering and generally living wisely and sagely—until the day the Vikings arrive. Rolling down the coast like an unstoppable Arctic gale, the 40 or 50 Vikings leave a trail of horror and devastation in their wake. Who can stand against these nightmares with their six-foot broadswords? Oh, oh! Did I mention they’re also decked out in banded metal armour? They’ve got trained warhorses, too. Anyway, who can stop them? No one—their innate scariness prevents the Wampanoag from mustering any kind of legitimate defence. Well, no one, that is, until one of their own decides to fight back against them. Because only a single Viking boy can defeat an angry Viking war band.
While at first glance this outline may seem ludicrous (and believe me, it doesn’t get less ludicrous on future readings), this is the plot of the new 20th Century Fox film Pathfinder. If you are a person with any degree of historical knowledge whatsoever, your first instinct will be to start poking holes in it with extreme prejudice, but the problem with that is the filmmakers don’t care about accuracy because it’s ostensibly a fictitious piece of forgotten history. The argument that Vikings wended their way down the eastern seaboard for slaves is backed up with the argument that it’s a story that has simply vanished into the mists of time. “It could have happened” is what we’re supposed to go along with here.
I guess, yes, Vikings could have plundered North America for slaves, even though they were already available relatively effortlessly in England and Ireland. And the Wampanoag might have sat around saying wise things and have been completely unable to defend themselves against an extremely small invasion force, although it might not be extremely plausible. Perhaps it simply never occurred to the local populace to fight back with the guerilla tactics that have been historically recorded during actual skirmishes with the Norse settlers in Vinland.
Which is one of the greatest dangers with a movie like this— it’s based just enough on verifiable history that it becomes plausible and its flaws are easier to ignore or, in a worst-case scenario, accepted as truth. The silver screen is persuasive and has a way of making people believe what it shows, even if it doesn’t have a “based on a true story” tag in front of it (and we all know how much truth is involved there). Film trends dictate public perception to a greater or lesser degree, and while in recent years the ball has swung away from films depicting Native Americans as villains to portraying them as victims, they weren’t helpless victims. Their raids are what drove the Norse out of North America, so the disingenuousness of portraying them as unable to defend themselves against a longboat or two is staggering.
And the Vikings, well: “We quickly agreed on a realistic portrayal of Indians, but wanted to take some artistic licence with the Vikings. There would be contrivances, but they would be our contrivances—nothing we or anybody else would have seen before,” said director Marcus Nispel. And indeed we haven’t. Helmets made of skulls, banded metal armour and warhorses. Hint to Marcus: bone is more brittle than metal—it makes bad armour. Also, horses take up a lot of room and food in cramped long ships. But, hey—we already believed that the Vikings were simply bloodthirsty, genocidal slavers, so what are a few liberties between friends?
The most tragic thing about Pathfinder is that it’s not a bad high-concept movie pitch—I probably would have bitten, too, were I a movie producer—but with the vast wealth of real information about the Norse settlers and their contacts with the indigenous peoples of North America (they could have set this film in Newfoundland and taken a huge step toward accuracy), there’s just no excuse for a studio movie to show this much flagrant disregard for the facts. And seriously, if you are going to play that fast and loose with history, you might as well have Mongols invading the Incans, because not only will it make a great movie, it’ll make an amazing social studies report from some misguided high school kid.
