Black Cleopatra and Historical Documentaries

We break down the Netflix "documentary" and make suggestions on why the producers of this work made some interesting, and historically inaccurate, choices.  

Transcript

Black Cleopatra and Historical Documentaries

May 2023 

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

George Orwell

“No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for “Before Coffee.”

Cherise Sinclair

All the old paintings on the tombs

They do the sand dance, don’t you know?

Foreign types with the hookah pipes say

(Whey oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh)

Walk like an Egyptian

Liam Sternberg, as sung by the Bangles 

Whenever a movie about history comes out, or even one about a contemporary non-fiction person (think Elton John, for example), there is always a parallel posting, or a hundred, about its accuracy. Elizabeth, the Golden Age, is one of my favorite movies, but I try to watch it for what it is rather than what it should be. 

In a piece entitled “History in the (re)making,” thehistoricalnovel.com states, “Elizabeth: The Golden Age takes place almost thirty years after Elizabeth (the original of the two movies), charting the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots and the Spanish Armada, focusing on Elizabeth’s relationship with Sir Walter Raleigh. All the while somehow managing to be even less historically accurate than the first film.” Just one nugget. In the film, Raleigh is at sea taking on the Spanish Armada, almost single-handedly, even steering a fire ship. In reality, Raleigh was on land manning a fortress, well away from even where the Armada could be seen. Other items that gall historians; are Phillip II of Spain, the villain of the piece, who is depicted as slightly mad, and his daughter Isabella as a child. She was 20 at the time of the Armada, and Phillip, though an ardent Catholic, was not insane; that would happen to Spanish Kings centuries later.  

Sometimes it is very irksome when embellishments or downright changes are done to historical characters. I find history to have enough excitement that the Scots who fought the English did not have to be painted blue or wear kilts, as was their inaccurate portrayal in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. Nor did William Wallace need to bed the French Princess. But I get it. Americans think that any historical Scot wore a kilt and that if you are going to feature Elizabeth’s love interest, he must have a daring do role in the penultimate battle. But these types of movies are, after all, presented as “based on true events,” as they say. A documentary, however, is of a different caliber. 

The current Cleopatra series on Netflix is positioned as a Netflix Documentary Series. And here is the definition of a documentary: A movie or a television or radio program that provides a factual record or report. Documentaries can be twisted and warped to fit a narrative like history. For example, I could find a small town that happened to house a cult of 10 people who were convinced that aliens had landed there and were infecting their brains with impious thoughts. As an intrepid documentarian, why this town? Why now? What is it about this place?  

The obvious conclusion I would intend for an audience to draw is that the town is wacko when the reality may be that the rent was cheap or maybe the alien cultists liked the climate. 

There is probably no story since even alien-believing cultists have to live somewhere. But I have to get my documentary funded and want people to, you know, watch it, so I have to present things as Obi-Wan Kenobi put it in a terrible line in the otherwise solid Star Wars Return of the Jedi, “You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”  

Michael Moore made a tremendous fortune by presenting facts from a certain point of view. 

His breakthrough movie, Roger and Me, depicts the dogged, slightly ruffled, paunchy, cap-wearing documentarian trying to meet with Roger Smith, Chairman of General Motors. Aside from featuring Moore himself at the center of the action, the centerpiece of Moore’s work is the implication of GM’s shutdown of the Flint, Michigan, plant and the negative consequences for the residents. In Moore’s leftist narrative, GM is a rapacious monster that is eating the very souls of the people of Flint instead of a car company making a logical decision for the betterment of all stakeholders to maintain the company’s profitability.  

Moore would never ponder that if GM went out of business completely (it later did file bankruptcy), there would be no plants anywhere, and the same fate would still befall Flint. No, because, again, that POV thing. But here are some critical points in Roger and Me. First, Roger Smith was the chairman of GM at that time and certainly had a hand in the closing. 

The plant did close, and Moore is not wrong; any time a large group of people loses their jobs, it is a terrible thing, and I do not lightly throw out the “it could have been worse” lightly. Once in my career, I was laid off, and it was very disconcerting. But Moore spun this out as if the denizens had no agency, no choice but to sit and wait at the behest of General Motors to take care of them. And again, all of this happened. Moore was not making it up, which was part of the film’s effectiveness with specific audiences.  

So let’s look at another director who got rich making a documentary, former Vice President Al Gore. 

He made tens of millions of dollars by cherry-picking climate data to show a crisis. But he made a mistake; instead of just illustrating the challenges with his selective fact usage, he got into the Nostradamus business. His mistake was saying that said the crisis would ruin the Earth in ten years. He said in 2006. Since I publish this in 2023, it has been seven years since doomsday and no apocalypse, but Al Gore does not need to return the cash. He still has it. But Gore’s data, though somewhat disputable, was still factual as he would determine it. It is not like Gore was saying; in the 1300s, before Europeans arrived in North America, it snowed every day, and the winters were always below freezing. 

And this brings us to Cleopatra, or what many podcasts and video sites have designated Black Cleopatra. This is not, however, in homage to the incredible 1975 action pic Cleopatra Jones starring Tamara Dobson – 6’2” and all of it dynamite, as the tagline states. In that film, Dobson single-handedly takes down a crime syndicate led by “Mommy,” played by two-time academy award-winning Shirley Winters. Yes, listeners of a certain age, there was a time when studios could come up with original ethnic characters instead of converting existing ones, but I digress.  

The Cleopatra of this film comes from Executive Producer Jada Pinkett Smith as a new documentary series exploring the lives of prominent and iconic African Queens. Note, documentary series. Netflix states, “This season will feature Cleopatra, the world’s most famous, powerful, and misunderstood woman -- a daring queen whose beauty and romances came to overshadow her real asset: her intellect. Cleopatra’s heritage has been the subject of much academic debate, often ignored by Hollywood. Now our series re-assesses this fascinating part of her story.”

Given all of the movies about Cleopatra and all of the available videos covering her, why is this noteworthy? And the focus of the promotion is not on Cleopatra’s intellect, which based on the historical facts, must have been considerable, but on her race. This Netflix Pinkett Smith documentary features British actress Adele James, who is black, portraying Cleopatra. And this is not a choice about who is the best actress available, but rather that the actress be black. Pinkett Smith stated, “We do not often get to see or hear stories about black queens, and that was important for me, as well as for my daughter, and just for my community to be able to know those stories because there are a ton of them.” Not black in the same way that Bridgerton or Hulu’s The Great, a show about Russia’s Catherine II, has black actors playing historically pale-skinned English and Russians. No, the claim is that Cleopatra was, in fact, black. Well, this happened long ago (2100 years), so how do we know? Shelley Haley, a Classics professor at Hamilton College, notes her grandma told her to ignore the historical record; Cleopatra was black. I wonder what else is in the syllabus for her courses, but I digress. I like the line in which Islam Issa, a professor, and commentator at Birmingham College, states, “I imagine her to have curly hair like mine and skin color.” 

Well, one can imagine all they like except that no facts support this. Her father, Ptolemy XII Auletes, was descended from a long line of Ptolemaic kings going back to the first, who certainly was from Macedonia, a kingdom north of Greece. This first Ptolemy served alongside Alexander II, who conquered Egypt. Upon Alexander’s death, Ptolemy set up shop as ruler of Egypt.  

The Macedonians themselves were an ancient tribe that lived in the northeastern part of mainland Greece and were essentially ancient Greek people. Cleopatra’s mother, Cleopatra V, who happened to be her father’s sister, was another long-time descendant of Alexander’s general. 

I would joke about how the Ptolemies participated in games the whole family could play, only with them. It was not a joke; they kept the genes in the family.  

Here is a quote from Pinkett Smith “So, was Cleopatra Black? We don’t know, but we can be certain she wasn’t white like Elizabeth Taylor. We need to have a conversation with ourselves about our colorism and the internalized white supremacy that Hollywood has indoctrinated us with.” Well, at least she, unlike several commentators in the documentary, is nothing we cannot be certain about. Well, aside from the pesky historical record that subverts Pinkett Smith’s beliefs. 

The director, Tina Gharavi, asked, “Why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a melanated sister? And why do some people need Cleopatra to be white? Her proximity to whiteness seems to give her value, and for some reason, it seems to really matter for Egyptians.” 

To be clear, a group that has made being authentic and bitterly complaining of whitewashing (think of Laurence Olivier playing Othello or John Wayne playing Genghis Kahn, now says it does not matter. If it does not matter, then why not a Greek actress such as Tonia Sotiropoulou, who at 35 would be close to the right age? Or even Gal Gadot, who will play Cleopatra in an upcoming movie, and looks wise, resembles a Greek.

And as for whiteness. Are Greeks white? Would Ariana Huffington pass for an Arab or Congolese? What about Billy Zane, the odious Cal Hockley from Titanic, whose real name is William George Zanetakos? I get it was a bit of a stretch for Elizabeth Taylor to play Cleopatra but a better job than Jada Pinkett Smith?  

Mustafa Wayziri is an archeologist and Secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt. He called the documentary “a falsification of Egyptian history, and Netflix is trying to stir up confusion to spread false information that the original Egyptian history is black.” This puts the leftists who made the documentary into a bit of a cleft stick. 

Withdraw the claim, offend black people, do not, and offend Arabs. What to do? Ignore it all.  

And if this was solely about race, I might dismiss this as a sign of the times in which leftists (and because of the reaction, now rightists, see race in too many things. But much of the non-race conjecture in this documentary is false. Another line, “as warriors, queens, mothers of nations.” Cleopatra led armies, but the documentary depicts her wielding a sword and outfighting men. There is simply no historical record of her engaging directly in battle.  

Another of the lines I covet. 

Cleopatra states that “there is no Rome, without Egypt.” Wait what? At the time of Cleopatra, Rome had beaten all the states on the Italian peninsula, Carthaginians, Spanish Tribes, the Gauls, the once formidable Macedonians themselves, and the Greeks. The Roman legions had added most of North Africa, Spain, France, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, Croatia, Syria, Judea, most of Austria, and a big slice of Germany to their Empire. But they somehow needed Egypt? One of the reasons that Rome had not conquered Egypt to that point was the wealth of the place meant no one general could trust another with it. Egypt was formerly annexed only after Octavian became the sole ruler over the entire Empire. 

Despite her allure to Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, Egypt was not a world power or a significant factor in who emerged victorious in deciding who would rule Rome. If it were, it would have been Antony, who had Egyptian backing, that would have emerged as the first Emperor, but it was Octavian. That statement was meant to hype the documentary, just as the casting was both a way to exercise racial beliefs and cynically drive controversy and awareness of the work. I probably would have watched the documentary anyway, but I certainly did, given this race-swapping.  

And this type of dialog is endemic throughout the production. We often like our ancients to have British accents and talk like they deliver a stirring oration. It isn’t easy to know how they spoke with each other. But I doubt that Cleopatra said things like when she is told, with appropriate wonder and awe, that she should have been a scholar, and she exclaims, “what, and leave Egypt in the hands of idiots.” As a princess of the House of Ptolemy, Cleopatra would have known her lot was intrigued and palace cabals, a hallmark of the dynasty for one hundred years. She would never have stated it as a choice, like if only the men were smarter, I could have spent my time in the library! Damn you, patriarchy!

And these “scholars.” One, a self-proclaimed Egyptologist, Colleen Darnell, notes that Cleopatra carries “within her womb the ability to unite Rome and Egypt.” Uh, no. Caesar had a Roman wife at the time, Calpurnia, and a Roman daughter, Julia, by his first wife Cornelia Cinna. These were legitimate Romans. Perhaps their child, Cesarian, could have ruled Egypt, but the Romans would not have welcomed him. Knowing this, Caesar had made Octavian, his great nephew, his heir, not his direct son by Cleopatra. This is the kind of thing a year one classicist, or a high school Latin student, would know. Darnell also claims that Cleopatra’s abandonment of Antony at Actium was brilliant. Ouch. And later, Issa makes the point Rome was against the rule of women, like all societies ranging from 3000 BCE to about 50 years ago. The insights are startling.  

Then there is the gender identification. Heard says that her story “resonates with every woman.” Again, what? How many women are foreign queens? Does it resonate with this depiction? It features a mighty middle-aged white man getting it on with a 21-year black woman who needs his help—wondering how the community feels about that one. And maybe, once again, that was the point; see, even in the 1st century BCE, white people were exploiting black people! But for this to work, Cleopatra has to be black because a white Italian exploiting a white Greek does not fit the narrative. And is that the narrative? That this story will resonate with every woman?  

Even the trailer is garbage. 

One of the lines, “There was a time when women ruled with unparalleled power?” Cleopatra’s legitimacy came first from marrying her brother, then later by the sanction of Rome. Aside from Nefertiti and a few other exceptions, Egypt did not have many women rulers. And during that time? Men ruled Rome, Parthia, the Germanic Tribes, and even as far away as contemporary Maurya India and Han China. I am not saying it was fitting that men assumed the various thrones globally. But the documentary commits the all too common error of presentism wherein our moirés and belief systems are projected onto historical times. 

And this line, and the concept of Cleopatra’s intellect, contrasts with that earlier point; either she is a woman of agency, even manipulating the Romans, or she is a historical example of the white supremacy narrative. The documentary wants it both ways.  

But there is a great question here asked by Haley in the documentary. She asks why does race matter? Why indeed. Because since the Obama years, the left has injected the color of one’s skin into all things, even where roads have been built, according to Secretary of Transportation Pete Pete Buttigieg. I agree with the commentator, it should not matter in many things, but that is our situation. And this is a documentary. 

Caesar is depicted as white and older than the also white Antony. If anything, the actor playing Caesar seemed too young though the actor himself, John Partridge, is close to the right age for the 21 century. But at fifty-two, at the time of the late Roman Republic, Caesar would be bordering on old age, making the May-November relationship with Cleopatra all the more interesting (she was 21 when they met).  

At least the next in this series features Njinga, a 17th century Southwest African ruler who served as queen of the Ambundu Kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba, located in present-day northern Angola. But much as with Cleopatra, inconvenient history is changed.  Already Njinga is portrayed as being against slavery but like so many other sub Saharan African kingdoms, was a willing, if not enabling part of the slave trade.  Leftist educators decry the removal of CRT with the charge that conservative educators wish to eliminate the negative parts of our history, slavery and Jim Crow.  That is a false charge as there is key difference between political indoctrinarian and historical accuracy.  But many of these same educators minimize Africans involvement in the slave trade as if the Euorepeans were doing it all alone.  

As a Twitter poster on politics and history, I court a certain amount of animus which is a fancy word for people saying pretty nasty things about me. My favorites involve my doing stuff with my body that a contortionist would find daunting. One of the worst fusillades to my postings was averring that Egyptian pharaohs, pre-Ptolemaic ones, were not black. As Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s former minister of state for antiquities, “the only Egyptian rulers known to have been Black were the Kushite kings of the 25th dynasty (747-656 BC). And Hawass has pushed back against Black Americans who have claimed that the Egyptian civilization has Black origins and are “obsessed” with the colonization of Egypt throughout its history.” As noted several times, part of this is the imagination and individual identities attached to history, as opposed to the record. And when someone’s identity is challenged, we get into Swiftian territory, “Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.”

So in filmmaking, what is reasonable? What if, to use our earlier example, they had cast Viola Davis instead of Cate Blanchett to play Elizabeth the First? I am not keen on race-swapping in movies, even loosely based on historical events, because it takes me out of the story. One of the reasons that plays such as Our Town or films such as Ferris Bueller has the actors talk directly to us (breaking the fourth wall), as it were, is to break out of the narrative purposely. Often it is so that we (but not the other characters) can hear the narrator’s thoughts. In Ferris, the lead character provides us with his motivation (helping his friend) which later helps us understand though Ferris is a confidence trickster in many ways, his heart is in the right place—something we might not have discerned with this technique. 

But that is not what Shonda Rhimes does in Bridgerton when casting late 18th-century British nobles with black actors. Instead, she is signaling that she will put people of color into traditional white roles, so damn your white supremacy and all of that. She also signals that she is the Deux ex machina running the show. No doubt, this is also about leftist concepts of equity. If it were true equity, all plays, movies, and TV shows would have 13% black actors, 5% Asians, 28% Latinos, some Jewish ones, and the rest whites, which makes lots of sense. One of the things I hate is when movies or TV shows are driven clearly by the producers’ desires instead of character, plot, or situation. We see that in long TV series where intelligent characters get dumb because the producers need another season, so nothing gets resolved.  

But what about the history? Thinking that Bridgerton is historical only in the sense of the sets and a few of the characters, but not many think it is real history. That is why Rhimes Queen Charlotte is irritating. One thing for some fictional Duke to be black, but as with Cleopatra, we will have a generation thinking King George III of England’s Queen was some proto-Michelle Obama. My problem with John Wayne playing Genghis Khan is that he looks nothing like a Mongol in the face nor, at 6’3” tall, in build. And it is John Wayne with that voice and his singular mannerisms. There is no way to get into the story, much less the stunted history, with Rio Bravo Wayne playing a 12th-century Mongol war leader. This is as much about ruining an intriguing historical narrative as it is denying Asian actors their opportunities.  

The historian Simon Webb, no conservative historian, has a different take. He is concerned that race-swapping, at least as far as it goes in British period pieces, buries the racism that was undoubtedly inherent in the age. George III’s madness led him to a regency, but it is possible it might come a lot earlier had he tried to marry a woman of African descent. Webb is worried that these depictions show a post-racial society which, well, at least, I would clamor for.

But to Webb’s point, there has to be a line. When claims of historical accuracy are put forward, and that is the case with a definition of documentary, that accuracy should be the goal.  So let’s look at what Jada Pinkett Smith, the commentators, writers and director, and Netflix are really doing here.  Unlike Rhimes, they are not race swapping to make a casting point.  Rather this is about identity.  Let’s get back to Pinkett Smith’s comment to her daughter, something I believe was personal, and heartfelt, “We do not often get to see or hear stories about black queens, and that was important for me, as well as for my daughter, and just for my community to be able to know those stories because there are a ton of them.” Black queens.  Personally, I agree with Leslie Neilsen’s Frank Dreben from the Naked Gun series who called having a queen silly. If one wanted to know what so called royalty or nobility looks like, look at the Windsors with Harry and Charles and god help us, Andrew.  There is no specialness about them which is why some 240 years ago we rejected the concept.  And that is why we have traditionally looked to other heroes closer to home, an amalgam of politicians, entertainers, and sports figures.  That is what Pinkett Smith is really doing, trying to find a hero for her, her daughter and the African American community.  I find it sad that in a country that has produced Harriet Tubman, Ida B Wells, Shirley Chisholm, Maya Angelou, Rosa Parks, Aretha Franklin and heck, even billionaire brilliant business woman Oprah Winfrey, that Pinkett Smith needs to reach back 2,100 years, and appropriate a Greek queen for this identity need.  And let’s be clear.  It is probable that Cleopatra’s two companions depicted in many tellings, Charmian and Iras, were her slaves.  We know that Cleopatra’s would have employed thousands of them.  A fact somewhat inconvenient to the hero identity.  And finally Pinkett Smith herself.  She has appeared as an actress in 51 TV Shows and movies in several cases, such as Woo, as the lead.  She now has 22 producer credits and adding to that total.  Her husband who is also black, was for nearly 15 years the most bankable star in Hollywood.  Their combined net worth is will top half a billion dollars in the next few years.  But she needs to reach back to a Greek queen, who owned thousands of slaves, and determine that this is the model?  Because to do otherwise might be to acknowledge that the United States is today, a great nation, and now open to all for its opportunities.  That is something that sticks in the craw of too many and to say otherwise is as faulty as the history of Pinkett Smith’s documentary.