Ooops...
Sorry I forgot to post this earlier--I was in a wedding and lost my mind in the process!
I have never analyzed the effects of a film depicting a moment in history to quite the extent as I have recently. Paramount Pictures with the screen writer from The Pianist, are writing a movie about my town, Dover, PA, about the Intelligent Design trial in which parents and the ACLU sued the district when the school board insisted on teaching Intelligent Design, a version of Christian Creationism, in science classes. Everyone in the town has a different opinion of what happened during this period of time, and knowing one version will be concretized for the rest of the world through a Hollywood interpretation is unnerving. I remember watching Schindler’s List in my tenth grade history class. I recognized that it was an interpretation, but I assumed that this interpretation was close to the truth. What is extraordinarily problematic is taking a film—a fiction—and utilizing its interpretations and premises to develop a tour of a traumatic historical reality. The Hollywoodization of history and trauma is alarming. While it may mean history is more accessible through film and a tour—that tourists are able to become emotionally attached to the actors representing real people and therefore, more emotionally connected to the site—what history is being represented? Spielburg’s? Germany’s? Capitalism’s? Additionally, in order to tour this site, the tourist must be familiar with the film, even to have seen it multiple times. I wonder if the tour, or the familiarity with the film as a requirement of the tour, create repetition of traumatic history that desensitizes the tourists to the original subject manner. I am curious to know how people react to this tour—how historians, survivors, and locals in addition to tourists view this site.