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I really didn’t know what all I was getting into when I rented the DVD for The Current War.

Netflix’s ratings recommended the movie to me, even if only if modestly. It ranks the feature at 3.3 stars (meh territory) but for me it says 3.6 (worth watching). It thus settled into my DVD queue and eventually worked its way to the top.

What that all misses though is that there are two versions of the movie. The Current War was to be released in 2017. That happened to coincide with the surfacing of allegations against Harvey Weinstein. The situation was all the worse in that Weinstein had just made it known that he was personally involved reediting the feature. The Current War‘s release was held up after premiering at the Toronto Film Festival.

After The Weinstein Company’s bankruptcy, the film was picked up in 2018 and by April 2019 it was finally ready for a widespread release. Along with that delay and rebranding, the film had been reedited. The Weinstein version edits were made over the objections of the director and may have been largely responsible for some of the initial bad reviews. The 2019 release was billed as a Director’s Cut. UInlike most versions with that label, this one actually cut down the total running time (although five additional scenes are included).

When I checked on my own rental copy, the DVD sleeve simply read The Current War. Once I became aware of all this above information, I got worried that I’d actually borrowed the bad version. Digging around, I am not sure that’s even possible. I did come across some really awful reviews out there (for example). I must assume that much of the negativity surrounding this title is driven by that original, 2017 version of the film.

As to the 2019 version, I do like it. In fact, I’ll concur with the Netflix’s AI’s rating of 3.6. Call it techie-tinged history for the attention-span challenged. The basic famous-figures biographical drama is spiced up through title cards and fast cuts. It is history-lite but, as I’ve said before, I think soft history-o-tainment serves its purpose on both accords.

It’s not for nothing that the Amazon splash screen for this movie shows, not one of the two stars of the film (Benedict Cumberbatch as Thomas Edison or Michael Shannon as George Westinghouse), but the actor who plays Nikola Tesla (the heretofore unknown-to-me Nicholas Hoult). To my reckoning, The Current War‘s long-time-coming release is punctuating the tail-end of a Tesla obsession in popular culture. The early aughts saw, for example, the foundation of Tesla Motor Company and movies such as The Prestige, starring David Bowie as our man. This followed a zeitgeist of Tesla admiration, emphasizing his apparent misunderstanding and mistreatment in his own time. For me, peak Tesla was represented by the Epic Rap Battles of History episode wherein he faces off against Thomas Edison. Because we all knew it was cool to declare that Tesla > Edison. It made you smart AND edgy.

That said, The Current War does not exhibit an unhealthy Tesla fascination. His inclusion seems pursuant to the main story. Tesla really did work for both Edison and Westinghouse and was an important contributor to both.

The title of my post, which is a well-used Boston insult, is also a nod both to the actual history and to the complexity that is glossed over by a film such as The Current Wars. George Westinghouse’s first major salvo in the current wars, in which he would eventually be victorious, was a AC distribution demonstration project in Great Barrington, MA.

For many of us, even those that have lived in Massachusetts, our reaction some five years ago would probably have been “Great Where?” The town is in the southwest corner of the Commonwealth and thus is about as far from Marblehead as one can get and still be within Massachusetts’ boundaries. Its claim to fame, from the industrial area, was as a population center of the Berkshires, the popular get-away for the wealthy from the declining environs resulting from the industrialization of the cities. Among those wealthy industrialists who would sometimes escape to the region, and to the town, was George Westinghouse himself, thus endowing upon the town its greatest claim to fame up until that point… the first AC distribution grid.

To this day, the Berkshires remains a “summer house” community for urban dwellers living to its south. It also houses the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), having relocated to the “small town” from MIT in 1946. AIER helped draft and distribute the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020 which got many of us to notice* just where in the world this Great Barrington actually was.

As to Marblehead, we might question who got their electricity into the city first? Was it Westinghouse and his AC or Edison/GE and their DC? The answer is neither.

Marblehead, through the traditional New England Town Meeting, voted to establish their own electric power system, owned by the people, in 1894 on a vote of 319-20. Those 319 people dedicated an eye-popping $62,687.50 to build a generation plant, which was completed the following year. The project was intended to primarily supply industrial power but also was slated to illuminate Marblehead’s streetlights on such nights as moonlight was insufficient.

The lesson, as always, is that none of us should rely on pop culture to provide the whole of our historical knowledge.

– Photo by Joy Singh on Pexels.com

*I’m misrepresenting myself, here, for dramatic effect. I have a facebook-friend who was, at the time, working for AIER. In the year-or-so before October 2020 I had seen some pictures of the AIER location (which is beautiful) and had thus looked up where this was. But that is just confusing.