King Richard III was a monster. He poisoned his wife, stole the throne from his two young nephews and ordered them to be smothered in the Tower of London. Richard was a sort of Antichrist the King --"that bottled spider, that poisonous bunchbacked toad. "
Anyway, that was Shakespeare’s version. Shakespeare did what the playwright does: he turned history into a vivid, articulate, organized dream-repeatable nightly. He put the crouch back onstage, and sold tickets.
And who Would say that the real Richard known to family and friends was not identical to Shakespeare’s memorably loathsome creation The actual Richard went dimming into the past and vanished. When all the eye-witnesses are gone, the artist’s imagination begins to twist.
Variations on the King Richard Effect are at work in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Richard III was art, but it was propaganda too. Shakespeare took the details of his plot from Tudor historians who wanted to blacken Richard’s name. Several centuries passed before other historians began to write about Richard’s virtues and suggest that he may have been a victim of Tudor malice and what is the cleverest conspiracy of all: art.
JFK is a long and powerful harangue about the death of the man--Stone keeps calling "the slain young king.’ What are the rules of Stone’s game Is Stone functioning as commercial entertainer Propagandist Documentary filmmaker Historian Journalist Fantasist Sensationalist Crazy conspiracy-monger Lone hero crusading for the truth against a corrupt Establishment Answer: some of the above.
The first superficial effect of JFK is to raise angry little scruples like welts in the conscience. Wouldn’t it be absurd if a generation of younger Americans, with no memory of 1963, were to form their ideas about John Kennedy’s assassination from Oliver Stone’s report of it But worse things have happened--including, perhaps, the Warren Commission report
Stone uses a suspect, mixed art form, and JFK raises the familiar ethical and historical problems of docudrama. But so what Artists have always used public events as raw material, have taken history into their imaginations and transformed it. The fall of Troy vanished into the Iliad. The Battle of Borodino found its most memorable permanence in Tolstoy’s imagining of it in War and Peace.
Especially in a world of insatiable electronic storytelling, real history procreates, endlessly conjuring new versions of itself. Public life has become a metaphysical breeder of fictions. Watergate became an almost continuous television miniseries--although it is interesting that the movie of Woodward and Bernstein’s All The President’s Men stayed close to the known facts and, unlike JFK, did not validate dark conjecture.
It can be inferred from the text that public life（）
A.is often the stuff for artists’ fictions
B.lies outside the field of history
C.is the focus of public attention
D. remains memorable at all times
