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"It's not like the old days" says Crusades Scholar
By Victoria James
Special to The Japan Times, May 18, 2005- Link to Original Article
Scott's intentions lay in the right direction, says London University historian Thomas Asbridge, a specialist on the Crusades. " 'Kingdom of Heaven' is actually the most interested Ridley Scott has ever been in getting the historical detail right," he says of the director of the wildly popular "Gladiator" and widely panned "1492."
But as Asbridge found, it's rare that historians and moviemakers see eye to eye. The scholar's input was used not to frame the historical bigger picture, but to pin down the fine details. "They were interested in getting the physical setting right," says Asbridge. "I'd be asked about, for example, what a 12th-century padlock looked like and how it worked. One day I was out shopping with my young daughter -- if you're an 'expert,' you get used to getting a call at any time about anything -- and I was told I had 10 minutes to come up with a solution to a problem about the sword, the one that's now on all the movie posters."
As the author of an acclaimed recent study, "The First Crusade: A New History," Asbridge has spent years pondering the mind-set of the Crusaders.
"Knights almost bankrupted themselves and their families in order to go," says Asbridge. "There are many motives at work, but always underlying them is piety, real devotion. The difficult thing to explain is that, by modern standards, their aims are utterly unacceptable, but they believe they are carrying out the work of God."
That difficult explanation, Asbridge believes, proved too much of a challenge for the director of "Kingdom of Heaven. Preoccupied with getting the film to look right, Scott failed to ensure that his characters think right, the historian suggests.
"Ridley Scott has made it very clear that he's an atheist and an agnostic," says Asbridge. "In fact he has very similar views to those I hold, but that doesn't stop me from realizing that the medieval world was completely different, yet he's determined to impose 21st-century morality on the 12th century. And I think that's where his problem comes in the film. All the people we're supposed to sympathize with in the film don't believe in religion. That's a really strange mixture."
The scholar, who is currently working on a study of the entire crusading movement, says that he was ultimately "disappointed" with "Kingdom of Heaven." The film "didn't have the smell of the Middle Ages; it's not as if it's conveying what it was to live in that era, to think in that period," he says.
Perhaps, but should we really care? After all, those who want a scrupulously accurate account of history can pick up a book by Asbridge or one of his revisionist peers. We go to cinemas for entertainment, not a history lesson.
What makes "Kingdom of Heaven" different from, say, 2004's "King Arthur," which offered a fanciful account of medieval Britain few historians would endorse, is the powerful resonance that the Crusades still has for contemporary Muslim society. A holy war between Muslims and Western Christendom is not a subject to be treated lightly.
As Asbridge explains: "Hatred can be engendered in Islam by using crusading as an idea. There's a danger in this word. 'Crusade' has lost its automatic connection to religion and to the idea of a holy war in English. In the West you can 'crusade' against just about anything you want. But it's never lost its religious dimension in Islam."
In the West, the two Crusading centuries, 1095-1291, are a part of history like any other. Multiplex viewers may register the parallels with contemporary concerns, but are unlikely to spend the 145 minutes of "Kingdom of Heaven" worrying about its political correctness.
In the Middle East, however, the faces and events of the Crusades are very much a part of modern political debate. "Islamic leaders, and certain sectors of Islamic society have become aware that the Crusades are a useful clarion call when it comes to mobilizing resistance to the West," says Asbridge. "Take a leader like Saddam Hussein, who drew very direct parallels between himself and Saladin; the creation of Israel is a parallel to the creation of the kingdom of Jerusalem."
Perhaps Scott was anxious not to stir up that deep-seated feeling in Muslim viewers. Whatever his motives, critics largely agree he scanned the history books to produce what The New York Times described as "an ostensibly fair-minded, even-handed account of one of the least fair-minded, even-handed chapters in human history." Which, all told, rather defeats the point of making a historical epic.
Perhaps someone should persuade Scott, who made his name with the sci-fi epics "Alien" and "Blade Runner," that it's time to go back to the future.
The Japan Times: May 18, 2005