Getting the Timeline Wrong

Anachronisms occur when a film or TV show that’s set in the past makes a mistake, and includes things that couldn’t have existed yet in the time when the story is set. Some are insignificant, visible only to a tiny number of history buffs and specialists. Others are face-palm blatant, like someone carelessly leaving a Starbucks cup in the background of a scene in Game of Thrones. Errors like that can hurt the suspension of disbelief. HBO wasn’t amused. A few people lost their jobs over that.

General George S. Patton liked Packards. But it’s not possible for him to have ridden in the postwar car we briefly see on the streets of wartime London in Patton. It’s not a big error, though I can tell you there was an uneasy murmur even from 1970 audiences, who were old enough to detect that something was slightly wrong.

Cars tend to make it tough to fool an audience because they are readily date-identifiable, especially for a male audience old enough to remember them. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to notice clothes and hairstyles that look “off”. They’re usually right, too: for decades, studios compromised, not wanting to be historically correct at the cost of making actresses less attractive to audiences. Faye Dunaway’s hairstyles in Bonnie and Clyde are Sixties styles influenced by the Thirties. Cleopatra did not dress like Elizabeth Taylor. I doubt anyone demanded a ticket refund over it.

How long ago is the story? The standards of historical recreation have risen sharply over the years, but in general the farther back it is, the less critical timeline errors are. Notorious perfectionist Stanley Kubrick used an 1827 Schubert trio on the soundtrack of Barry Lyndon, which ends in 1789; it felt right, and nobody cared. In the opening scenes of King of Kings, Pompey, an arrogant Roman general on horseback, defiles the sacred Temple of Jerusalem. In 65 BC, though, the six-pointed star wasn’t a symbol specifically for Judaism, and it wouldn’t be widely recognized as one for another 1600 years.

If an outta-time anachronism runs the other way, it may be an eccentric choice, but it’s not a timeline goof by our definition. The Sting (1973) is set in 1937, but its music and story, even its poster design, is pure pre-World War 1. Again, nobody really cared, especially as The Sting was essentially a charming conman’s crime comedy, not a documentary about the Depression. Comedies usually get a break. You expect the helicopters to be correct in Zero Dark Thirty. Less so for Tina Fey’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

The mostly young staff of George Clooney’s 2005 Good Night and Good Luck didn’t notice a problem with plastic water bottles left scattered around a CBS-TV table littered with 1954 debris—ash trays, fountain pens, notebooks, cardboard coffee cups. After all, what’s the problem? People drank water in 1954; they had water coolers, didn’t they? And there were already plastic bottles in existence. They Googled it. But in 1954, we didn’t carry them around to compulsively hydrate ourselves all day and everywhere. It’s a minor, but telling, detail of pre-Eighties life that they didn’t know they didn’t know.

Some mistakes happen because habits or customs changed. Unlike obvious errors in technology, these tend to be “invisible” to modern eyes, hence trickier to avoid. As careful as Barry Lyndon is, people in that era did not write with their left hand. In other films, men putting on their boots in or before the 1700s didn’t sort them left and right; they were all the same. For nearly all human history, the obvious and universal, so therefore unspoken, fear of pregnancy or disease inhibited sexual relations in ways that many contemporary readers and audiences don’t seem to care to understand.

Anachronistic ideas do more cultural damage than 1959 DeSotos in a 1957 scene. In too many cases of historical storytelling, the past is neither understood nor respected. It’s merely a malleable tool to be used to send a message about the present. To be sure, this was true of enterprising dramatists well before even Shakespeare’s time.

Some adjustment of dialog is usually needed for comprehension, but sometimes that adjustment is done to tacitly frame and silently pre-condition an issue for us. In the old days—pick any date prior to, say, 1965—people spoke differently. The words they chose reflected a different way of thinking that a dramatist needs to respect in its own terms. Making some timeline mistakes, major or trivial, is hard to avoid even when the filmmaker has the best of intentions.

In Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, written by Tony Kushner, statemen use terms like “racial equality” that mean something now, but would have been strange to 19^th century ears. Biblically-based arguments about easing the burdens of the dusky sons of Ham would have made far more sense to them, but far less sense to modern, secular audiences.

By the way: who decides when a word or term is anachronistic? It isn’t always a razor-sharp distinction that lends itself to a certain answer. Experts in linguistic analysis run into gray areas, where someone may have used the term once in an obscure journal or small-town newspaper thirty years earlier, but it doesn’t catch on, and is reinvented by coincidence. The 1959 title The Twilight Zone is an example. Even Rod Serling didn’t claim it was original, but he couldn’t remember when he’d ever seen it. Most of the claimed predecessors turn out to be dead ends.

Mad Men was a happy hunting ground for (usually) minor anachronisms. Real-life advertising executives of the Sixties didn’t yet use terms like “leveraging (an advantage)” or “levelling the playing field”. In those days, the only people who “sought someone’s input” would have been audio engineers. These are errors, but most of them aren’t important.

Some are. The show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, was a relatively young man who knew a lot of things but didn’t always get them right. In an early episode, an ad agency loses a Jewish client when they inadvertently reveal their casual anti-Semitism. He was making a genuine historical point: Even in JFK-era, superficially liberal midtown Manhattan, classic old-timey American upper-class anti-Semitism wasn’t as rare, or as long ago, as we like to believe. But he did it, if you’ll excuse a treif expression, rather ham-handedly.

There are subtle shifts in national moods and morals that get blurred over in films. The French Connection (1971) actually took place ten years earlier, when pre-Miranda NYPD procedures were different and much rougher. Ignoring the passage of time was not something that most outsiders would notice, and made it seem all the more real.

A major turning point in 1969’s Goodbye, Columbus: a mother discovers that her 21-year-old daughter is hiding her use of birth control, driving a young couple to break off their relationship. In Philip Roth’s book, written in 1959, it made dramatic sense. But when the film came out, the idea that an upper-middle class mother of an adult child in the wealthy suburbs of New York would be so shocked at the idea seemed unrealistic. Times had changed quickly.

While we’re on the subject, in our own times Aaron Sorkin has a natural gift for heavy-handed scene-setting that in 2010’s The Social Network turns Harvard in 2002 into a babe-mobbed-rich-jocks versus sex-starved-nerds social situation out of a cliched Mythical State College in 1955. That was sometimes wryly noted even when the film came out, at a time when in the eyes of the national literati, Sorkin could do no wrong.

In less ideological cases, I’d suggest that we give the filmmakers a break, or at least a sliding scale of blame. Apollo 13, given the great opportunity to film in NASA locations, couldn’t always eliminate minor anachronisms like a few, background, out-of-focus, overexposed examples of the later, shuttle-era “worm” logo of NASA’s initials. These weren’t exactly mistakes; the production knew a few of them were there, appreciated the authenticity of the site anyway, and tried to frame and edit the shots to minimize the attention paid to them on screen. In 1995 it was an honorable, realistic approach. Nowadays, a Netflix cleanup team would simply go in overnight and paint them out.

Ron Howard, given the rare privilege of using some actual flight-ready Apollo Command Module hardware, may have accepted a Collins receiver on the set that was a Block III model that, although almost identical to Apollo 13’s, wouldn’t fly until Apollo 15 the following year. Quelle horreur, right? Full disclosure: I’ve always liked the movie and I don’t count these as timeline mistakes for anyone but the most demented nitpicker.

On a lesser budget level, I cut the cable and streaming production teams even more breaks. Well, up to a point. Their owners and bosses were the ones who signed the deals that guaranteed Hollywood-level visual perfection at New Mexican, New Zealand, or Quebecois prices. Now it was up to the hungry local teams to deliver, to save—or lose—their own skins. To a remarkable degree, they have, at each tier of the contracted schedule. From Cold Case to The Dark Side of the Ring, history via cable TV has been successful as one of the final ad-supported arenas left.

Budgets are far tighter these days; after the years-long hangover after the pandemic-era frenzy of spending all of Hollywood’s money on building streaming services that could, conceivably, by the far-off year of 2020, compete with Netflix. It didn’t happen. Yet even these present-day budget strictures don’t inhibit the quality of what’s possible, with enough cultural energy.