I was deeply shocked to watch the actor playing committed pacifist Dave Dellinger, who was an actual friend of mine, punch someone out in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” Dave served some serious jail time for refusing to fight in WWII, and all of his writings emphasize nonviolence. Quite relieved to read Harvey Wasserman (who was involved in the Chicago events) say in his review of the movie that it never happened, was disgracing Dave’s legacy, and should be removed from the film:
Here Sorkin’s film hits a bad bottom. Played by John Carroll Lynch, we sense a suburbanite whose spiritual roots in a lifetime of pacifism are not quite clear.
In one truly inexcusable moment, Dave is shown punching a court officer (and then apologizing for it).
THIS ABSOLUTELY DID NOT HAPPEN!!!
Dave Dellinger spent years in prison for refusing to take up arms during World War II. He was an elder beacon for countless nonviolent protests.
He titled his autobiography From Yale to Jail. Even when sorely provoked — at least in his adulthood — it was a point of honor that Dave Dellinger would refrain from physical violence.
Years later, as we sat in at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, Dave made a pretty convincing case that Abbie had been murdered. When election protection attorney Bob Fitrakis held hearings on how Ohio’s 2004 election had been stolen, Dellinger came to Columbus while conducting a long water-only fast.
It was also Dave — not Tom — who read the names of those killed in Vietnam. He did it at the beginning of the trial, not the end. The litany included Vietnamese names, not just American ones.
Like Tom (and unlike the actor who portrays him) Dave’s powerful physical presence reflected his heartfelt commitments. There are artistic liberties that work in this film, but that alleged moment of personal violence does not. Mr. Sorkin, please edit it out!
Dave once wrote me a letter describing not wanting to do violence by smoking a cigar when people found it offensive. So I believe Harvey. And I don’t understand why Sorkin would undermine everything Dave believed in for a cheap visual. People will watch this movie and think, well, he wasn’t so committed to nonviolence after all. It is a total invalidation of what he stood for and the way he lived his life.
Harvey’s critique is all the more valid because Harvey himself has a tendency to write in a somewhat apocalyptic style, with a lot of capitalizations and exclamation points and predictions of dire consequences or major victories (see an example in the single-line third paragraph I quoted). Yet this false characterization of Dellinger was unacceptable because it completely changed the meaning of Dave’s philosophy and behavior.
Bending or distorting or outright ignoring the facts is something that happens way too often in Hollywood movies. I still remember a movie portrayal of nuclear safety whistleblower Karen Silkwood, whose death on a highway has been widely linked to a deliberate attack. While official investigators said she’d fallen asleep, a union investigator found that her car was indeed rammed from the back. That the documents she was bringing to meet with a New York Times reporter were never found makes the story of deliberate murder far more likely.
But in the movie (it may have been “Silkwood” or it may have been “The China Syndrome”), her little Honda is repeatedly hit from behind by a large pickup truck—but she survives.
I honestly don’t see how changing the outcome was at all useful in telling the story. It essentially lets the company she worked for get away, literally, with murder.
Yet, when I interviewed one of my favorite authors, Madeleine L’Engle (author of A Wrinkle in Time and dozens of other books), she made a distinction between truth and fact. The emotional impact of powerful fiction doesn’t have to be based in fact, she says—and we have many powerful novels to prove her right.
Facts are limited. It is a fact that we’re sitting here, but whether any truth comes out of this meeting is something else again. We don’t always know [truth]. I write stories because that’s how I look for truth. I was looking for truth when I was writing Wrinkle. We live in a world where it’s very difficult for people to understand that a story can be truthful and not factual.
For me, the line in the sand is whether shifting the facts to make a better narrative interferes with perceiving the truth. In both the movie examples I’ve cited, I think changing those particular facts is unacceptable because it changed everything about what we believe about Dave Dellinger and about the people who probably killed Karen Silkwood.
Where is the line YOU draw, and why?
