When I was but a near-illiterate and uncultured mini adult, I could ignore anachronisms like misplaced prepositions. But now! As a full-fledged adult-by-law-but-who-really-knows adult, I only occasionally miss them. Anachronisms, that is—prepositions are a lost cause at this point. At precisely the moment I learned the definition of anachronism, and how neat it was—in both the “hey that’s cool!” as well as the “hey that’s tidy” sense—I brimmed with righteous indignation at the evil that they are. They do not belong in a story! They belong in their own time and no place else. That is to say, I found them distracting. I let them steal me from the creator’s world all the while screaming inside my own tiny little head: Do your research and stop wasting my time!
If you accused me of being harsh and judgemental, you’d be mean. But also correct.
This continued for some unknown number of years—unknown to you because I don’t want to admit how long I was a gargantuan tantruming toddler—until that fateful day when I realized that my favorite movie of all time was, in its near entirety, an anachronism. If you’ve seen A Knight’s Tale, starring the late great Heath Ledger, you know exactly what I am talking about.
I probably should have acknowledged this earlier; medieval peoples singing and dancing to Queen’s “We Will Rock You” could be considered by mightier minds as a dead give away. But no, I suffocated in the dirt in which I buried my face. What cured me of my delusion you might rightly ask?
It was not nobles dancing to David Bowie’s “Golden Years”. Or trumpets sounding like electric guitars. No, it was my swelling brain when I heard the word surgeon. “Why would they know what a surgeon is?” That’s so stupid…Everybody knows that surgeons only exist today.
Right?
…Right?
Who knows—I didn’t, but for those of you who are inclined to know the etymology of words, the root of surgeon has been around for a long time. So distraught at this perceived anachronism, I nearly lost my mind. How could such a great story contain such a glaring error? The wise among my readers might foresee my coming thoughts as I parsed through my cognitive dissonance: in what could only be called a revelation, I realized that stories are much more than a multiple choice test. They are not right or wrong, they merely are.
The power of anachronism for me was the freeing, the unchaining, of storytelling. You are not wrong to have any amount of anachronism in any kind of story. And in the case of A Knight’s Tale, embracing the anachronism can produce an amazing and heart-bending story. Now, this might not seem like much to many of you, but it meant the world to me. I could do anything. I didn’t have to be scared of missing some obscure piece of time trivia. It turns out that even a carefully crafted story can hold, intentionally or not, misplaced timepieces, songs, and phraseology, and it doesn’t matter. We are free to craft whatever it is we wish to read or watch. Freedom—that is the power of anachronism.
Thank you for reading and please feel free to leave a comment!
~K
K 