Braveheart TV Premiere Letters

Few would doubt the enormous emotional impact of Braveheart when it was released in 1995. The strong anti-English message, the powerful nationalist message, and indeed the violence left me feeling physically sick for 24 hours (and, no, it wasn't the curry afterwards).
SNP ratings in opinion polls rose by 8% in the autumn of 1995 after the film's release, even though few of the most powerful elements of the film have any basis in fact. So Braveheart's credentials as an instrument of nationalist propaganda are acknowledged.
Is it therefore appropriate, or indeed responsible, of the BBC to screen Braveheart on January 7, less than four months before the Scottish Parliamentary elections?
Or is this just BBC insensitivity to the debate that will take place in the coming four months regarding Scotland's future? The real questions that we must address in Scotland are about social and economic progress and about developing a positive vision for the next millenium, based on a level-headed analysis of our prospects.
Sadly, screening Braveheart, with its highly charged emotional message, may actually stifle and inhibit positive, rational, and clear-headed debate on the shape and future of Scotland at the very time it is most needed.
Show the film in the summer. Now is not the time.

John Scott
Ballantrae, Ayrshire
January 2

BRAVEHEART-phobic reader John Scott (January 4) is voicing the continual Unionist fear and hysteria of any Scottish mention of resistance to English invasions and oppressions. In his efforts to have the film censored perhaps he, and his concerted cronies, would at last define the parts of the film which they continually claim to be inaccurate - apart from the allegorical make-up of the actors.
The "Wild Men of Galloway" did paint themselves blue and charge the enemy naked and were recorded, to the horror of their English adversaries, as doing so as late as the "Battle of the Standard", on August 2, 1138. One English chronicler described them as being dressed like "Merry Andrews" and being naked and over seven feet in height. And we ken English chroniclers never lie.
It may help their anti-Scottish cause to actually define in some detail which parts of the film "had no basis in fact". Was it the minor bits where Edward invaded, looted, pillaged, raped, and murdered his way through Scotland? Or was it where Wallace was grassed up by Scottish cringers, handed over to their English bosses, and faced a mock trial in Westminster, where he was dragged through the town on a hurdle, mutilated, had his entrails burnt in front of him, before being hanged? Or was it the bits where Wallace and the common people managed to beat superior forces that was most unpalatable and embarrassing to the Scottish Rajs?
Odd that we did not hear one of these anti-Braveheart critics complain once of the endless films, plays, books, etc, on the totally inaccurate versions of English history, which author Randall Wallace precipitated by properly detailing his sources. Perhaps the anglicisation of our North British Universities and colleges has done more than its bit to keep the Scots in ignorance of their own past, leading them to believe they have no present and no future. I look forward to the reader and his chums complaining to the EBC of the inaccuracies of most of their British films and presentations.

Donald Anderson
Glasgow
January 4

William Douglas
Glasgow
January 4

Bob Hamilton
Coldstream
January 4

JOHN Scott suggests ( 4^th January) that the television showing of Braveheart this week should have been put off until after the May elections to the Scottish Parliament, for fear that exposing the electorate to the movie’s "highly charged emotional message" will inhibit proper debate about the future of Scotland.
Mr Scott’s fears are groundless. The message of Braveheart, at work among us for some years now, is an overwhelmingly positive one. It is about love, loyalty, and courage, and about being prepared to risk everything in defence of what you hold dear. The people of Scotland flocked in their thousands to cinemas, from the premiere in August, 1995, through to the last showing in the summer of 1996, and took this message to their hearts. They went home to think again, and to question and debate. On 11th September, 1997, called to take up the pen to secure the future of democracy in Scotland, they were not found wanting. They were even prepared to risk higher taxes.
Decisions will always be made on a mixture of both emotion and reasoning. Braveheart, in the way it has brought Blind Harry’s ‘Wallace’ to life, has caused many to look back in order to see forward all the more clearly.
Roll on Thursday evening!

John Anderson
Edinburgh
January 5

Jimmy Johnston
Glasgow
January 4

JOHN Anderson's claim today that Braveheart is about love, loyalty, courage. and risking everything in defence of what you hold dear is truly astonishing.
In my opinion, this film is a glorification and glamorisation of war, violence, cruelty, slaughter, the taking of human life, and man's inhumanity to man. It is a debasement and antithesis on noble human virtues such as love, kindness, mercy, care, compassion, and empathy for our fellow voyagers on the pilgrimage of life.
Its appalling message is the blasphemous doctrine that you are quite entitled to obliterate the divine spark of human life in anyone against whom you have a personal grudge or who gets in the way of your ambitions. This is the ethos of barbarism, savagery, and the repudiation of the recognised standards of civilised behaviour which differentiate man, the apex of creation, from animals.
Sadly, the film's popularity reflects the Scottish veneration and deification of the warrior cult and promotes the myth that there is something romantic and patriotic about brutalising and dehumanising our brother men and sister women whom political and religious propagandists demonise as impersonal foes, devoid of feelings or personal identities for their own nefarious purposes.
No wonder Scotland has one of the worst records in Western Europe for street and domestic violence. It will continue to remain so as long as its inhabitants, male and female, aotheosise and falsely ennoble the fantasy of the strong man.
Presumably most of those who think Braveheart is such a great film and that killing is entertainment have never experienced the brutality, the shame, the family devastation, and the indignity of war at first hand for themselves.
May I respectfully suggest that they read the poetry of Wilfrid Owen, MC, a heroic Army officer who portrayed the horrors, futility, and stark reality of blood-shedding combat before perishing himself during the First World War just one tantalising week before Armistice Day. 1918?
In particular they should impress upon their conciousness the eerie scene in Strange Meeting where the ghost of the slaughtered British soldier is confronted with the ghost of his dead German counterpart who greets him with the spine-chilling words: "I am the enemy you killed, my friend". This is a haunting evocation of how men, in the devine plan born to be brothers, were manipulated by their political masters into seeing each other as adversaries.
As we approach the millenium, it is time now for the people of Scotland to abandon their legacy of carnage and start to build a brave new world of peace, harmony, tolerance, understanding, and respect for our fellow men and women, irrespective of race, creed, nationality, or colour.
Braveheart, and the pitiless, ruthless virtues which it enshrines, should be consigned to history. It does not embody the motives and aspirations of the Higher Man.

Derek Parker
Elderslie
January 6

Janet Cameron
Glasgow
January, 8

Rob Jamieson
Dunblane
January 6

John Anderson
Edinburgh
January 12

Ian O'Bayne
Glasgow
January 11 

IF, after the success of Costner's movie, The Adventures of Robin Hood, hundreds of English had adopted it as a true picture of their past and a revelation of their heritage, I think that many of us would have lined up at the border to jeer at their jibbering idiocy. Unfortunately it happened the other way round. We bought Braveheart.
The inaccuracy of Braveheart as a representation of the Scottish experience goes far beyond the flashing of a pair of St Michael knickers at the wrong moment. Apart from half-a-dozen names and dates filtched from the history books the movie bears no resemblance to what we know of the Scotland of the Wars of Independence. Like the Tibet of Shangri-la and the Mexico of The Magnificent Seven the Scotland of Braveheart is merely the exotic window-dressing of American concerns for an American audience. A community of mountain men led by a libertarian struggles against the corrupt Eastern plutocracy and an English army of occupation.
For almost 200 years Blind Harry's version of the Wallace myth has been used repeatedly by Americans as an expression of resistance to distant government. This is just another incarnation. It is no accident that the Wallace of mythology is an icon of the American right, whose political ideas run throughout the film.
Obviously, Braveheart hit the spot for many Scots, but what spot did it hit? Well, it exposed the fact that we are still suckers for the sado-masochistic, "we wuz robbed," view of Scotland that helped many people live with their national inferiority complex. As we approach independence this pathological branch of nationalism should have died the same death as tartanry, Brigadoonism, and haggis-bashing.
Unfortunately it has been given a new lease of life and its only function now will to be to provide the basis for a Scottish fascist movement. Until I met some of the representatives of Braveheartism I never thought of using the words "Scottish" and "fascist" in the same phrase.
Of course, very few braveheartists are aware of the weakness of their case. Why should they be? In addition to Randall Wallace's pulp novel, all of the popular "Wallace" books of the 1990's - those by James Mackay, Elspeth King, Glenn Telfer, and Peter Reese, for example - have reversed several generations of scholarship to make Blind Harry's propaganda poem of the 1470's a major source for the life of Wallace. In most countries the capacity to distinguish between fiction and evidence is considered to be essential to an understanding of how society works. According to some of your correspondents it just makes you a "Unionist".
The sad fact is that the life of Wallace is much more surprising and challenging, more informative about our past, than Braveheartism will allow. If (as I hope) we form a Scottish republic, one of the more interesting tasks will be the struggle with the populist right and the libertarian mythological Wallace whom they espouse. If anyone wants to start that debate - in public - I am open to offers.

Alan Steel
Paisley
January 12

Max Dunbar
Glasgow
January 14

IT's amazing to see that people are still debating the "accuracy" or otherwise of the film Braveheart which, broadly speaking, is to Scottish history what Asterix the Gaul is to the story of Gallic resistance against Rome: in Braveheart there's even a bit where our hero demonstrates the advantage of brains over brawn in a jovial sort of "parable of the stanes" with a Scottish Tunabrix.
MacTunabrix hurls an enormous boulder at Wallace, who easily ducks it, before replying with an ordinary stone which hits the giant straight between the eyes. Everybody laughs, especially MacTunabrix. The film charges rapidly downhill from this point on, culminating in possibly the most unconvincing death scene in screen history.
But, for all that, why the fuss? Your Scottish republican correspondent, Alan Steel, appears to fear the growth of a right-wing movement based on Wallace the Leader (which strikes me as a bit odd, given this century's mushrooming of personality cults centred on socialist dictators) and suggests the film is the inspiration for a sinister brand of emerging American-style neo-fascism, in kilts.
The eerily similar plot of the Eisenstein medieval epic Alexander Nevsky (in effect Braveheart on ice) was also concerned with the string-willed individual who harnesses the power of free men to resist evil, only it really was developed as a cult - but by Stalinist Soviet Russia against the invading Nazis.
Others found Mel's masterpiece moving, or disliked its violence, or pointed out that Wallace didn't really sack York then behead its governor; or indeed canoodle with pouting French starlets.
Mel Gibson, meanwhile reckoned that Braveheart was purveying a truly international message which could have been about any freedom-fighter in any country (but ours hadn't been done before and tartan warriors were "in").
When you consider the perverted lies peddled by that long-winded eejit Shakespeare - whose lurid quasi-historical fantasies make Braveheart look like particularly convincing social-realism - our Australian-Irish epic suddenly seems less obviously risible.
Critics north and south can cavil til they're, well, blue in the face, but the hero they didn't want to tell you about at school, and who you'll struggle to find in the allegedly national museum of Scotland, is now - thanks to Mr Gibson and friends - on the loose all over the world. That's a good thing, isn't it?

Roy Beers
Glasgow
January 14

AS a republican who has never knowingly bashed a haggis or indulged in tartanry, and who is well enough balanced to be able to enjoy the music and choreography of Brigadoon without losing my grip upon reality, I'd like to take up the gauntlet cast down by Alan Steel.
With his obvious penchant for book and film burning I choose to disbelieve him when he states that using the words Scottish and fascist in the same phrase is for him a novel experience.
On the contrary, I think he is rather fond of such bellicose labelling, which fails to conceal the fact that he has nothing new to contribute to the debate and is merely acting in the role of a surrogate for the well-known establishment historians who regard the whole subject of Wallace's role in past and present Scottish history as taboo.
As Mr Steel with evident displeasure concedes, that taboo was effectively destroyed by the publication and subsequent filming of Randall Wallace's Braveheart. Initially the strategy pursued by its critics was to impute the "obvious and glaring inaccuracies" in the script to Randall Wallace, thereby avoiding any discussion of his main source, Blind Harry's medieval epic poem of 1477.
With the publication by Elspeth King of a new edition of Hamilton of Gilbertfield's 1722 edition of Blind Harry's Wallace this strategy became redundant, especially after Professor Tom Devine had publicly admitted his brief role as historical adviser to Braveheart. The attack has now moved on to the Makar himself and an "authoritative" demolition of Harry and his "Wallace myth" is confidently awaited.
While Mr Steel makes completely unsubstantiated claims regarding Wallace's alleged 200-year old inspiration of the fundamentalist right in American politics, he has nothing whatever to say on the subject of his impact on Scottish and European politics during the same period. Robert Burns, Wordsworth, Muir of Huntershill, George Mealmaker, and the radicals of 1820 were all profoundly influenced by his example. Likewise the great liberators of European politics, Garibaldi, Mazzini, Blind, and Kossuth, none of whom can be described as fascist ideologues.
By erasing the "great gests and songs" about Wallace referred to by Andrew of Wytoun and lovingly recorded and embroidered by Blind Harry, Mr Steel and his academic co-conspirators hope to achieve a "final solution" to the problem of Wallace.
It was precisely in the furtherance of this strategy that Professors Smout, Devine, and Lynch approved the burying of the Lubek letter of Andrew de Moray and Wallace under the "appropriate context" of "trade and the burghs" in the new displays of the Museum of Scotland.
That is why it is currently displayed in its original medieval Latin without an accompanying translation, otherwise tourists and Scots alike could read the taboo words which still provide the relevant context of all discussion of Wallace.
"Thanks be to God, the kingdom of Scotland has now, by battle been recovered from the power of the English."

Michael Donnelly
Glasgow
January 14

THE latest Braveheart phobic, Alan Steel, seems most confused. His comparison between Wallace and Robin Hood is a non-sequitur. Wallace is a historical fact, even in English records, such as his trial in Westminster Ha'. Robin Hood is subject to various theories. Hollywood has him a Saxon resisting the Norman conquest. Other English sources have him a Celt, hence the green, in what is now Yorkshire, a former Danish colony, resisting the Saxon invaders.
Like most Scots I grew up on a diet of Robin Hood films and books but did not engage in anti-English, racist attacks because of it. Quite the contrary. Robin Hood was a hero to us all because he was portrayed as fighting injustice, invasion, and oppression.
A visit to the important Wallace exhibition at the Smith Museum in Stirling, and the impeccable sourcing of the Scottish Wars of Independence, would be the best way to redress the slur on the the much-maligned Curator, Elspeth King, whose political departure from the People's Palace was accompanied by the sanitation of Glasgow's radical past and the disappearance of all history prior to 1707.
What happened to the model of the Bishop's Palace and reference to Bishop Wishart, the sponsor of Wallace, who accepted from the "Hammer of the Scots" roofing timber to be used against him as siege engines?
What happened to the Pilkington Jackson equestrian statue of the Bruce? Pilkington Jackson designed the Bruce statue at the Bannockburn site. It was Elspeth King and Michael Donnelly who were responsible for it being there in the first place, along with many other artefacts of national and radical history - an unforgivable act, seemingly.
Why is there no monument to Wallace in the City of Glasgow? Why no plaque to commemorate the Battle of the Bell of the Braes, outside the Cathedral, where Wallace chased the English occupation forces back to Bothwell Castle? Why no mention of Bishop Wishart's part in the Wars of Independence inside the cathedral itself, or the Museum of Religion? Why no plaque in Stockwell Street where Wallace stocked the well with English bodies, before retreating?
Why no promised statue of of the anti-imperialist, republican socialist, John MacLean, in George Square? Why statues to Queen Victoria and other imperialist "heroes"? Why is there a Wallace statue in Ballarat, Australia? And why was he internationally renowned? Garibaldi, Napoleon, and Washington are among many who regarded him as a hero, just as the common people of Scotland do, while our rulers still hate and fear him.
Why are Scots so ignorant of their past and taught that we were always good little imperialist Brits, so therefore it would be "alien" to perceive our present and future politics any differently?
It is surprising that Mr Steel uses the language of the Unionist and British nationalist and also student "socialists", who grow up to be Blairites, to attack the Bravehearts who dared resist early imperialism and oppression.
Mr Steel then claims to be for a Scottish Republic and to be open to offers of debate in public. As one who has been working, for more years than I care to remember for a Scottish socialist republic, I would be only too happy to take him up on that.
He will find that the only real basis for attacking the film was that it was made at all. If Errol Flynn, who also played Sir Walter Raleigh, a real-life mass-murderer and thief, had portrayed Wallace instead of a mythical English hero in tights, then Scottish republican socialists would still not disdain themselves so basely as the British nationalist left and right, in such ill-informed campaigns of hatred.

Donald Anderson
Glasgow
January, 14

I HEARTILY agree with Alan Steel's letter today on Braveheart. The first five minutes, depicting Wallace as a ragged child in a remote Highland hut surrounded by kilted fuzzy-wuzzies, instead of as the younger son of a prosperous Paisley knight, was enough to convince me that the rest would be awful too.
With difficulty I managed to identify a killing in the wild mountains as the murder of the Sherriff of Lanark - Lanark itself being nowhere to be seen, and it seemed odd that Sir Andrew de Moray, Wallace's faithful friend and helper, who died, it is thought, as a result of wounds he received at Stirling Bridge, was not mentioned at all.
After Stirling Bridge I gave up, being unable to see a bridge, or indeed the River Forth at all: a true account of what really happened , of Wallace's brillian strategy in allowing only so many English over the narrow bridge and then attacking, and cutting of the rest, would have been really worth doing, and I agree with Alan Steel that what we know of the true story of Wallace, faithfully followed, would make a film worthy of the independence we hope to celebrate.
The film, as I am told, goes on to accuse Bruce of the betrayal of Wallace, when it is well known that Menteith, the Sherriff of Dumbarton, was responsible, and maintains that, unbelievably, Wallace actually had an affair with EdwardI's Queen!
I appreciate the fact that the film is American but nonsence of this kind does Scotland no good whatever.

Patricia Baillie
Glasgow
January 14

Wallace's Well

I THOROUGHLY agree with Mr Donald Anderson's comments about the lack of monuments to Wallace in Glasgow (January 16).
By coincidence I had just driven past Wallace's Well in the Robroyston/Auchinleck area of Glasgow prior to reading his letter. I recall being thrilled at visiting the well when I was a child and my father never failed to point it out anytime we were in the area, as to my knowledge it has never been signposted.
As this is Glasgow's year as City of Architecture, with the interest in Wallace aroused by Braveheart, surely it is time for Glasgow (a) to rid the surrounding area of rubbish, (b) to erect signposts indicating the existence of the well, and (c) to create a safe parking area near the well.
After all, this is part of Scotland's history. I am sure the children of today would be equally thrilled to stand where Wallace stood. What better way to bring history alive?

Jennifer A Dick
Stepps
January 17

John Walker
Falkirk
January 19

Brian D Finch
Glasgow
January 20

Jim Brunton
Edinburgh
January 18

David B Sutherland
Greenock
January 17

A shortened version of this email was printed in the Sunday Herald of 21st February, 1999, as follows:

The cinematic version of the life of William Wallace, and the history of Scotland it paints, has caused a feverish debate.
    I will not profess to understand what strains of nationalism are currently running through the hearts and minds of Scottish citizens as you prepare for elections of such historic magnitude. But for goodness sake, what sort of future will you have as a nation if you direct all you energies into the debate about the accuracies or inaccuracies of a motion picture?

Ange Parkin
Ontario
Canada
February 1999