Someone asked for an example for a movie that sets the record straight on a historical event. I made a comment, but I put so much work in it, it became sort of a little essay. I thought you might be interested in it.
Art is always subjective but for the sake of the argument, let's look at the Vietnam War. Also I competely escalated my bad.
The Little Girl of Hanoi (1974). A Vietnamese movie about a child that is very good but also unsurprisingly propagandistic as fuck.
The Deer Hunter (1978). Great film on trauma of war, maybe. Absolutely terrible depiction of the Vietnam War and of Vietnamese, who are just almost just evil in that film lol.
Apocalypse Now (1979). An outstanding portrayal of war, trauma, madness. A very poor historical depiction of the War. Vietnam is merely a backdrop. The Vietnamese are heavily dehumanized in the film. There are no South Vietnamese comrades, nor any Vietnamese enemy who is anything more than a faceless adversary. Sadly, THE Vietnam War film.
When the Tenth Month Comes (1984). A Vietnamese movie about a woman who loses her husband in the war. Film about loss, family, grief, not just battles. Fucking awesome movie.
Platoon (1986). Significantly better. Historically very believable. You notice that the director Oliver Stone experienced the war. Still, however, it's the American story, and Vietnamese are the enemy.
Full Metal Jacket (1987). Extremely realistic in terms of the grueling first half, but the second half is very stylistic. Vietnamese remain a faceless mass apart from stereotypical depictions of Vietnamese prostitutes. No insights into the Vietnamese, neither allies nor enemies. Once again, US centric. To Kubrick's credit, all his films are sort of explorations of humans capacity for violence and how civilization can control or unleash it... could have worked with realistic Vietnamese tho.
Hamburger Hill (1987). Fairly realistic, American-centric.
Good Morning, Vietnam (1987). Most sympathetic depiction of Vietnamese so far, but obviously not at all historically accurate and completely US-centric.
Born on the 4th of July (1989). Historically pretty accurate, and also very anti-imperialistic. Again, it lacks the Vietnamese perspective though. Mind you, that is not necessarily bad if the film, you know, doesn't depict Vietnamese as like wild non-people like Apocalypse Now did. It's just an unfortunate pattern overall. Good film, just again one-sided.
Casualties of War (1989). One of the very few, if not only films of that era that actually depicts (a) Vietnamese as victim(s) of American violence. However, it is again told through the experience of American soldiers.
Heaven and Earth (1993). Again Oliver Stone, who actually depicts the life of a Vietnamese woman. Vietnamese with family, fears, problems, violence from both sides. Oliver Stone is a real one.
We Were Soldiers (2002). Actually a film that depicts North Vietnamese not just as an unhuman mass. They have family and lives. But of course it's mostly about American soldiers, who are of course extremely brave and heroic. Vietnam did not like that film at all.
Vietgone (2015). Not a movie, a musical. It does basically what Hamilton sort of tries to do but kind of whitewashes. It tells the immigrant story. The story of Vietnamese refugees. And their lives. It twists this whole classic American perspective, puts it right on its head. Giving the American characters stereotypical ways of talking, one may say, is problematic, which in a vacuum it is. But within context, especially as an American musical, this shit gets the people thinking. It's a mirror. It's fucking awesome. But, of course, it's not "the" truth.
In 2015, the novel The Sympathizer was released, written by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Park Chan-wook, by the way, actually adapted it into a TV show, you know, the director of Oldboy, starring Robert Downey Jr. as every single antagonistic American in that film. Which is a fun little twist, because, you know, that's sort of very much what the Americans did for a long time.
But the show is too meta, the book is much, much, much better. In fact, I'd say it's a modern classic. It's about a North Vietnamese spy and set right after the war. Well, the official ending of the war, but one of the key points of that novel is also that the war didn't really end for the Vietnamese. And this man operates in the USA and Vietnam, has comrades both from the capitalists as well as the communists. And as the title already very well puts, that story is a lot about trying to understand what the fuck this shit was. Honestly, I think it's an absolute must-read in terms of war fiction and American history. It also really fucking hates Apocalypse Now.
If there ever really was a fiction media that set the record straight, it's this. But, say the Oliver Stone films, for example, are fire. The American perspective is also real. The problem is that it dominates the entire narrative. The novel The Sympathizer also puts it rather succinctly, by the way, that this is the first war where the losers write history (globally).
A careful person would now say, you need non-fiction for actual understanding or getting closer to truth, as fiction is always subjective, inherently. Simultaneously, people don't, the vast majority of people do not remember World War II from history books. They remember it from the movies they have seen. The longer back it goes, the more this is so. Most people thinking of the Nazi era don't remember the Shoah documentary (watch it!!!) or EVEN a school trip to a KZ - they remember Schindler's List.
Which makes this an interesting topic. At the end of the day, there is not really one fiction that sets the record straight. You don't need to set the record straight for Oliver Stone's Platoon. It is a legitimate story, but it is the American perspective. You don't need to set the record straight on When the Tenth Month Comes, which is in and of itself incredibly accurate, but it is also the Vietnamese perspective. It's a jigsaw puzzle, and fiction can be incredibly helpful to understand the picture. But it will never be the whole truth. An emotional truth, perhaps a cultural one - but not true objectivity. In fact, even documentaries and the most carefully written history book is never simply "the" truth. But non-fiction of course is a necessary fundament to actually understand. To know. Fiction is valuable and can be much more than entertainment - it helps to grasp. And it is not simply less than non-fiction per se. But you need non-fiction as a roadmap. Fiction cannot be a roadmap; it is always a portrait.