Golda Meir

We often hear people refer to entertainment as threat-less, as in "It's just a movie," or "It's only a story." The bullets shot in blockbuster action movies are blanks, falls from buildings are all staged, and White House-destroying explosions are created only with pixels. Fantasy, not reality. On the other side of fictional narrative is its credibility—stories are supposed to "suspend disbelief" so that audiences can journey along with the tale presented. When it comes to portraying real people, many directors and writers will give interviews in which they insist the historical characters were researched down to the last eye blink and pinky movement. But for a writer, director, and actor to carve out the personality in question, they make a series of choices: which scenes in this person's life to present? Which known statements to recreate? Which relationships to highlight and which to leave absent from the screen? Even if the people in question were consulted for a particular retelling—which is not usually the case—there must remain a gap between the whole of their lives and the film version. In this case then, these films may say something about the era in which they were produced, as well as our cultural need for a particular representation.