On Sunday 30 January 1972 British troops shot and killed 13 unarmed civilians on a civil rights demonstration in Derry; a fourteenth died later from his wounds. This is history, and for a long time it was living history, argued and fought over.
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For republicans, Bloody Sunday was an example of the ruthlessness of British imperialism; for unionists it was a mistake that ought not to distract attention from the real problem of terrorism; some even insisted that the killings were justified. Bloody Sunday is no longer argued over in these terms. It has passed from history to myth.
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This development is expressed perfectly in the two documentary dramas made to mark the 30th anniversary. Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday (shown last Sunday on ITV) and Jimmy McGovern's Sunday (Channel 4, Monday at 10pm) have their differences as dramas, but their fundamental approach is the same. Both films agree on the facts of the atrocity, and both are sympathetic to the demonstrators and condemn the army. That much is fair enough - indeed it is only good manners these days. But why make a drama rather than a documentary?
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The annoying thing about 'drama documentary' is that you are never quite sure what is real and what isn't. Even if you trust the film-maker to get the important historical facts right to the best of his ability, the details filled out by the author are never inconsequential. Most important perhaps, the characters have to be interpreted by actors. Drama is about performance much more than documentation.
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Clearly, Greengrass knew what he was doing when he cast James Nesbitt, the housewives' favourite, as Ivan Cooper. The relatively obscure MP and moderate civil rights campaigner became Mahatma Ghandi with a rogueish grin and the gift of the gab. Meanwhile, it was easy to dislike the 'supervising' army officer played by Tim Piggott Smith doing his best Posh English Bastard routine. The obligatory sensitive para playing the Good German role only highlighted the fiction.
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It's probably a fair bet that the Paras indulged in a bit of tasteless bravado before the action, but watching actors portray this made me very uneasy. There is a lot to get riled about here that is indisputably true - why am I being encouraged to frown on imagined banter? If Bloody Sunday had been presented as a drama that just happened to be based on real events, this would be less of a problem. But both Greengrass (who previously dramatised the murder of Stephen Lawrence) and McGovern (the Hillsborough disaster and the dockers' strike) have claimed to be using the Truth to 'heal' communities.
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 | | Turning history to therapeutic ends is an exercise in myth-making |
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In fact, McGovern has suggested that his film is little more than a by-product of community work. 'The most important thing for us was that the process was correct; that's often more important than the end product. In this case it was to make sure the Derry people were empowered and participated fully in the making of the film.' (1) Dramatising real events is one thing (and McGovern's peculiar motivation doesn't mean that Sunday isn't good drama), but turning history to therapeutic ends really is an exercise in myth-making.
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Although the Final Solution unquestionably happened, the Holocaust achieved the status of myth a long time ago. The historic slaughter of six million Jews has become an emblem of human hubris. Sunday is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Conspiracy: the Meeting at Wannsee (BBC2, Friday at 9pm) is part of the commemoration. This is a dramatised account of the meeting of Nazi brass at which it is thought the Final Solution was hatched. Kenneth Branagh stars as Reinhard Heydrich, the shadowy figure who chaired the meeting.
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In fact, Conspiracy is less a document of an historic event than a study in the politics of bureaucracy. As such, the drama is well observed: the little fat man introducing himself to everybody over wine captures the dull reality of the conference environment. Heydrich and his sidekick Adolf Eichmann have the answer to the 'Jewish question' all along: it is just a case of bringing on board the various departments represented at the meeting. Heydrich (more precisely, Branagh) achieves this with consummate professionalism, using a threat here, a compliment there, but above all a breezy sense of get-things-done efficiency.
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The most interesting performance comes from Colin Firth as Stuckart, the lawyer responsible for the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws. He is clever and civilised and despises the idiotic anti-semitism of the SS, because he is a sophisticated and ideological anti-semite. In bureaucratic terms, such principle is little more than pedantry, and he is duly steam-rollered.
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Again, all this is the sort of thing that probably did happen, but Conspiracy is based on one set of surviving notes that screenwriter Loring Mandel assures us were 'highly sanitised'. So this is fiction, but then he doesn't pretend otherwise.
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Dolan Cummings is publications editor at the Institute of Ideas, and editor of Culture Wars. He is also the editor of Reality TV: How Real Is Real?, Hodder Murray, 2002 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).
Read on:
Bloody Sunday: why now?
Bernadette McAliskey: 'It has nothing to do with finding the truth', by Brendan O'Neill
spiked-issue: TV
(1) Time Out, 23 January 2002
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