We Don’t Need Statues To Learn About History. That’s What ‘Night At The Museum’ Is For.

As Confederate statues and statues of colonizers are torn down around the country, many are reaffirming that we don’t need statues to learn about our country’s history. We especially don’t need statues whose plaques glorify the likes of Robert E. Lee. And that’s because the movie Night at the Museum, where museum exhibits come alive at night, teaches us pretty much everything we need to know about history.

 

After all, the whole plot of the movie revolves around Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) learning about history so that he can better deal with the museum exhibits that are coming alive at night.

 

Is the movie Night at the Museum as Eurocentric as the confederate statues? Sure. Is the movie’s portrayal of a Sacagawea pretty divorced from her real life as an enslaved teenager despite the fact that one of the human characters in this movie is writing her dissertation on Sacagawea? Yes. Is the fact that these exhibits are brought to life by the tablet of a fictional Pharaoh kind of racist in and of itself? A little bit. But in a way, isn’t that sort of the biggest lesson this movie can teach us about our country’s history?

 

Plus when the T-Rex skeleton chases Ben Stiller it’s so funny.

 

 

No, we don’t a statue of an old white dude who committed genocide in order to understand our history. We need a movie where a life size model of a whale burps in someone’s face.

 

Remember the part where the old man says, “he looks like a weird-y” about Ben Stiller? Lol!

 

In short, we don’t need statues to learn about history. We just need to keep recycling the other distorted and incomplete representations of Western History, by watching Night at the Museum.