Facts: In 1969, Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge, swam to safety, walked to his family’s cottage, and didn’t report the accident for 10 hours. A girl died in his car.
Those are facts and they are indisputable. Kennedy, in fact, would later plead guilty to fleeing the scene of the crash, which left a young campaign worker, Mary Jo Kopechne, dead.
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So any retelling of this true story would have to include those facts. The new movie “Chappaquiddick” does just that.
But Neal Gabler, who is writing a biography of Edward Kennedy, wrote a piece on Friday in The New York Times calling the film “character assassination” and “tragedy distortion.”
The movie, Gabler writes, “has been heavily promoted by conservative media outlets, and reviewers across the political spectrum have praised what they deem its damning but factual approach. Damning it is; factual it is not.”
“What is the relationship of fact to fiction, of the historical to the histrionic in art and entertainment? Ted Kennedy was a real man living out a real life. His political opponents could and did distort that life for their advantage. But just how many liberties can an artist or entertainer take when he or she deploys a biographical subject?” Gabler muses.
The writer claims many scenes “cross from dramatic interpretation to outright character assassination.”
Instead of excavating Kennedy for larger artistic aims, it eviscerates him for narrow voyeuristic ones.
But this is about more than Ted Kennedy’s legacy. It is a case study in how society collectively shapes its own history. It is not merely, or even mainly, the realm of historians.
Because historical figures pass out of history and into popular culture, and because that process is accelerating, these figures are increasingly defined by popular culture. Artists and especially entertainers may not feel obligations to their subjects, but they do have responsibilities to us, one of which is honesty.
Reaction to the column was brutal on social media.