Based on a True Story

 Sometime during the last winter Olympics, in order to get in the proper spirit, as well as to celebrate the return to the ice of the Jamaican bobsled team, some friends and I settled in to watch a classic—the 1993 live-action Disney film, Cool Runnings. We were expecting it to be a cringe-fest, as so much family-friendly '90s fare has become; but we actually found it has held up well. 

To be sure, some of it has aged poorly. We probably didn't need that speech from Junior implying that Jamaica's economic problems are due to a lack of personal ambition (*yeesh*). But fundamentally, the movie remains profoundly watchable, and retains its power to pull on the heart strings. This is because it grasps the fundamentals of character and story. All the people in the movie have some conflict they are trying to resolve; they all develop and grow over the course of the film; they are flawed in interesting ways but are ultimately redeemable; and so on. 

And the best part of the movie is—it's all real! After all, the movie is "based on a true story." And so, when we root for Junior to learn to stand up for himself against his overly controlling father; when we applaud Derice's pluck and ambition; when we chuckle over Sanka's antics and weep at Coach Irving Blitzer's heartfelt speech to the Olympic committee, in which he pleads for his own transgressions not to be visited upon the heads of his team—all of these things gain power from the fact that we can say: this really happened! 

Although..., it began to dawn on us... just to be on the safe side, one should perhaps verify those details. The fact that one of the teammates—the bald one—calls himself "Yul Brenner" seemed perhaps implausible. My friends and I decided to do a quick scan through Wikipedia to see how much of the story is taken from real history, and how much was poetic license for the sake of telling a Hollywood story. 

Unfortunately, as you've probably already guessed—or may have known already—it is almost entirely the latter. There was no Irving Blitzer who cheated in the Olympics and lost his gold medals but redeemed himself in the end by shepherding the Jamaican team to an honorable performance. (Our hearts sank.) There was no Derice or Junior or any of the others. They were all made up. There was in fact a Jamaican bobsled team, which was established by a couple of American promoters who watched a Jamaican pushcart derby and decided to front the cash to send them to the Olympics. But that's about all the genuine fact that made it into the film. 

We felt betrayed! There is a terrible disenchantment that has entered the world, thanks to Wikipedia and the internet. The scientific spirit has once again driven the Hamadryad from her forest bower. Now, we can no longer go along blissfully believing that every time Hollywood tells us a movie is a "true story," that it all actually happened just as portrayed. It is like the exposure of the Donation of Constantine—except now it is happening everywhere. It is coming for pop culture—for our beloved childhood movies—and not stopping just with the arcana of scholarly controversy. 

But then I was reading Lord Acton's lecture on the "Study of History," collected in a volume with an introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper; and it turns out that all of critical history may have emerged from similarly humble origins. Acton tells us that the great Leopold von Ranke, one of the founders of modern historical science, was himself first motivated to apply a critical lens to claims about the past by a similarly disappointing encounter with pop culture. 

Ranke was reading Sir Walter Scott, it would seem, and fell in love with his historical novels on the assumption that what they reported was truth, rather than fancy or romance. Much later, he read some of the original sources of the period, and what he found there largely contradicted the portrait Scott had painted of certain historical personages. Ranke was dismayed; and out of that disillusionment, modern history was born. As Lord Acton puts it: "His course had been determined, in early life, by Quentin Durward." 

And so it is not absurd to feel strongly about historical criticisms of the origins of Cool Runnings. Such discoveries have always been the fuel of the historian's craft. If we did not have things that we wanted to believe about the past, and in which we were constantly disappointed by the facts; and if such experiences did not give rise in turn to such profound feelings of doubt and betrayal, and a sharpened desire for truth, then few people would ever have had the inner motivation to undertake arduous historical researches in the primary sources. 

The only difference, of course, is that now—in the age of the internet and social media—we are all critical historians. "Here comes everybody," as they say. And that has to be better than a world in which institutions can simply tell us a version of events and we have no option but to trust it. But it cannot be denied likewise—there is a loss associated with it as well. We will never again be as naive and trusting, when we are confronted with those once-potent words: "Based on a true story."