Hollywood's Gatekeeper

The single greatest day in the history of American film criticism is August 14, 1967--the day that Bosley Crowther slammed Bonnie and Clyde in the New York Times.  You laugh!  That day film criticism became a full-intellectual-contact sport.  Crowther was nearly crucified in letters he received from outraged readers.  The "younger generation," it appeared, did not share Crowther's standards for movie violence nor his distaste for anti-heroes.  Crowther's colleagues excoriated him in print--Pauline Kael famously began her unusually long review of the film, "How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?"  Kael's influence rose dramatically, so much so that her friend Joe Morgenstern changed his review in Newsweek from negative to positive.  The upshot of the "Crowther Affair" was that the most influential movie critic in the country who wrote for the most respected newspaper in America's single largest movie market had been taken down.  The decade that followed this moment witnessed a tremendous outpouring of high-level critical debate about movies amidst one of the greatest periods of filmmaking in American history.

And then Steven Spielberg made Jaws.

Based on a best-selling novel by Peter Benchley, Jaws hit theaters in the summer of 1975 behind an advertising blitz that culminated in an opening weekend in over 400 theaters.  While such an opening was not totally unprecedented, this single movie has often been regarded as the one that changed an era.  As perhaps the first true blockbuster it recouped production costs in a few weeks and, just as important, it proved that film critics--with their ability to shape popular opinion--were growing irrelevant. The tradition of releasing a movie in New York and Los Angeles to build some buzz before sending the film across the nation, faded in the glow of Universal's success with Jaws.  Basking in that glow was 26-year old Steven Spielberg.

I am writing a long essay on Spielberg and film critics for a volume on the director that will include something on the order of twenty separate essays.  In short, academics find Hollywood's most successful director...interesting. This is so because, without a doubt, Spielberg is not only the most financially successful filmmaker in American history but also widely regarded as a very good filmmaker--not the greatest or the most innovative, but still a filmmaker that many talented people want to work with.  And while not impervious to critiques from film critics, Spielberg is a very good storyteller and excellent technical filmmaker.  In short, critics often don't have much to complain about.

We have confirmation of that last point with the overwhelmingly positive critical reception of his latest film Lincoln.  Generally Spielberg's movies appeal to two sides of the critical community in the United States--he makes both great action/adventure movies and thoughtful period pieces.  When critics sit down to write their review, it is no wonder that they thank the Hollywood gods that every so often Steven Spielberg makes a film that breaks up the schlock that comprises the vast majority of what they must watch.

And yet, there has been a chorus of discordant voices regarding Lincoln and the choices Spielberg and his team made when creating the film's narrative.  Ben Alpers has provided a great portal into the debate sparked by Lincoln.  We know that other Spielberg films--The Color Purple, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad--have likewise caused flare-ups over choices of whom to focus on.  Of course, when Spielberg focuses his lens on an event or historical actor, the effect is substantial and significant.  As America's most successful filmmaker, he generates a narrative that exists far beyond those in his films.

So what we often get with a Spielberg film is a general chorus of praise from film critics and a chorus of complaints from scholars.  The critics know that their voices cannot do much to affect the Spielberg aura--and frankly most have no reason to try.  Critics can write for public consumption of the film and for posterity, for people like me who attempt to take stock of what Spielberg has meant over the years to American film history.

For scholars of various stripes, though, Spielberg films create occasions of often intense and revealing debates.  Over the past two weeks, I have thought more about the role of different historical forces, actors, and events in the fall of slavery than I would have if Spielberg's movie hadn't appeared.  As a historian of the United States, I've profited a great deal from reading Eric Foner and James McPherson, David Goldfield and Dorris Kearns Goodwin, Ira Berlin and David Herbert Donald--but outside seminars in graduate school over a decade ago, I haven't been engaged with texts on this subject like I have after reading Corey Robin, Ira Chernus, Aaron Bady, Tim Lacy, etc. on the film.

All this discussion reminds me of how I have pined to be part of the era in which Bonnie and Clyde entered the American debate over movies and culture.  Except this time, rather than an establishment critic thundering on about the historical inaccuracy of a film and his critics screaming to shift his focus to the world revealed by that film, I read scholars thundering about the historical inaccuracy of Lincoln and their critics screaming that they, in effect, don't want their world intruding on the one in the film.  The debate sparked yet again by another Spielberg epic has been about the way we should remember the past as a people who use that past.  Bonnie and Clyde created a similar moment in film history--the point was to argue over what the film meant as a culture signpost; at that time, critics moderated the debate. In our time, the moderators have changed, they are not film critics, but those of us engaged in a vigorous debate over how to represent our collective past.

It seems to me that the gold standard for sparking that kind of debate is Oliver Stone's JFK.  I teach the film every semester I teach a course on historiography.  What better way to talk about and demonstrate the use of historical sources and argument than to witness one of the most manipulative and wrongheaded exercises in the historical method.  Stone's film is an utterly brilliant piece of filmmaking--if you want a good contemporary comparison to D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, JFK stands ready.  While movies don't "write history with lightening" (no matter what old Woodrow Wilson claimed), they do fire debates about how people can generate a broad, popular debate about our collective memory and the problems left unsettled.  Robert Rosenstone argued: "If it is part of the burden of the historical work to make us rethink how we got to where we are and to make us question values that we and our leaders live by, then whatever its flaws, JFK has to be among the most important works of American history ever to appear on screen."*

Indeed, for all it's faults, Lincoln poses a moment to debate whether this nation, or any nation, ever truly had a "new birth of freedom."  And while we debate that claim, we should pause to affirm that our movies of the people, for the people, and by the people will not perish from vigorous critical--and scholarly--debate.


* Quoted in Robert Brent Toplin's excellent treatment of debates over film and history, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (University of Kansas Press, 2002), p. 107.

Historians and History-at-the-Movies

As an historian interested in film history, I've often been frustrated with the ways in which historians have tended to use history films in the classroom and to discuss them in the public sphere. 

I tend to use movies in the classroom as primary source materials, e.g., I show films made in the 1930s to teach about the 1930s.  Films can be wonderful when used this way.  Students tend to already be more sophisticated consumers of motion pictures than they are of most other kinds of primary source material.  A well-chosen film can teach us both about its subject and about the way films themselves were made and consumed at the time of its creation. Using films in this way is, of course, a luxury available to those of us who teach courses about the last 120 years or so.

Most historians, however, teach about earlier periods.  And if they use films in the classroom, it's usually as secondary sources, e.g. screening a film like Black Robe to teach about French interactions with Native Americans in the 17th century.  Films used as secondary sources in the classroom share one big feature with films used as primary sources in the classroom: students by and large prefer viewing motion pictures to reading books. But many of the things that recommend primary-source classroom films make secondary-source classroom films problematic.  For example, Black Robe is a pretty complicated and interesting portrait of Native American life, especially for a mainstream narrative film. But as a product of the early 1990s, it no doubt bares the marks both of that era of filmmaking and that era (or possibly earlier eras) of historiography.  And, of course, Black Robe wasn't filmed to be used as a textbook manqué, but rather to be a piece of narrative entertainment. Reading Black Robe in its cultural context is thus necessary, but doing so takes us far away from 17th-century Quebec.

Perhaps this latter use of films in the classroom helps explain the dominant way in which (non film-) historians have tended to write for the general public about history films.  When dealing with films about the past, historians have tended, first and foremost, to fact-check them. Indeed, volumes and websites have been dedicated to separating "reel history" from "real history" (a pun that ought to be retired, btw). 


I have long felt that such an approach to history films was problematic because of its unwillingness to seriously grapple with history films as a filmic genre.  And, especially in the last two decades, historians interested in studying film have taken more sophisticated approaches to studying history films.

But recent discussions of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and Oliver Stone's Showtime documentary series, Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, have highlighted another weakness of historians' fact-checking approach to movies: it does a terrible job conveying to the public what it means to do history.*

Spielberg and Stone have devoted much of their careers to putting American history on film. And though both have (often ostentatiously) employed professional historians to validate their films' take on the past, they have positioned themselves rather differently in relation to the historical mainstream. By and large, Spielberg's history films have tended to reflect the mainstream scholarly consensus about the past; Stone's have tended to be openly iconoclastic and revisionist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, academic historians have tended to prefer Spielberg's films (at least as works of history) to Stone's.

Lincoln, as far as I can tell from reading about the film, fact-checks well. But as any historian would tell you, getting the facts right, while necessary for doing good history, is not sufficient. It is perfectly possible to construct an historical narrative which is accurate, but misleading.  Historians are responsible not only for getting the facts right, but for selecting which facts are significant and constructing explanations for why things happened as they did.  Non-historians are often unaware of--or even downright hostile to--this aspect of the historical craft.**

While a number of historians have praised Lincoln, which focuses on the passage of the 13th Amendment, others have objected to the way it frames the story of emancipation entirely through the actions of European Americans, while reducing African Americans to the status of onlookers.  Prof. Kate Masur, of Northwestern University, published an editorial in the New York Times on November 12 that made this case.  And academic bloggers (and friends of this blog) Corey Robin and Aaron Bady have launched similar criticisms of the film.  All are well worth reading (as are most other things written by Robin and Bady).  But I was particularly struck by the comment thread on Corey's post on Crooked Timber.

As most readers of this blog know, Crooked Timber is an eclectic academic blog that reaches an audience that extends well beyond the academy.***   What's interesting about the comment thread on Corey's post is how many respondents don't quite get why some historians (and historically-oriented social scientists like Robin) object to Lincoln.

Some examples:

EMS:  "I’m astonished, though, and rather disgusted that any would criticize this film because there weren’t enough blacks in it, or that black agency in their own emancipation seems to have been omitted. This reminds me of a huge fight I had with my wife over “Tell ‘Em Willie Boy was Here” when she accused Polonsky of anti-feminism, despite the fact the film took place way the hell before there was any such thing as Feminism (except in a few small Eastern precincts). It’s about Lincoln and the 13th amendment. Why the hell should any blacks be in it at all? One could, probably with some force, argue that Spielberg and Kushner are guilty of tokenism. I’d argue it’s just bad film-making. Does every film have to be judged by the inclusion or exclusion of blacks? How about The Red Badge of Courage? Ya wanna make that one all black? One can dislike the choices Spielberg makes, but he’s about emotion more than historical accuracy. What he’s not is a profound thinker. What he is, usually, anyway, is a superior craftsman."

Bloix: "I know all about history from the bottom up, but I believe that there are great people whose acts turned the course of history. Lincoln, Gandhi, King, and Mandela. Their stories are great stories that deserve to be told over and over again, in every era, in every form of art."

Dave: "It may not be the constraints of history or genre driving Spielberg’s choices, but presumably culture as it is presently configured and the master-narrative of the period preclude the possibility of Spielberg telling the kind of story Corey would like. At least, it’s as likely as 'Spielberg’s blinkered vision.' There is no pop culture artifact anywhere telling that story; why be outraged at Spielberg for failing to account for an academic history when no one else does?"

Mark Field: "I saw the movie yesterday and thought it was excellent. I’m not much impressed by this criticism. There are thousands of stories that could be told about the war and about emancipation. There are stories of Thaddeus Stevens, of Frederick Douglas, of millions of unidentified slaves, of Union generals, etc. No movie can easily incorporate them all. And it’s not as if Lincoln was peripheral to the story, not then and not in historical memory.
"The fact that Spielberg chose to tell one of these stories — one which fits well the nature of film — doesn’t strike me as anything worth criticizing. It just means there are lots more (good) movies to make."

Harold:  "Masur is silly (not for the first time). Tony Kushner made a decision to restrict the story to a time period of two months in the interest of narrative economy, and it worked."

Two thoughts about these (and many other similar) comments:

One repeated trope among Lincoln's defenders in the CT commentariat is the contrast between the requirements of a movie and the requirements of history (or, more specifically, academic history).   This line of reasoning is correct...so far as it goes. To the extent that historians expect or want historical dramas to look exactly like academic history, we are bound to be disappointed. And, as I've said above, in the past, many of us have not been careful enough about distinguishing the requirements of one from the requirements of the other.  But the fact that a Hollywood historical drama is not a work of academic history does not--and should not--shield it from criticism from the perspective of academic history. Though those of us who seek to criticize a work like Lincoln need to bear in mind what those differences are...and perhaps even foreground them in our criticisms.

This leads to my second thought about these comments: just as, in the past, historians have not always been very sophisticated in the way we treat Hollywood's attempts at telling historical stories, we have also not been very effective at explaining to the public what it is we do and what we expect from works of public history (broadly understood).  The crude role of fact-checker nicely fits the public's conception of us as nothing more or less than fonts of knowledge about what happened in the past.  But it is in our capacity as interpreters of the past that we have the most interesting things to say about Hollywood's historical fictions.  If we don't understand the rather complicated, shifting generic expectations of the historical film, and the various tasks it performs beyond informing its audience about its historical subject, we will not be able to grapple with historical films successfully as interpretations of the past. And if the public doesn't understand what it means to interpret the past, or even that any historical narrative necessarily entails a series of interpretations, our public interventions are likely to be misunderstood or dismissed.


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* I'm not addressing my own opinions on Lincoln or Untold History in this post for a very simple reason: I haven't seen either of them yet.  Most of this post concerns reactions to Lincoln, but for a good example of a take on Untold History that takes an unsubtle approach to Stone's take on history, see this piece from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

** Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) at the 1995 Senate hearings into the Smithsonian's proposed Enola Gay exhibit:  "[I]s it really the role to interpret history, rather than just simply to put forward historical facts...? ...I was a history major. In the days when I studied the text... was essentially a recitation of fact, leaving the reader to draw their own analysis..."

*** Like Spinal Tap's, our appeal is more selective.

Some Muddled Thoughts* on Truth, Non-Fiction, History, and Objectivity

When Peter Novick passed away recently, I immediately thought of the enormous impact that That Noble Dream had on my generation of graduate students.  The book was published in September, 1988, the very month that I began graduate school. The book's importance to many of my fellow graduate students and myself rested on at least three factors: first, it immediately became a centerpiece of the reading list for the historiography / methods course that we all took in our first semester of grad school (i.e. it was going to be "on the test"); second, it provided a historical narrative of the professional identity as historians that we had all recently decided to assume; finally, as Jim Harrison commented at the time (and, more recently, on this blog), the book was a "serious meditation about the state of things in the late 80s," and thus very much spoke to the particular world of historical practice that we were all entering at the time.**

I was going to write something to this effect in response to Tim's invitation to comment on Novick's passing (I would have liked to say something, too, about The Holocaust in American Life, which was also a book of enormous importance to me), but I never got around to doing so. And the moment passed.

In part, I hesitated to write my memories of That Noble Dream in the late 1980s because I felt that the whole question of objectivity was less front-and-center in the profession today, that the book, while still a fine piece of scholarship, had (not surprisingly) lost its immediate currency. But I couldn't manage to formulate exactly what had changed in this regard.***



Then, late last week, This American Life announced that, for the first time, they were retracting a story.   "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory," an episode-long exploration of conditions in a Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, China, that manufactures products for Apple, originally aired back in January and was an excerpt from a longer staged monologue by Mike Daisey who traveled to Shenzhen to investigate working conditions there.  It turns out that many of the details of Daisey's story were fabricated.  Though it's worth listening to the entire TAL story devoted to the retraction, the executive summary is that Daisey successfully, if temporarily, hid his fabrications from the show's producers by lying to them about, among other things, the name of his translator, thus essentially making fact-checking the details of the story impossible. When the translator was later located, the fabrications became obvious and Daisey fell back on pseudo-defending himself by insisting that, since he is not a journalist, it's wrong to hold him to the standards of journalism.

When this story broke, I commented on Facebook that "I've grown increasingly tired of people who try to pass fiction off as nonfiction. The issue of working conditions in China is a serious one, but fabricating stories about bad working conditions there does not help the cause. And simply saying 'I'm not a journalist,' as Mike Daisey does, won't do. Nonfiction storytelling needs to be not fictional, whether or not one calls it journalism."

In a variety of interesting ways, this is not quite Novick's "objectivity question." But it's a cousin of it. And, like Novick's book was in the 1980s, the Daisey scandal is very much of its time.  From the controversy over James Frey's pseudo-memoir A Million Little Pieces to the recent publication of John D'Agata and Jim Fingal's The Lifespan of a Fact, which anticipates the controversy and undoes the scandal by making the nature of truth the very topic of the book itself, we find ourselves in a moment that both has an unusually high regard for non-fiction storytelling, yet is very unclear on how to define the boundary between fiction and non-fiction.

Then, just today, Aaron Bady published a really smart and interesting post over at The New Inquiry**** entitled "The McNulty Gambit."*****  Starting with the subplot from Season 5 of The Wire in which Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) invents a (media friendly) serial killer in an effort to attract public concern to crimes that would otherwise be ignored, Bady mounts a semi-defense of fabricating evidence, with reference to the Daisey case, the recent Kony viral video, the Three Cups of Tea fiasco, and the Gay Girl in Damascus blog.  It's an interesting effort.  Rather than summarize Bady's post in detail, I'll just suggest you go read it.

I'll wait.

Now that you're back, let me note a couple things about Bady's piece that bothered me.

Here is what I think are the nut 'graphs of Bady's post:

what these fiction writers also have in common is a certain objective sense in which they are right, in which the story they are telling is true. While their subjective accounts tend to be the least true part of it (the most damning lies have to do with Daisey’s description of his personal experiences, for example), but behind those subjective untruths, we also find a broad field of objective accuracy: Foxconn is a terrible place to work, Joseph Kony really is a nightmare, building schools in Afghanistan is a good thing to do, and Syrian repression is no joke. Marlo really was a serial killer. 

This is not a defense, of course, but it is worth saying: if we only emphasize the lies in these accounts, we thereby overlook the extent to which they were saying true things. And it is also worth remembering that truth is not an either/or. One can easily deceive by telling nothing but the truth – telling it selectively, misframed, etc – and one can also tell a kind of truth by using statements which are, on their own, untrue. This is why fiction matters, and why journalism never rests onquite the firm bedrock of objectivity that it needs to pretend it does. But again, this is not a defense, just an attempt to describe a problem that we often have vested interests in failing to acknowledge, the blurriness of the line that separates fact from fiction.

What bothers me here is the slippage in Bady's post between right and true.  Bady seems to want to argue that, though not true in one sense, the falsehoods in these stories are true in some other sense.

But this seems like a wholly unnecessary bit of water-muddying.  Certainly Daisey, Frey, Tom MacMaster ("Gay Girl in Damascus"), and (the fictional) McNulty absolutely understood that they were telling falsehoods and did what they could to cover up that fact. What each was interested in wasn't arriving at some higher truth, but rather compelling action, which each felt couldn't be done by simply sticking to the facts.

Bady understands this. And most of the rest of his post concerns precisely what one needs to do to compel action (more about this later).  But for some reason Bady starts the discussion by attempting to reframe the it in terms of the complexity of truth, almost suggesting that a lie that compels good action might be another form of truth.

Sorry. I'm not buying.

There is, of course, a tradition stretching at least back to Plato that argues in favor of "noble lies" or socially necessary falsehoods.  It is a tradition that, at least today, is largely associated with the political right.  I can't say I find this tradition very attractive. But speaking of noble lies seems to me a good deal clearer and, in a certain sense, more honest, than attempts to rebrand putatively socially necessary falsehoods as some other form of truth.  The story of the McNulty Gambit is, in fact, a story about noble lying.  We will be clearer about the virtues and vices associated with this strategy if we are honest about what it entails.

My other dissent from Bady concerns his post's concluding thoughts about the seemingly futile reformism of many of the efforts that he discusses.  In situations that require fundamental structural changes--the political situation in central Africa, crime in Baltimore, working conditions in China--Bady's protagonists spin yarns that seem to instead point to inadequate and local changes--killing Joseph Kony, capturing Marlo, boycotting Apple products.  This flawed reformism, Bady argues, is intimately linked to the limitations of narrative:

[B]ecause such stories are derived from their audience – and its imaginative capabilities – they will for that reason demand and privilege reactions to the problem that are maddeningly simplistic in their very imaginable practicality. Kony is bad and so he must be killed by the military, because that’s something we can picture, can visualize; fundamentally restructuring the Central African system of political economy and governance is impossibly and unthinkably remote. Apple is bad and must be regulated (or shunned or something), because, again, that’s something simple we can imagine happening (as opposed to any alternative to the advanced industrial capitalism that makes Foxconn all but inevitable). And MacMasters later admitted that he had given his story an ending, an ending that is striking by its plausible realism: “I was going to end the story with having her be free, and get out of country — end of story.” But this ending is necessary precisely because individual escapes happen every day (while a real solution to the Syrian crisis is unthinkably complicated).  

Each of these outcomes are imaginable, in part, as a direct consequence of the fact that they do not trouble the status quo. We can imagine those reforms, because they are essentially superficial adjustments of a system that not only remains intact, but which we – in our thinking about what is and isn’t possible – rely on and presume. 

All of which is simply to say: it’s in the nature of grand structural transformations that we will always have great difficulty picturing what the end-state would look like. And because we feel we have to, we tend not to, falling back on the narrative patterns we know better. 

I think, in principle, quite the opposite is the case. Our ability to imagine fundamental structural change is, if anything, more dependent upon, and more helped by, fictional narratives, than is the reformism of these particular efforts.  Our culture--and most other cultures of which I'm aware--is full of stories that imagine vast, fundamental changes in the world:  from the Book of Revelation to the entire genre of secular utopian (and dystopian) fiction.  The world's great revolutionary and reactionary movements have compelled transformative action--for good and ill--precisely by substituting fantastic tales for quotidian truth, often labeling the fiction a kind of higher truth (Stalinist Socialist Realism comes most immediately to mind, but just about any millenarian religious movement or radical political movement has similar structures).  Bady is right that the reformism of these efforts is worth noting. But that reformism is accidental; it does not reflect any limits of the McNulty Gambit.

Let me conclude by pointing this discussion back in the direction of historical practice (without ever quite getting there).  None of the figures that Bady discusses are historians. Despite historians occasionally playing with narrative and fiction, even the most postmodern of us tend to go no further than knowingly making stuff up that we simply cannot know and admitting as much (and even that is a bold, and IMO rarely entirely successful, maneuver).  To the best of my knowledge, the canons of historical practice still explicitly forbid passing on knowing falsehoods as the truth.

And yet the "objectivity question," to the extent that it still exists, revolves around similar issues.  The quest for a "usable past" is not entirely dissimilar from the desire to tell stories that will compel action.

So I'm back where I was when I didn't write about That Noble Dream the week before last, wondering how exactly this moment of our culture's continuing struggle to reconcile narrative and truth is reflected in my own profession.  And wishing, I suppose, that I had a guide as good as Novick around to help clarify these issues for me.

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* What is blogging for if it is not, occasionally, for muddled thoughts?

** This was particularly the case in the Princeton History Department, which played a starring role of sorts in Novick's final chapter on the David Abraham controversy, which had occurred just a few short years earlier.  Several years later, I'd actually become friends with David. Though he was teaching at the University of Miami's law school, he continued to live in Princeton, NJ. And, during summers, he played softball with me on the History Department's B-league softball team, the Revolting Masses (fwiw, the more serious / skilled A-league History Department squad was called the Machiavellian Moment). But in the fall of 1988, David was very much an historical actor and, as of yet, unknown to me personally.

*** One way or another, I would have asked younger readers of this blog whether this book mattered to them at all.  So I might as well do so here.  Does it?

**** The New Inquiry's format, like that of the sports-and-culture blog Grantland, incorporates marginal notes, a marvelous (and marvelously old-fashioned) way of presenting additional information that turns out to be particularly well-suited to the web.  Certainly it beats the crap out of these jerry-rigged footnotes. Memo to myself: when this blog finally migrates to Wordpress, let's see if we can incorporate marginal notes in our new design!

***** The piece is apparently partly inspired by Slavoj Žižek's recent talk on The Wire, which I have yet to listen to.  Bady's description of that talk as "usefully wrong about lots of things, and strikingly insightful about a few," however, seems to me one of the best general descriptions of Žižek's work that I've ever read.

The New Inquiry

I've plugged The New Inquiry before. I would like to do so again in the wake of their recent upgrade. Not only does The New Inquiry now feature a magazine that readers can subscribe to for $2/month. They have also upgraded their blog by swallowing up some of my favorite bloggers, including Aaron Bady of Zunguzungu blog fame, and Rob Horning, author of Marginal Utility.

For a recent sample of the type of writing we can expect from The New Inquiry, check out Bady's remarkable review of David Graeber's remarkable book, Debt: the First 5,000 Years. Enjoy.