Altering History to Serve the Story

To a greater or lesser extent, all authors have Charles Dickens as a pebble in their shoe. No matter how much I want to forget his narrative mastery, he is always there, trashing any delusions of grandeur, making me feel like a complete klutz.

My childhood preferences always went to Great Expectations, and later, somewhat more grown, to Scrooge’s second chance in A Christmas Carol. But it is in this wiser age that A Tale of Two Cities astounds me, above all for the perfect musical cadence of its first page. For that very reason, a week ago, I naively thought I could rejoice in the new series Amazon made. And into a well all my joy fell.

To excuse the butchery of A Tale of Two Cities, critics offer a lazy false equivalence: Dickens took liberties with the French Revolution, so screenwriters and casting directors can take liberties with Dickens. Égalité, perhaps. But there is a vast gulf between a 19th-century novelist harnessing history to serve the story, and Amazon destroying the story to serve compliance.

This “Tale” fits what has become a predictable pattern among literary adaptations, and period pieces in general. The artificiality isn’t just about painted backdrops and CGI mobs. It’s about overly noble characters, their stagy exchanges, the manicured squalor of the poor, and, for the rich, an opulence that might have arrived courtesy of Wayfair. Again, this isn’t something specific to A Tale of Two Cities or its presenters. There seems to be a stylistic monopoly at work among the streamers of “original content” that renders innovative storytelling—and any semblance of cinema—invalid.

This afflicts nearly all historical dramas today, and I despise it. I don’t want to watch a period drama with all the characters acting like contemporary people. Part of the allure of period pieces is seeing how people at the time acted and felt, and how profoundly that differs from today.

Nor do surface details escape this contamination. A production will invest heavily in authentic townscapes and domestic architecture, only to cap the illusion by adorning the women with modern hairstyles foreign to the epoch. The visual slip is telling, but the psychological anachronism runs deeper: their sensibilities are neatly calibrated to satisfy a contemporary ideological template, entirely severed from historical reality.

By the way, I have no problem with Black actors finding employment, but the clear violation of historical accuracy is jarring. The so-called color-blind casting