It seems that hardly a week, or at least a month, goes by without outrage over the fact that a black actor has been cast in a film as a character who historically had white skin. Or perhaps the actor is not black, but at least Arab or Asian.
This is often attributed to anti-white racism. But perhaps something deeper is at work. Perhaps we are witnessing the end of the historical period in which filmmakers and artists strove for historical accuracy. When Shakespeare’s theater performed a play set in antiquity, the characters were dressed, spoke, and behaved like English actors of the time. Everyone regarded this as perfectly normal. No one thought to demand a resemblance between the people on stage and their ancient counterparts.
The idea of “historical accuracy” emerged only with the rise of the Enlightenment and modern science. If I have traced it correctly, the first use of historical costumes took place in 1798, with Goethe among those involved. The play was set during the Thirty Years’ War, and the actors were actually dressed according to the fashions of the period. This change in taste was connected both to the broader scientific outlook and to the emergence of history as a discipline that genuinely sought to investigate what had happened in the past. It took historians more than a century to put this approach fully into practice, but the ideal was already there. And with it came a different way of depicting the past in the arts.
Perhaps you can think of one genre that this principle has never quite reached: opera. A sixty-year-old, 140-kilogram Pavarotti can play a sixteen-year-old shepherd, and no one finds it strange.
As society changes, science is losing its authority, the scientific method is coming under attack from all sides, and historical accuracy is being pushed to the margins. Today we can imagine a film in which Hitler speaks Russian receiving favorable reviews, with none of the official historians objecting. Another area in which we are returning to the premodern world.