A friend on facebook says that Hamnet contains a pretty serious error — naming the Costwolds the Chilterns (or, pretty much equivalently, mislocating the Chilterns between Stratford and Oxford). I’m not sure that would ruin the book for me, but I definitely would find it annoying (knowing both areas very well makes it worse, but even if I didn’t know them!).

My, recent, error/irritation, was in the film Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer meets Jean Tatlock at a cocktail party and one of them (I forget which) almost immediately attributes the slogan “Property is theft” to Marx; the other (again, I forget which one) agrees that Marx said it. I then spent the rest of the movie wondering whether it was the characters, or the screenwriters, that made the error. If its the characters that tells us something quite interesting about them: they are basically poseurs, or at least posing in this context where they are also flirting, and (probably) one of them is refraining from correcting the other (for whatever reason, perhaps connected to flirting). It’s not out of the realms of possibility that someone who worked for the CPUSA at the time (as, I gather, Tatler did) would get this wrong, still less that she endorse a flirtee’s error. But… if it’s the characters who are in error surely the screenwriters know that the vast majority of the audience won’t pick up on the implication, and the tiny fraction of the audience that know Marx and Proudhon will likely spend some substantial part of the movie puzzling about exactly what I was (and still am, slightly, puzzled about). Why would they do that? So… I was tempted to conclude that it was a screenwriter error. But… did nobody who read the script catch it? Are they all really that ignorant? And then I thought of all the people I knew who went into that industry (surprisingly many, including someone who was nominated at a young age for the Academy Award for best director) and think, yes, they really might all be that ignorant. And then I thought, ah, but the only actual Academy Award winner I’ve ever known was a lifelong Trotskyist, and he would have caught it. But, of course, he was a Trotskyist, not a Communist (which returned me to realization that someone working for the CPUSA in the 30’s might well have made the error). [1]

My conclusion is that it was a screenwriters mistake. But: would you like to contribute other examples of errors like these two that have puzzled and/or irritated you?

[1] Ok, since I’m in a flippant mood today, I’ll share this one… I watch a lot of cricket through Willow TV, and in recent weeks I have been inundated a particular ad for the Tom Tiffany for Governor of Wisconsin campaign which, evidently, thinks that people watching Pakistan v West Indies test matches in Madison are fair game. His ad starts out by saying “This is not your grandparents’ Democrat Party. Or your parents'” and shows a picture of Saunders, AOC, and a couple of Democratic Party Governor candidates with, I kid you not, a hammer and sickle. My first thought was to wonder which voters are triggered by a hammer and sickle, and my second, quite seriously, was to wonder whether he is trying to convey the (true, as he no doubt knows) thought that whereas there were lots of Communists in “your grandparents'” Democratic Party (nearly every Communist I knew in LA in the 1980s was a Democrat, and nearly every Democrat I knew was some sort of Stalinist, because those were the circles within which I moved), not one of the people depicted in his ad is one. Obviously not.