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.
{ 32 comments }
Neville Morley 08.07.26 at 7:55 pm
In the film it’s slightly annoying: in Wonder Woman, in the scene where Diana has infiltrated a German military reception and is talking to General Ludendorff, whom she suspects of being the god Ares in disguise.
LUDENDORFF: `Peace is only an armistice in an endless war.’
DIANA: Thucydides.
LUDENDORFF (happily surprised): You know your Ancient Greeks.
Not in fact Thucydides – the earliest citation of this line I’ve found is 1988, though it echoes an idea in Plato – and I know the classical consultant on the film told them this and was ignored.
What was really funny, however was when the IR scholar Graham Allison adopted this as advertising for his ‘Thucydides Trap’ book Destined For War?, thus demonstrating the depth of his knowledge of the topic…
afeman 08.07.26 at 9:20 pm
Now I have to wonder if “Saunders” is some kind of wry joke.
Chris M. 08.07.26 at 11:22 pm
I think they know who said it, but changed it because not enough of the audience (to put it mildly) know who Proudhon is. Why confuse them?
Speaking of inaccuracies, we are not all ignorant out here. Some of us are even clever, on our good days.
Matt 08.08.26 at 2:39 am
One that’s not my own, but amused me, and one of my own:
Not my own: I laught at Masha Gessen’s complaint in her article on the HBO series “Chernobyl” that the top scientist “lived in the same sort of squalor as everyone else” when he would really have “lived in a completely different sort of squalor.” (I’m going from memory here, so it may be slightly off, but something like that.) That made me smile.
My own: in an otherwise quite good recent book on Marx, mention and brief invocation of a supposed period of “war capitalism” during the Russian revolution. Of course, there was no such thing, and it was pretty clearly a garbled mix of the actual “war communism” and the New Economic Policy, which started after the revolution was done except for a bit of mop-up.
On the question of what sorts of voters are triggered by a hammer and sickle, my guess would be “old ones”, but I’d be surpised if people old enough to be so triggered would be a likely audience for cricket in Wisconsin!
D. S. Battistoli 08.08.26 at 5:28 am
Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing contains a chapter whose entire plot turns on cocoa plants maturing and bearing fruit “within months” after being planted (they take a minimum of three, and usually five).
Abena is subject to an ultimatum: she “would be removed from the village when she conceived a child or after seven bad [harvest] years.” In context, this is credible, though what follows isn’t. She carries on an affair with a poor farmer who says he’ll marry her after a good harvest, six years pass, and he goes off to buy either seeds or saplings (the omniscient narrator seems unsure, which is a tell, and strange enough, but it doesn’t matter for the timeline) in another town. Unbeknownst to Abena, he only secures these by promising a trader that he’ll marry the trader’s daughter after harvest—which is odd, because if the trader should know that issuing credit to a visibly poor farmer from a distant town was a low-probability way to secure a rich husband for his child—a poor way to invest his money even, since he has no evidence that the farmer is skilled, his land fertile, or the local weather and pest outlook propitious. An entire chapter in a realist novel hinges on plants sprouting almost as fast as Jack’s beanstalk.
Gyasi had workshopped the novel during an MFA, gotten one of the highest-profile agents at a heavily-staffed agency, been published by a house that is on the record as having invested millions of dollars in her book, and apparently no one along the way stopped to ask:
How fast does a tree grow?
D. S. Battistoli 08.08.26 at 5:33 am
ah, *three, and usually five years.
Harry, can we hear more about your two director acquaintances?
Gareth Wilson 08.08.26 at 7:04 am
It’s barely even an error, but there’s an episode of Doctor Who where an enormous spaceship is hovering over a black hole. The characters enter the spaceship at the closest point to the hole, where the hole’s gravity is slowing down time. One character goes down the spaceship in an elevator, reaching part of it further away from the hole, where time is passing much faster. Can you tell what part of this annoyed me?
Adam C Roberts 08.08.26 at 9:19 am
The granddaddy of these slips and errors is surely the one in “The Wizard of Oz”: after receiving his ‘brain’ the Scarecrow says: “The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side!” … mangling Pythagoras’s theorem on several counts (it’s squares, not square roots, and, as the Simpsons notes, it’s a right-angled triangle not any isosceles triangle).
There’s a debate about this: perhaps it reflects the ignorance of the scriptwriters, who misunderstood the Pythagorean theorem, or perhaps they knew the theorem but thought the word “isosceles” sounded smarter and so used it. But perhaps it’s there deliberately to indicate that the Scarecrow is just as dumb as he ever was, that the Wizard is a fraud. All he does, after all, is give Scarecrow a university degree (in Frank L Baum’s original novel the wizard opens the Scarecrow’s head, scoops out the straw inside and replaces it with actual brains: nothing like that happens in the movie).
Persitz 08.08.26 at 4:32 pm
It is bit different, but my all time misquote favorite is from Cassavetes Death of a Chinese bookie :
Flo: ” That jerk Karl Marx said opium was the… religion of people. I got news for him, it’s money.”
Austin G Loomis 08.08.26 at 8:58 pm
Wellactually, he either supplements or replaces the straw with bran (so the Scarecrow will have, as the expression originally was, a “bran-new” brain) augmented with pins and needles (to make him sharp). These are the jokes, folks.
D. S. Battistoli 08.09.26 at 7:22 am
Oh gosh, that’s brilliant Persitz @9.
Class it as “character errors that deeply pleased you.”
nonrenormalizable 08.09.26 at 7:35 am
The pronunciation of “Khrushchev” and “Gorbachev”, which I too have gotten wrong: the “e” is actually the (oddly enough, official) transliteration of “ё”, which is an “o” sound.
So e.g. Reagan has it right in his “Tear down this wall” line. But quite a number of modern media still mangle it, including The Death of Stalin.
Interestingly, I find this error to be more common in British speakers and media than in American ones, though that may be because (like the Nazis a generation or two ago) it’s become a Hollywood convention that Soviet parts are played by British actors.
You could make a “midwit” meme out of it:
Dimwit: “It’s pronounced Gorbach-ov, because Russian names end in ‘ov’.”
Midwit: “It’s pronounced Gorbach-ev, because the name ends in ‘ev’, not ‘ov’.”
Highwit: “It’s pronounced Gorbach-ov, because the ending is ‘ёв’.”
Laban 08.09.26 at 8:20 am
Chris M is probably right (everyone’s heard of Marx, few of Proudhon, and it’s too good a line to leave out) otoh it’s not impossible that the writers don’t know.
Alan Peakall 08.09.26 at 9:02 am
A recurrent gripe from this genre is an anachronistic USA national flag. In addition to the recent lapse in Oppenheimer, Private Schultz also slipped up in that respect. On the other side of the ledger I recall being quite impressed that Chariots of Fire accurately showed the Pentacolour flag for the Chinese Republic at the 1924 Paris Olympics rather than using the Nationalist Sun flag.
I also remember patiently waiting for the eleventh episode of ATV’s Edward the Seventh to see whether the portrayal of the Coronation fell into the trap of presenting a sceptre incorporating the Cullinan diamond (discovered two years later) but finding that case unproven.
marcel proust 08.09.26 at 1:50 pm
Huh. My recollection of that bit from the Oppenheimer/cocktail scene was that they agreed to attribute “Poverty is theft,” to Petrus Josephus Chrysostom.
novakant 08.09.26 at 8:31 pm
I thought it was Kropotkin. I only heard that in a movie once, though.
LFC 08.10.26 at 3:02 am
Didn’t see the movie Oppenheimer, but the Proudhon/Marx thing is clearly a screenwriter’s error. Btw, I once had a boss/supervisor who was very surprised when for some reason I mentioned that I’d been to Marx’s grave in London. “Marx is buried in London?” he said. I suppose I could have explained a bit, a sentence or two would have done it, but instead I decided just to nod and let it go. (This was around the early 90s, so people didn’t yet go online and look things up that way. I wonder if he ever bothered to learn something about Marx’s life. I’m guessing not.)
LizardBreath 08.10.26 at 2:48 pm
In Die Hard, there’s a moment where a cable news talking head refers to the possibility that the hostages have begun to sympathize with their captors, and describes it as “Helsinki Syndrome”. And then someone else on the newscast steps in to say “that’s Helsinki, Sweden.” I have never understood what was going on there — is it just a joke about cable news people being dumb? Because dumb as they may have been at the time, that’s a type of dumb that makes no sense at all.
PatinIowa 08.10.26 at 7:16 pm
In Michael Mann’s Public Enemies (2009), John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) sneaks into a Chicago PD office, clearly in midsummer in the thirties. The game is between the Cubs and the Yankees, an impossibility before inter-league play began in the nineties.
For absolutely no good reason, it annoyed the heck out of me, unlike, for example, Johnny Depp’s visible ear piercing scars.
That’s when I learned that movies listed on the IMDB have a “goofs” section devoted to errors that irked nerdy viewers. If you want to waste some time–enjoyably–look up your favourite films and read the goofs. You’ll find, among other things, that people who watch lots of movies know enormous amounts about Nazi uniforms and medals, and the timelines of various weaponry.
And then there are the sword and sandal historical dramas, like the one occupying a huge part of the online bandwidth at the moment.
PatinIowa 08.10.26 at 7:19 pm
Edit: “A baseball game between the Chicago Cubs and the New York Yankees is playing on the radio …”
Ogden Wernstrom 08.11.26 at 1:05 am
LizardBreath @18, I’m pretty sure that Helsinki Syndrome was intended as a throwaway joke – don’t read into it too deeply.
However, the joke is apparently on the real-life audience, since the term “Helsinki Syndrome” keeps popping up in the place of “Stockholm Syndrome”.
Plus, Finnish TV made 14 episodes of a series named “Helsinki-syndrooma”.
Gareth Wilson 08.11.26 at 5:00 am
“Helsinki Syndrome” was mentioned on Babylon 5 too. It’s possible that something happened in Helsinki before the 23rd century that made it a better reference for the hostage thing, although it was probably just a Die Hard joke.
D. S. Battistoli 08.11.26 at 5:32 am
I’ve found myself wondering three times about Seven.
Not the David Fincher film, though I enjoyed that. I wondered about the contents of the abandoned T.E. Lawrence book whose title he gave to Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I wondered at how The Seven-Storey Mountain politely but firmly vitiates against the very thing about Dante’s Purgatorio that its title references. And I wondered which of the violent deaths in A Brief History of Seven Killings were the seven murders (which I guess is part of Marlon James’ whole play in producing a mainstream literary novel exploring plotlessness).
Neville Morley 08.11.26 at 5:56 am
@LizardBreath #18: I always assumed the point was that the second person knows it’s Stockholm Syndrome, but is snarky rather than offering a straight correction.
John Q 08.11.26 at 7:57 am
@1 Something very similar is attributed to Foch, commenting on the Treaty of Versailles “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.”
He was objecting to the provisions under which the Rhineland would be demilitarised rather than annexed by France, and the Saar would be returned after 15 years (which helps to explain the uncannily accurate timing).
Neville Morley 08.11.26 at 7:09 pm
@JohnQ #25: thanks for that reference. I wonder if Raymond Aron was thinking of it, as well as of Thucydides, when he suggested that 1914-1945 should be considered as a single conflict with a period of supposed peace in the middle.
John Q 08.11.26 at 7:44 pm
Neville @ 26. I agree with Aron, to the extent that I avoid referring to WWI and WWII whenever possible. I use The Great War if I can do so without causing confusion.
novakant 08.12.26 at 5:05 am
No offence, but certain revisionist elements in Germany would love that view of WW1/2 to be established, i.e. WW2 was a foregone conclusion because of the injustice of Versaille etc.
I am sure you have very different reasons for holding it.
J-D 08.12.26 at 6:18 am
Maybe I’m missing something, but if I’m understanding that correctly then it appears he was suggesting that the problem was that the peace terms were insufficiently strict, which would suggest …
… a different reading from this one, namely, that the peacemakers’ mistake in 1919 was not that they treated Germany too harshly but rather that they didn’t treat Germany harshly enough.
There is, of course, no way of knowing for certain what consequences would have followed if the Saar and the Rhineland has been permanently annexed to France in 1919.
John Q 08.12.26 at 6:39 am
Novakant @28 None taken. My reasoning is that the war brought forward Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin (among others) who would otherwise have lived and died in well-deserved obscurity, and produced the conditions under which they could command armies of followers. For different reasons, all of these made a durable peace impossible.
As regards Versailles, the actual justice or otherwise of the settlement is largely irrelevant. Most Germans perceived it as unjust and the dominant group blamed it on socialists and Jews. Looking at the settlement after 1945, the correct response in 1919 might have been one that severely punished the war leaders (particularly Hindenburg and Ludendorff) while treating the German people more kindly. But that was never going to happen.
Tm 08.12.26 at 8:58 am
Not sure whether that fits here but I was wondering in one of the early scenes of the Odyssey why the soldiers on Odysseus’ ship while rowing keep their helmets on, and when they raise the sail they have taken the helmets off. Also how the giants clad in heavy iron armor are stomping into the ocean as if the weight didn’t bother them.
LFC 08.14.26 at 8:40 pm
N. Morley @26 (and John Q.)
Raymond Aron was not the only one to suggest that 1914-1945 was basically one long conflict w/ roughly a 20 years’ break in the middle. See, for instance, E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, p. 22 (“thirty-one years’ world war”). I do not think however that one should stop referring to WW1 and WW2. After all, there were many significant differences in the periods of active fighting/hostilities, and, among other things, WW2 had ideological dimensions that WW1 didn’t (not in the same way at any rate).
Comments on this entry are closed.