Hollywoodification
I've had several friends tell me over the years that they would love to have lived in the Mad Men period of unironic three-piece suits and hats, women glammed-up in dresses and heels, typewriters, anxiety-easing office scotches, Golden Age marketing messages, cooking with lard, kids out back on the (safety net-free) trampoline, friendly neighbors and mailmen, chrome-slathered cars, straight-shooting politics, and everyone knowing precisely how their life will go (childhood, school, work, marriage, kids, retirement, then repeat the cycle but, for one's kids instead of oneself).
This era—usually a post-WWII, mid-Cold War United States—is one of the most commonly romanticized moments in American history as many people felt it was a proud moment, a celebratory, what-can't-we-do moment, and a moment of change that managed to happen without arriving all at once and slapping everyone in the face as it did so.
We view this period through rose-tinted glasses, today, in part because the oldest among us remember it as something of a heyday, because it was a stunningly wealthy and celebratory and change-laden (but still quite cozy and comfortable and secure, for many people) moment in this part of the world, and because those rosy retrospections have resulted in countless media reinterpretations, remixes, and revisitations, all of which were encouraged by another trait of this era: it was the dawn of modern visual media, which allowed us to capture it more vividly than we were able to commemorate any previous age.
Like all media, though, being vivid and capturable doesn't mean what was released via reel-to-reel was accurate.
Because our films and TV shows and video games aren't made to be "true" in the sense of representing documentary information (even our documentaries frame things in intentional ways, based on what they're trying to convey), and because of the moral tone and regulatory environment within in which early films were produced in the United States, these bits of media evidence portrayed an even more polished and dolled-up version of reality than the most saccharine of storylines, today.
All of which is to say: the Mad Men era, as presented in our shows and films and everything else, is not true, and most people wouldn’t actually want to live there, compared to how things are today—despite our current time’s many shortcomings.
The racism, the sexism, the homophobia, the countless deaths from motor vehicle accidents, pre-seatbelt, all the cancer deaths from smoking and other substances we didn't realize at the time were dangerous—it's not there. Or it's glossed-over. Or it's over-dramatized, made sexy, or used as a vehicle for portraying a character as deep and flawed, and in a way that doesn't make clear just how bad the daily reality of a huge slice of the human population was at the time, despite the pockets of snazzy hats, high-heels, and kids who roamed free throughout the neighborhood and always did their chores.
I read a wonderful piece, recently, about what Hollywood gets wrong about pre-modern battlefields, and it felt like a similar sort of story, if about different things and a different time period.
Many of our stories, portrayed on screen, in games, etc, present the age of swords and shields and armor as a sort of chivalrous, brave, masculine playground full of romance, hands-on skill, and noble labors and sacrifices.
In reality, though, close combat of the sort that was most common before the age of mass-produced firearms was terrifying.
Some historians have documented periods of conflict in which entire wars pivoted on which side fled first, as one side almost always would, ultimately, because the melee that would result if one side or the other didn't get their wits about them and run in the other direction was just so brutal and bloody and prolonged and pointless.
Strategies eventually evolved to take this reality into account, and by the Napoleonic Wars, the British were regularly able to defeat the French not because they had superior weapons or skills, but because they'd developed an approach to fighting that aimed to do the maximum amount of fright-inducing damage up front, which would then make their bayonet charges (which would seldom cause any actual damage and only really served to make the other side afraid of the soldiers that were crazy enough to hurl themselves, wielding only gun-spears, into oncoming gunfire) seem just bogglingly, worryingly bizarre and scary; the French would simply run away (and maybe rightfully so).
What's more, seldom were battles with bayonets or swords determined by skill, as these sorts of weapons, despite what we see on-screen and in our games, don't really lend themselves to elegant footwork or flurries of well-placed parries. Instead, such fights between combatants would almost always end within a few seconds, the winner determined in part by variables outside their control (other people around them, their footing on irregular ground, etc).
Thus, part of the terror associated with pre-modern battle was likely related to the fact that you're kind of just one small part of a human wave trying to scare another human wave into turning back.
If you can't make the other side turn and run, you'll be pushed into another human, forced to make a series of split-second decisions while facing them (both of you holding only sharp pieces of metal), and if you make any wrong choices, or do something too slowly (or because of pure dumb luck) you die—and often not a clean, painless death, but a lingering, bleeding-out-from-a-gut-wound on a muddy battlefield as you're trampled by other terrified humans and their horses death.
I've been trying to collect examples like these to serve as a reminder that my sense of what much of history was like has been shaped by media portrayals that are either incomplete, heavily romanticized, or outright fantastical versions of reality.
Any such depiction will also, without fail, be presented from the perspective of one human, one group, one region or country, which further distorts the "truth" we may believe we're receiving, our heuristics thenceforth shaped by the interpretations of an artist or documentarian from another time and place who is working in accordance with incentives (making something popular that will earn them a bunch of money, perhaps) that might be orthogonal or oppositional to serving up something close to what actually happened.
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