Braveheart’s Warped History Keeps Suckering Evangelicals

[Potoooooooo]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/braveheart-warped-history-keeps-suckering-041223197.html

Twenty-five years ago, the Best Director and Best Picture awards went to a strikingly different feature film. That year, Mel Gibson captured both for his epic film Braveheart. Gibson also starred in the film as the freedom-loving, kilt-wearing William Wallace. Based on the legendary 13th-century Scottish warrior, the film was less about kindness and hope and more about unquenchable violence avenging evil and injustice. In a very different way, Gibson’s film, too, would make history.

Gibson was a conservative Catholic, but it was white evangelicals who would become the film’s most fervent fans. With William Wallace their hero and “Freedom!” their battle cry, American evangelicals assigned the film a prominent place in their culture-wars liturgies.

 

[ideologyhunter]

You can find the Mel Gibson "Freedom Speech" all over the web. Conservos probably think of Braveheart as a combination of Robert E. Lee, Popeye, Rambo, and Trump. Some of them are no doubt secretly drawn to the scene of Braveheart's men flashing their dicks at the British before the battle. (The proper term for this tactic is anasyrma -- I believe Trump tried to get the Joint Chiefs to add this to the field maneuver manual. As Trump said, "That's something even I could do, as a soldier. Many people say I am good at it.")

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/braveheart-warped-history-keeps-suckering-041223197.html

Twenty-five years ago, the Best Director and Best Picture awards went to a strikingly different feature film. That year, Mel Gibson captured both for his epic film Braveheart. Gibson also starred in the film as the freedom-loving, kilt-wearing William Wallace. Based on the legendary 13th-century Scottish warrior, the film was less about kindness and hope and more about unquenchable violence avenging evil and injustice. In a very different way, Gibson’s film, too, would make history.

Gibson was a conservative Catholic, but it was white evangelicals who would become the film’s most fervent fans. With William Wallace their hero and “Freedom!” their battle cry, American evangelicals assigned the film a prominent place in their culture-wars liturgies.

Not Braveheart, but about as historically accurate, The Punisher to me falls under the same category of presumed justice. Oddly enough, I was watching 48 Hrs (more historically accurate than Braveheart, even if entirely fictional), and a lot of the plot is driven forward via very wildly assumed presumptions of fact based on whims and guts. Two Beverly Hills officers are taking extraordinary career risks via tiny bits of info and no protocol. Everyone ends up shooting up everyone else in a showdown that'd actually be pretty hard to justify in court if someone decides to sue. I mean, they killed a half dozen or dozen people, and yet had absolutely no records to back up the claim they murdered a drug kingpin.

There people view themselves as pro-freedom, yet swoon for a day when there was less freedom for others. Braveheart manages to do a couple things, grossfully overemphasize Wallace's victories and then ultimately his relevance. It glorifies the little he actually accomplished.

Meanwhile, those that celebrate the idea of a war in the US are apparently guilty of the same lamebrained stupidity in the 1860s, over the idea of a short Civil War. They imagine less a Civil War and more a not so much bloody coup, where they sweep in, seize power, and murder liberals for justice. Wars are almost never that simple, especially when the military isn't involved in the DC swooping part.

 

[TSwizzle]

Braveheart is great entertainment and was never intended as anything else. It's pretty much a bog standard good versus evil Hollywood movie but very well done.

 

[Politesse]

There people view themselves as pro-freedom, yet swoon for a day when there was less freedom for others.

This is exactly it. They have no idea how to exist in the modern age, so they romanticize the past and then try to relive it, even if that means needing to cast themselves as both villain and hero.

 

[bilby]

Braveheart includes such highly authentic touches as Scots wearing kilts four hundred years before anything like a kilt existed in Scotland (made of tartan that would not exist for five hundred years) along with woad face-paint that had ceased to be used a thousand years before the events depicted in the film; And the Battle of Stirling Bridge taking place without a bridge (as the name of the battle suggests, the bridge was the central tactical and strategic element of the battle; without the equalizing effect of the numerically superior English force having to cross the Forth on a narrow bridge it is highly unlikely that the Scots could have won).

The very name 'Braveheart' wasn't applied to William Wallace; It refers (or did prior to Gibson's theft of it for his movie) to Robert the Bruce. Who the film needlessly slanders as fighting against, and ultimately betraying, Wallace - which he never did.

Anyone who considers Braveheart to be a depiction of real events is a fool; It's about as true to life as Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. Or as comedian John O'Farrell put it in his book An Utterly Impartial History of Britain:

The film couldn’t have been more inaccurate if a Plasticine dog was added to the cast, and the film was re-titled William Wallace and Gromit

As such, its adoption by evangelicals (renowned for their devotion to such historically accurate sources as the King James Bible) is hardly surprising.

 

[Potoooooooo]

Anyone who considers Braveheart to be a depiction of real events is a fool; It's about as true to life as Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. Or as comedian John O'Farrell put it in his book An Utterly Impartial History of Britain:

The film couldn’t have been more inaccurate if a Plasticine dog was added to the cast, and the film was re-titled William Wallace and Gromit