Hammer of the Gods (Winning Time)

The rock biography Hammer of the Gods, which chronicles the legendary career of Led Zeppelin, is an entertaining, if somewhat fictional, account of the band. One of the more, aherm, memorable stories involves a mudshark and a groupie and is often cited as a big reason not to trust what is in the book. Even with its issues, I still found the book to be an entertaining tall tale that captured the mythic force of the larger-than-life group. Although would I have had potentially deeper engagement with the band if I read a biography along the lines of say Bob Spitz’s The Beatles?

With all of the discussion on the new HBO series, Winning Time, particularly with Jason Clarke’s titan of rage Jerry West, I wonder if you can appreciate the show through a similar lens, while at the same time wondering why these fictional depictions are often way off the mark of what happened. Yes it is fiction, but it’s also film, a medium through which we can have subtlety and shades of gray and perhaps be less beholden to extreme interpretations that may be wildly off the mark. I have wildly enjoyed Winning Time, but now I probably also need to watch a few documentaries and dig into the Jeff Pearlman book on which it is based to gain a better sense of What Really Happened (which may not be such a bad thing). It is a supercharged adrenaline rush of a show, and after living in Los Angeles for a few months, think the series acutely captures the energy of the city and what it may have been like in the dawn of the modern age.

Part of me doesn’t necessarily care about how Winning Time is off the mark (name me a biopic and I’ll bet there’s at least some type of historical inaccuracy). If a show like Winning Time is being so out there and upfront about its hyperbolic flourishes, maybe that’s something I can live with. But it does make you wonder, when the truths that are out there are already so darn fascinating why they need to be tinkered with at all. Aaron Sorkin’s recent film Being the Ricardos is a good example of this, as Sorkin took several real-life events and compressed them into the same story to seemingly maximize its dramatic potential (“Ball became pregnant in 1952; the Red Scare happened in September of 1953, and the story about Arnaz didn’t come out until 1955,” according to a CBR.com article). Any one of these threads would have been enough to make a movie, especially when you have such performances from Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem, but Sorkin’s compression diffuses some of the intensity from each of these arcs, and the movie doesn’t feel as compelling as it should. I’d be lying if some of the West controversy didn’t diffuse some of my enthusiasm for the show (especially given the great Bob Ryan’s rejection of it), and wonder if we’ll ever see much change on this type of narrative decision. But then again, in a show made in Hollywood and about one of Los Angeles’ greatest entertainment exports what else would you expect? Maybe tis better to be a happy viewer than a hapless critic.