Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra is making a lot of people angry.
Numerous viewers, especially Egyptians,
have objected to casting a black actress
to play the historical ruler who is believed to be of Greek heritage.
But while this debate sounds like your typical culture war bickering,
what makes the critiques more complex
is that the show claims to be a docudrama
and is edited like a docuseries,
with experts chiming in about historical facts.
Complaints from Egyptians argue that this misrepresents the facts
of their cultural history – and others ask,
if this is a docuseries that’s part of
producer Jada Pinkett Smith’s African Queens initiative,
why not highlight actual female rulers of African descent?
With lines like: "I don’t care what they tell you in school,
Cleopatra was Black," Queen Cleopatra encourages us
to believe whatever we want to believe,
or accept whatever information resonates with us.
"I imagine her to have curly hair like me and a similar skin color."
But while this show may have noble intentions to remix history
to send a positive current message, is it really a good idea
for documentaries to tell us
to disregard what we were told in school?
More broadly, the looser-with-facts style of “docuseries” fits into a
bigger trend toward so-called documentaries
that are less concerned with reporting
the objective truth of a story,
than with furthering a certain subjective message.
In our post-truth age, conspiracy theories
have more power than ever,
and plenty of supposed documentaries
out there are deliberately spreading misinformation
and setting out with a sometimes questionable
or at least very one-sided agenda.
"Do you worry that there could be a
sort of social-contagion element to this?"
As people simply become so distrustful of those in charge,
and even mainstream documentaries
no longer care about the facts –
how are we to separate the real news
from the fake news?
Or the real history from the fictitious retellings?
Here’s our take on how the lines between fact
and fiction have become more blurred than ever,
and the danger of living in a culture where trust
in truth is completely eroded and devalued.
It’s always been kind of fun
to have at least one conspiracy theory
that you secretly subscribe to.
Was the moon landing a hoax? What happened at Roswell?
There’s a lot about history we can’t know for sure,
and it might not hurt to have an open mind.
But up until recently, there’s been a general acceptance
that most of these over-the-top theories were…
well, a little unhinged:
“somebody’d blow the whistle,
and every once in a while,
some poooor little SUCKER tries,
like these guys. Boom! Boom!
Every one of these guys, dead! dead! dead!”
Now, conspiracy theorists
have cleaned up their image a little.
No longer the man wearing a tin-foil hat
broadcasting from a ham radio in his garage,
they’re using traditional news tactics
like documentaries to disseminate their material.
What sounded like outlandish or far-fetched theories
a short time ago are now legitimized
and gathering huge traction online
"Are you a Gulf of Tonkin guy, or Operation Northwoods?”
“Those are all true, there's nothing,
there's nothing, those are all true”
“Operation Northwoods is my favorite.”
We’ve long had conspiracy theorists
and “documentaries” that spread
unverified claims with an agenda
But in our recent era, everything changed when
a conspiracy theorist became elected President.
"I'm not concerned about anything
with the Russian investigation
because it's a hoax."
Prior to Trump taking office,
he was already spreading the
Barack Obama birther conspiracy.
And with all his “fake news” rhetoric,
the distrust he was sewing in
the mainstream media, before and during
his time in office, was so effective that
people who operated outside of
these channels began to gain
credibility simply because they
were in opposition to the party line.
People like Alex Jones and websites like 4Chan
were able to fill the gap
created by this confusion
and offer an alternative narrative
in a convincing, persuasive way
“He says he knows the real culprits of 9/11.”
“Private corporate rogue networks working in US,
British and Israeli intelligence, all three groups
have been found to have fingerprints.”
These people come to be seen as credible
not so much because their followers think
they’re necessarily telling the truth
or right about everything,
but because they’re willing
to be skeptical about what
the official version of events is.
Someone like Joe Rogan has managed to maintain
a mainstream appeal not by spouting
conspiracy theories exactly,
but by being seen as this open-minded
middle ground who’s willing to have
the conversation with all sides.
And while on the surface
this may seem like a good quality to have,
it has ended up with Rogan
platforming theories that are provably false
“This is the grand conspiracy right,
the grand conspiracy is that,
the pharmaceutical companies are all in cahoots
to try to make anybody who
takes this stuff look crazy.
So because these people have these huge platforms now,
they are able to hoover up the theories that start out
in the murkier corners of the internet.
QAnon and Pizzagate, both of which began
circulating on the messageboard 4Chan,
are now firmly in the mainstream
because of the credibility
they’ve been given by people
like Trump, Jones, Rogan and others.
What’s interesting is that these self-styled
“truth tellers” have also been reflected
in fictional stories and pop culture,
and often in those reflections,
they are proved to be correct.
Woody Harrelson’s Charlie in disaster movie 2012
is a crackpot radio host living off the grid,
but he is the only one who knows exactly what’s going on.
In 2022’s Moonfall, John Bradley’s character
starts off as this fringe academic
who believes the moon isn’t a planet, but a so-called
“megastructure”, and again,
not only is he validated by the film,
but he’s eventually martyred by it
“The moon was attempting to return
to its original orbit, until this THING
went back inside the moon.” “This is what
I’ve been trying to tell you!” These depictions deliberately
challenge our preconceptions of these characters,
and invite us to consider
whether they’re really as crazy as they seem,
or whether there’s actually a more sinister reason
that what they’re saying gets dismissed.
It’s not that conspiracy theories
have gotten any less crazy,
but that a lot of the time
they use forms we are, rightly or wrongly,
used to associating with accuracy.
Documentaries are as prone to directorial manipulation
as any thriller, but because it’s real life
being depicted, with experts speaking
as “non-fiction” voices to verify the facts,
people often take what’s said as the truth
without any further interrogation
“All of the things that one could imagine
that Stanley Kubrick would have
had to go through
to fake the Apollo moon footage,
he stands up and he's wearing
the Apollo 11 sweater with
a rocket taking off, then I knew
I'd nabbed it.”
In fact, in the modern era,
many of the most influential documentaries
do have a clear perspective or argument.
Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine in 2002
and all Moore’s work to follow or Al Gore's documentary
An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 stood out because of how
they put together the facts
to support a thesis that spoke to people.
The massive rise of viral video essays
over the 2010s also contributed
to a savvier mainstream understanding
of how to combine facts and evidence
to build arguments. Yet over time,
the documentary form is becoming less and less
beholden to facts or objectivity at all.
Sometimes this is of a fairly harmless
though clearly biased, variety,
like the self-promotional documentary
or self-exploitational documentary.
"Doesn't it make more sense to hear our story from us?"
Other times, it leads to the “documentary”
with a clear political or ideological aim of presenting only one
highly filtered side of the story.
Matt Walsh’s What Is A Woman?
presents itself as a rigorous
scientific investigation into the coherence of gender ideology,
and himself as a sensible voice in the midst of a lot of
pseudo-experts, but a cursory fact check
reveals a lot of his statements
to be inaccurate. And clearly, they’re all serving
a particular world view: Walsh has publicly voiced
his own very old-fashioned, and actually pretty dangerous
views on gender norms:
“Girls between the ages of like
17 and 24 is when they’re technically most fertile,
recently, in the last 30 years or so
we decided that that's way too young to start a family. WHY?"
The film 2000 Mules runs with the story
that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump,
using information from the widely discredited election group
True The Vote. But NPR’s Shannon Bond
writes that despite the film's slick graphics,
“the maps don't actually correspond to the alleged data.”
Similarly, Mikki Willis’ film Plandemic surged in popularity
in the early days of Covid-19,
shared by notable doctors, politicians and celebrities,
despite the scientific testimony in the video having come from
a doctor who’d been widely discredited.
“That vaccine was grown in a cell line, a dog cell line,
dogs have lots of coronaviruses, that’s why they’re not testing there.”
“Honestly, just, it’s a purely illogical statement.”
The video was eventually removed, but by that time the damage was done,
and that’s the biggest problem. We see the same thing has happened
with various anti-semitic conspiracy theories over the years,
most of which can be traced all the way back to a fabricated
1903 Russian publication called The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion.
“It’s a book that was read by Hitler, and a book that
inspired the 9/11 terrorists.
It is perhaps the most dangerous book ever published.” ​
The Atlantic’s Steven J. Zipperstein argues that
“The Protocols is not, purportedly, mere narration of a diabolical plot
—it’s evidence of one. It projects authority
by obscuring its authorship, not unlike various religious texts—
or, to use a much more recent and pertinent example,
the anonymous dispatches that form the foundation of QAnon.”
The explosion in popularity of the true crime genre
has also gone a long way to creating this conspiratorial culture.
Documentaries like The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel
give legitimate platforms to these conspiracy theorists
and provide another outlet for ordinary people who already have
distrust in our institutions.
“At that point we were all feeling that someone in the hotel
has to be involved, and this has to be a foul play scenario.”
The irony is in spreading this distrust in mainstream media,
these documentaries don’t provide clarity,
but instead cause chaos.
Once they are fact-checked, it’s usually easy to know
what to believe.
But now the problem of misinformation is so out of control,
whose responsibility should it be to do that work?
So how does misinformation actually spread?
Stanford’s Edmund L. Andrews likens it to an actual virus,
saying that the propagation of fake and harmful stories
via social media bots can create such an overload of that information
that people are effectively worn down, to the point
where they believe it as truth.
“These accounts were deliberately and specifically attempting to sew
political discord in Hong Kong.”
The problem is that misinformation online
is rife, even in places that feel pretty harmless.
Similarly, things like deepfake technology and A.I
are now so commonplace that it can be initially very difficult
to tell the difference between them and the real thing.
“We’re entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like
anyone is saying anything at any point in time.”
UK photographer Siobhan Walker went viral for her A.I art images
that were intended to depict working class areas
of Glasgow in the 1980s.
It’s easy to see how these things that could be intended for parody
or artistic purposes could simply become
embedded in the culture at face value, like we see with conspiracy theories.
One of the main theories that went viral in the wake of
the Covid-19 pandemic
was that rich people had access to a special vaccine before anyone else,
something that was then alluded to at the start of Glass Onion.
“You won’t be needing that anymore.” “I won’t?” “You’re good.”
It’s one thing for bots to be spreading conspiracies,
but when these are disseminated by official accounts
and powerful people, why wouldn’t you believe them?
“Ukranian authorities have finally admitted
that the Ghost of Khiv is a myth.”
The saying goes that you can’t close the door once the horse has bolted,
and right now it feels like horses are bolting everywhere you look.
Today, seemingly anyone, even poorly informed non-experts,
can claim that authoritative voice, provided they package
what they’re saying in the right way.
Conspiracy theories are born out of skepticism,
and in truth, it’s good to be skeptical.
History is full of stories where the publicized truth
of an event doesn’t match up to what really happened.
“In a conspiracy like this, you build from the outer edges
and you go step by step, if you shoot too high and miss,
everybody feels more secure.”
But we need to apply that same level of skepticism
to the conspiracy theorists too.
A recent study from MIT showed that increased digital literacy
led to more people being able to discern
between real and fake news, and there are increased calls
for this to be taught to young people from an early age.
That’s the positive here: fake news may spread like a virus,
but that doesn’t mean there’s no way we can't take measures to avoid it.
"Just don't take things at their face value.
Just always be considering what else might be the purpose here."