Sexy, lanky, pouty Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays the sexy, lanky, pouty Henry the Eighth in the Showtime miniseries The Tudors. Not since Jennifer Love Hewitt's stunningly miscast but awesomely stacked portrayal of Audrey Hepburn has the grand gilt of history been roto-stripped and papered over with a new and improved veneer purchased in aisle 6 in a West Hollywood Target.
If The Tudors does what Showtime wants it to do, then we are certain to see an increase in production of quasi-historical epics featuring dumbed-down, beefed-up and tricked-out versions of their non-fictional inspirations. Already, the history-cum-video game 300 has whipped the box office into a steroid rage with its beefcakey Charge of the Lat Brigade and ticked off certain Farsi speaking cultures with its thoroughly pop interpretation of ancient events. Did people even have "six-packs" in those days? It's more likely they had "twelve-packs" or "fifteen-packs", since it was also more than likely that several of the individual "-packs" would have become resorbed early on, necessitating the development of more "-packs". Obviously, Hollywood's artistic license has been wielded with obscene recklessness, having given us everything from caucasian actor Walter Long's portrayal of the "renegade Negro slave" in D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation to a royally pissed off and loaded for bear Jesus in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, who practically cracks his knuckles before goin' out and gittin' some.
But times and approaches to dramatizing historical accounts have clearly changed. I mean, Raymond Massey at least had the bone structure that could suggest the homespun (read: acromegalic) features of Abe Lincoln; the porcine and brilliant Charles Laughton was a more than plausible representation of the original Hanky Panky Hank no. 8, possessing the beady, twinkling eyes, the moistened bee-stung lips and the substantial midriff so oft portrayed in oil, egg tempera and whatever other medium I can think of to sound knowledgeable about art. Gary Cooper could have been Lou Gehrig's brother, so similar a specimen was he. Hell, even Jackie Robinson played himself, leaving nothing to chance casting-wise. But when scant attempt is made to depict historical characters or events with accuracy rather than with an eye toward having a decent opening weekend the only question would be "what's next?" The inevitable answer is: Jake Gyllenhaal as a smoldering, puppyish Adolf Hitler; Russel Crowe as an expansive-shouldered and not-to-be-fucked-with President William Howard Taft, the film shot in a new 3-D process complete with an NC-17 bath scene showing the incident in which Taft got stuck in his tub---though not due to the girth of his stomach.
Now how, you might be asking yourself, do I somehow connect all this to the Bush Administration? I could easily do it, using my unerring tendency to see conspiracy in all things having to do with President McMonkey Head but the reality is it probably would still happen if, say, Alan Alda was president. It all goes back to my brilliant assertion that we live in a culture that extols triumph in the mediocre. Perhaps in the future this epoch will be dramatized by whomever the current arbiter of cinematic populism is. Probably by then people will be watching TV shows and movies on small screens pasted to their thumbnails. But perhaps, due to the shallowness of the culture that would be used for source material by the no doubt uber-hip, poly-pierced filmmaker/impresario/former American Idol winner, he or she would try to portray the the dark age Bush years positively, with an eye toward raising the collective IQ of the public, rather than smacking it down relentlessly as in a game of societal Whack-A-Mole the way we do now. A heavy lidded, slim-hipped, bed-headed heartthrob playing Henry the Eighth? Keep up that sort of thing and next we'll be seeing some beer and cocaine swilling frat boy with a rich dada and a hankering to be the commissioner of baseball sitting in the Oval Office! Nah, no one would ever buy that...