While in Scotland recently, the tour guide was telling us of movies set in Scotland or about Scottish history. She mentioned some Hollywood movies about Scottish heroes, which, she informed us, were not historically accurate.

I wondered, once again, why Hollywood is so averse to historical accuracy. History is not boring.

I think Hollywood shies away from accurate history because the stories are not clean-cut. The good guys sometimes chop off heads of a few thousand foreigners. The bad guys sometimes love their mothers and buy them castles. And if you want to make a movie about the War of the Roses, you’d better have it move slowly so we can keep up with changing alliances, kings who disappear then reappear and a bunch of people with the same title or name.

Hollywood doesn’t like that.

But this thought intersected with another thought I’d been having recently about the American love of horror. While we Americans like our Hollywood happy, we also love our true crime and reality shows where people yell at each other for being ugly and lazy. Horror films are hardly uncommon.

There we have it! Americans don’t need everything happy all the time. It’s a myth.

What might be happening is this: In America when we eat meatloaf and mashed potatoes and corn, we keep all three items separate. When the British (I know, Scottish is not British – I hear the criticism as I write) eat meatloaf and mashed potatoes and corn they put it all together (brilliantly so) and call it Shepherd’s Pie.

Americans like their happiness and their horror, just not in the same casserole dish. We are not a nation avoiding happiness-free movies. We just eat our horror in a different bite.

Hollywood

Hollywood, like its famous directors, is ruled by Scorpio. The city was incorporated on November 14, 1903.

The sun was in Scorpio, the moon in Virgo. Mercury in Scorpio is conjunct the sun. This is a talking Scorpio city.

Scorpio is a fixed water sign, emotionally intense with deep, dark eyes. Scorpio is the tall, dark loner of noir films. Scorpio is the stranger in the cape that haunts Amadeus. Scorpio is the vengeful lover in Fatal Attraction. Scorpio is brutally honest like Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment.

Scorpio is the shark that attacks the late, sexy Scorpio Roy Scheider in the deep, dark sea in the middle of the night. Scorpio is the emotional upheaval of a hundred Holocaust films. Scorpio is the passionate movie that makes you break up with your boring lover on the way out the door.

Scorpio is the mood.

Moon in Virgo is the dialogue, the lyrics of the moving picture. The dialogue must be Scorpio – clear and direct. Unless you have made it through “My Dinner with Andre,” you probably need the dialogue to move the plot, to have meaning, to be more than the practical words of daily life.

Pluto, Scorpio’s ruler, is in the sign of Gemini and opposes Uranus in Sagittarius. These were the times when communication was transforming into mass communication. It was the beginning of a control that comes through the ability to communicate to the masses in a common language. Moving image excites us.

Seems so easy now – to communicate to everyone – it was not so easy in 1903.

The moving pictures often convey ideas that later become part of the national dialogue. There were certainly eccentric writers in dark corners talking about the matrix and aliens and such prior to the rise of Hollywood. Only Hollywood taking on such ideas gives them social acceptance.

How did seeing Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City affect the sale of Manolo Blahnik shoes? Nevermind that this character writes one column a week which is probably not enough to even eat ramen noodles in New York City let alone have an apartment, drinks at new restaurants and $800 shoes.

And how much do our ideas of family and romance originate from the moving picture?

Hollywood has Venus in Libra. Combined with Scorpio, we have Marlene Dietrich, a serious, sensual and deep-voiced vixen, born close to the time of the incorporation of Hollywood.

Before you think Hollywood is about mood and image and cathartic emotional experience, notice that Mars is in Capricorn. All that art stuff is nice but we’re here to make money, to have the status that comes with making a lot of money.

Saturn in Aquarius seems quite anti-union. Let’s not get too enmeshed in high-minded ideals that are the subject of dissertations and law precedents but are no fun in the movies. Movies are not humanitarian exercises. They are mass personal experiences.

Jupiter in Cancer and Neptune in Cancer provide the comfort to know that if you please the Scorpio energy, all other emotions are allowed.

Saturn in Scorpio

Saturn is coming up on one year of its two-point-something long transit. That transit will put a strain on the finances of Hollywood, which likes to make its Mars-in-Capricorn money but needs sun-in-Scorpio lending to do it.

Pluto is transiting Capricorn so possibly Hollywood will find itself under some new, restrictive governance or some new laws.

Scorpio is known for sex so maybe we will have a one-year backlash against all those dirty movies until Saturn enters Sagittarius and we don’t care for the next two years. In Capricorn, we’ll care again.

Will Hollywood, like Detroit and Orange County, go bankrupt? Difficult to imagine, but who knows. Maybe Hollywood has borrowed and hedged itself into a financial problem.

We’ll see. Whatever happens, I’ll ignore it in the news. To discover the truth these days, I wait ten or twenty years until it all passes and no one cares then watch the documentary.