Ravings of a Textual Deviant

I was watching the History Channel’s four-hour Barbarians marathon Tuesday night, and in the middle of hour three, the Mongols, who should I see on screen but one of the professors from my former graduate department. Naturally, my first thought was to email a contact at my old department and one of my grad school classmates, and see what they thought about the program. Turned out that my classmate (now working on his Ph. D. at the University of Wisconsin) hadn’t seen it, but had spoken to one of his profs, who had.

Glaring errors pointed out by my source in a very brief email (I noticed these, too, when I was watching):

1. No Asian actors playing Mongols! You’d think this would be a no-brainer. I hope the producers hear about it from SAG.

2. One of the talking heads said that Mongolia was the “coldest place on earth” and that the temperature got down to “90 degrees below zero.” Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG! Granted, it does get bring-your-brass-monkeys-inside cold in Mongolia; today’s high and low temperatures in the captial were -6 degrees and -27 degrees Fahrenheit respectively–without wind chill. However, the coldest place on Earth is Vostok Station in Antarctica (DUH!), which records low temps in the vicinity of -100 degrees Fahrenheit (the record is -126 degrees). Now, if I can look that up in less than five minutes, why couldn’t the fact-checker? (Of course, that assumes that they used a fact-checker.)

I also noticed a distinct lack of horses in much of the re-enactment video. This is like watching a Gulf War I documentary without any footage from smart bombs or planes.

And from what I know–and granted, it doesn’t compare to what either of the aforementioned professors or my dissertating friend know–that’s the tip of the iceberg. (As I said to my ex-classmate, if I can spot errors in the Viking portion of the series, then you know somebody didn’t do their research!) My source is of the opinion that the only material provided by the interviewees that the producers used was the interview footage, despite the fact that at least one of the interviewees was asked to consult on the project. It looks that way to me, and apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so. According to my pal at UW, his prof said “They had some reasonable talking heads (Robert Hillenbrand, John Woods, Christopher Atwood, Sheila Blair), but between them, i.e. when the heads weren’t talking, it was very bad indeed.” Content-wise, I find it hard to argue. (Granted, it’s not easy to cram several hundred years of history into 44 minutes, but if you’re going to go to that much trouble, why not make the effort to do a good job of it?) I was annoyed that the program kept referring to what the Mongols did as “new,” when much of it was new only outside of Central Asia. And I was particularly displeased with the emphasis on the reports of excessive cruelty and general barbarism. This is nothing new; the Mongols were some of the few victors who didn’t get to write the well-known version of history…or at least, didn’t get their version well-publicized, which just goes to show the value of a good agent. One of the few things that the show did get right–and it was almost lost in passing–was the emphasis on the fact that there weren’t that many ethnic Mongols at the time. (There was a large confederation of several ethnic groups, including Mongols, but not as large as some of the contemporary writings estimate.)

Moving from content to production values, I have to say that even when the talking heads were on, the visuals weren’t as good as the audio. I was not impressed with the lighting or camera work on Christopher Atwood’s interview–half his face was in shadow, and the camera operator set the shot in such a way that his subject was constantly leaning out of the frame. On the other hand, the non-talking-head video had a few lovely scenic shots, and the computer-animated map overlays were nicely done.

All things being equal, I’m glad that I fell asleep halfway through the Huns. My ex-classmate said “Could be a useful teaching tool though: What’s wrong with this picture?” What the program did do very well was illustrate the fact that the History Channel is about entertainment, not education. It’s being re-run on Saturday night, so watch it for yourself and let me know what you think.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2004 at 12:39 am and is filed under Off the Shelf. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.