Ken Burns’ The War launched last evening. It was virtually impossible not to know this, as it had been advertised almost literally everywhere, and if you have any interest in anything that public radio or television broadcasts, you’ll have heard or seen tons of ads already. As usual, Burns is exceedingly earnest, and, as usual, The War–like The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz before it–is being not-so-subtly billed as the definitive account of that incredible event. Unfortunately, the first episode is an unholy mess, weighed down with cliched narration and an irritating soundtrack, a confused narrative that lurches forward and stumbles back in time, and interviews that are both startling for their candor and startling for their tedium.
I had the very great pleasure to interview dozens of World War II vets for an unpublished (and unpublishable) first novel that I wrote many years ago. As in The War, the men I spoke with were gentlemanly and brave–it is no small feat to recount such horrors, not to mention to pause mid-sentence to try to keep oneself from weeping in front of a perfect stranger. But these were the fascinating interviews: in every conflict are the men and women whose lives only marginally touched the grinding machine of war. Some of the men I spoke with (they were all Navy combatants) had enlisted at the tail end of the war and the whole of their experience was tooling around the coast of America.
There’s nothing wrong with that–my own Grandfather Derr was drafted into the occupying Army that wandered the ruins of the far East in the wake of World War II. He had no horrors to recount, and I’m damn glad for that. My other Grandfather, Grandpa Schilling, was a medic who landed in Normandy two hours after the first soldier hit the beach on D-Day. He was haunted by that experience his whole life, and never spoke of it except to my Aunt Mary. I wish that he had seen only peace. But there were also countless people who remained at home, and many have great stories to tell about the trials of living at home during the war.
But Burns doesn’t seem to get that there’s also a lion’s share of people whose experiences were, well… they were boring. Perhaps because he limited himself and the scope of his film to the tribulations of the citizens of four small to smallish towns in America. (Those towns are Sacramento, California; Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Luverne, Minnesota.) For instance, Burns gives us the testimony of the man who befriended a young English kid, and we’re told that this British boy lost his dad to a German submarine, and he (the narrator) felt just awful hearing about that. Well, Mr. Burns, it is probably much more potent to have interviewed someone who actually lost their father, rather than a second hand account. There are many such discussions, usually with the same people.
Even worse, Burns got into some trouble for initially excluding Hispanics and Native Americans from this story, which is a grievous error. So Burns tacks on a few interviews with Hispanic soldiers (after a heinous Norah Jones song that was obviously meant to close out part one.) This section is suddenly riveting, and makes it appear as if the protest were less about including Hispanics and more about making this thing actually entertaining.
Would it have been so awful to have included a major city in The War? Why only small towns? Including, say, either Los Angeles or Detroit would have given Burns myriad sources from various cultures and first hand accounts of two of the most famous riots in history: the Zoot Suit riots of ’42 or the Detroit race riots of ’43, both of speak volumes about race and the war at home.
The War is a diffuse effort, a film that juts and sways all over the historical map and can’t seem to find its footing. One minute you’re in Hawaii during Pearl Harbor, then you’re in Europe in 1939, then you’re back listening to an elderly woman recount how they really didn’t like Hitler in Mobile, Alabama, and you go “what?” Tom Hanks makes his appearance, narrating–they can’t make a movie about the Second World War without his participation. Too often, we get lofty speeches about what the war meant, in lieu of first hand accounts of the suffering. The old soldiers descriptions of Bataan and Pearl Harbor say so much more than you ever could, Mr. Burns.
What The War made me yearn for was some Studs Terkel and specifically his World War II masterpiece, The Good War. The Good War is a surprising work, and its people never boring, but often shocking to the extreme. Studs knew enough to find folks from every walk of life, in the small towns and the great cities, in the halls of Washington and the ghetto. He spoke to the men and women who felt the war was justified, the downtrodden who fought despite knowing that they had their own fight for freedom back home, and the few brave souls who objected to this war and sat out. It is a crazy book, and Burns could stand to have some of the real madness that accompanies war in his epic.
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