October 02, 2004
Taller than Napoleon?
One of the many snappy moments in Out of the Past is a beach scene between Jane Greer's character and Robert Mitchum. She walks up to him across the sand sans shoes:
Mitchum: I didn't know you were so little.
Greer: I'm taller than Napoleon!
Mitchum: You're prettier, too.
For those, like me, who are fascinated by the topic of error (intentional or not) in fiction, this exchange is rife with intriguing fruit.
According to IMDB, Jane Greer is 5'5". Napoleon Bonaparte was 5'6". (That would make Greer a bit shorter than Napoleon, though she was still prettier.
Ah, you say, but many people thought Napoleon was 5'2", owing to some sort of translation problem between French inches and English ones. This explains the error-- Mitchum and Greer live in a hypothetical fictional world where Napoleon is four inches shorter than he actually was. Plausible enough.
But (and here the plot thickens intriguingly), the voice-over commentator (from the DVD's bonus features) tells us that Jane Greer was between 5'1" or 5'2" (which would make her still shorter than our hypothetical fictional Napoleon). Now perhaps he is simply mistaken, inhabiting a still more-fictional world in which Jane Greer is four inches shorter than she is, and Napoleon is still shorter, or else he's just very very confused.
Or is something more complicated going on? Do all of the height errors signal something? Try this: Jane Greer tells us she is taller than Napoleon. This is false. Robert Mitchum tells us she's prettier. This is very true. This exchange-- early in their relationship-- signals everything about their two characters. Greer is the kind of girl who would lie about her height. Mitchum is the kind of guy who would tell truth to beauty. (Or would he?)
How, under this theory, can we explain the hired commentator's confusion? Well, he talks over the Napoleon exchange, and when he talks about her height, it's to emphasize how cute and innocent she looks in the scene. So is this proof that the commentator can't be trusted, that everybody is or could be in cahoots against us, trying to deceive us?
Or is it more likely that somebody writing a bit of snappy dialogue didn't do a fact-check (or perhaps that the dialogue was written first and they weren't willing to dump it even when they cast a girl who wasn't taller than Napoleon)?
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Correction
It turns out the Scalia-orgy quote I posted yesterday was erroneously reported.
This wouldn't be the first time a campus newspaper bungled reporting a Scalia speech-- in May of 2003 the Chicago Maroon managed to confuse grapeshot with grapefruit (the story is here). Though the paper corrected some of the other errors in that piece, they bafflingly never corrected that one.
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