The War goes on

I haven't seen any ratings figures from the first night. But after watching Episode 2 of Ken Burns' The War, I really wonder if its going to come close to the viewership of Burns' famous Civil War series.

After the first episode, I was grouching that a lot of it was standard History Channel fare. The History Channel does some good stuff, it's just that they became famous for running so many Second World War programs of one battle after another that it was popularly known as the "Hitler Channel" for years.

You would think Ken Burns would turn out something special. But by the last half-hour of the second episode, I was finding it downright boring. In his interviews, he's said that he hopes the viewers will become so familiar with the interview subjects that they would seem like family. Does this mean I'm going to have struggle not to nod off at Thanksgiving Dinner with these people?

I see several problems with the film so far. One is that I haven't seen anything that seems to add anything new in either facts or perspective to the story of the American experience in the Second World War. And it deals with the overall framework of the war so superficially that it does a poor job of retelling what we already know.

And the film steps on some of the parts that are the most engaging. Earle Burke from Luverne, Minnesota, has a lot of face-time in the second segment. And the film actually makes his life story come alive more than most. He tells about being a 19-year-old kid when his older brother was killed in the war. So he joins up himself, on reflection he thinks because of his brother's loss, but at the time it seemed like "fun", and he was 19 and indestructible. Flying bombing missions over Germany where the death rate among pilots and their crews was very high, he describes how he came to recognize his mortality fairly quickly, eventually ending his career on the bombing missions after two serious wounds which almost cost him his arm.

But the way the film tries to dramatize this is to show footage of American bombers being attacked by German fighters and anti-aircraft fire, complete with dubbed-in machine-gun sounds, while Burke is narrating his story about being on a bombing run over Schweinfurt, Germany,. We never see or hear the interviewer, but between the interviewer and Burke and the film editor, he was doing a darn good job of telling the story. But the fake machine-gun noise was almost drowning him out. I found myself wishing they would stop with the dubbed combat sounds and just let him tell the story.

The segment on the Japanese-American detention camps was disturbing to me, and not in a "Boy, what happened to those people was terrible" way, either. (I know there's some kind of ideological debate about whether they should be called "concentration" camps; I agree with the film's comment in Episode 1 that they were. I use "detention" only because it seems to me to be the more conventional usage, not because I object to their being called "concentration camps".)

It's preceded by the story of a white American family in a detention center in the Philippines run by the Japanese. I was thinking, why are they spending so much time on this, because there doesn't seem to be that much to the story except the bare fact that this family was there. Then it immediately switched to the story of the California camps, where we see footage of contented family strolls and baseball games to show us that "the internees acted like the Americans they were". With happy music playing in the background.

To be fair, the narration did say that those attempting to escape from the California camps were shot at and that the detainees had been deprived of their freedom. But the immediate juxtaposition of that segment with the Philippine camp segment really came off to me as intended to be a mirror-image comparison: one camp with white American internees run by Japanese, another with Japanese internees run by white Americans. The problem is, the internees in California were Americans. They weren't foreign nationals detained in wartime, as in the Philippine camp. Those two segments together left me with a bad feeling about the production.

One of the notable things about the series so far is that there is quite a bit of color footage. But I'd actually like to hear something more about the source of the film footage in general. During Burke's story, the screen was mostly taken up with scenes of bombers seemingly in the situation Burke is describing. I assume that footage is a compilation. But why don't they tell us? Especially when it's used at length to illustrate one man's story while he is narrating it simultaneously. How much trouble could it be to put up a caption that says, "Footage taken from various sources" or something?

I hardly know what to make of some of the historical commentary. Introducing Burke's story, the narrator mentions enough about the bombing policy to indicate that there was a difference in the British and American theories of "strategic" bombing. And that a lot of civilians were killed in German cities, 40,000 by their figure in Hamburg (and I believe they said in in just one night). But none of that really had much to do with Burke's particular story they were introducing. And they said just enough to brush across such huge issues related to the air war without giving the viewers any material to real understand those issues further.

And their discussion of the Second Front issue and the eastern front in Europe was so superficial they could almost have just left off mentioning that anyone but the US and Germany were in the European war.

I suppose I've got a "halo" effect working with this film. It's doing a spotty job telling the stories of the individuals and families. But it's also doing a poor job of telling the larger story of the war. We're almost getting the worst of both: a lot of schmaltz (a car dealer stopped at the base in Alaska and took home movies of "the boys" from Luverne!) mixed in with a lot of combat footage that doesn't add much of anything but noise to the story being told. Especially when we don't know if we're seeing actual footage of the events described: I guess we have to buy the $85 DVD-book-soundtrack package to find out about that.

Still, I've got more complaints. Unless I completely missed it, better-known interviewees like former Senator Daniel Inouye and historian Paul Fussell aren't identified by their more public roles. And it matters. You listen in a somewhat different way to an experienced politician or a professional historian describing things like this than to Joe Blow who's never been on TV in his life before.

The sentimental incidental music is just too much. Even if you were trying to focus on the nitty-gritty of the stories, the atmosphere with the music makes it almost impossible not to see this as a glowing heroic nostalgia tale. It also adds to the confusion. The segment discussing ramped-up war production began with about 10 minutes of boogie-woogie music for background, while the scenes on-screen were of hot, dirty, smoky factory work. Well before the end of the episode, I was thinking, "please, no more horns or violins!"

Finally, there's the problem of interviewing eyewitnesses who were teenagers or young children at the time. One woman in Mobile (who may have been a bit older than that in 1941) talked about how everybody supported Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor on. And a guy in Minnesota who was apparently a kid during the whole war talked about his very fond feelings about the sense of unity among people when he was growing up, "that sense of oneness".

National unity isn't all it's cracked up to be. And while it's true that there was widespread and enduring support for the war itself, the results of the 1944 Presidential election were that the Electoral College went 432-99 for Roosevelt, but the popular vote was 25.6 million FDR/22.0 million Dewey. Fifty-four percent of the popular vote for Roosevelt is a very solid margin. But obviously people didn't feel a complete "sense of oneness" in politics even during that war.

So maybe it's also the case that the good old days aren't what they used to be. Maybe the Minnesota guy felt a "sense of oneness" when he was a kid because the adults always talked to him about the war in simplistic terms. Here's where a focus on the individual's experience would have been enhanced by actually going into questions like that. But if you're not going to probe things like that a bit more in the final film, just leave it out. That same guy also talked about how he thought the wartime rationing was just an artificial scheme of the government to impose some sacrifices on people to make them more supportive of the war. Say what?

A lot of people are going to take away particular impressions of the Second World War from this series, I'm sure. How many days or hours will it be before a reference to it appears in a Dick Cheney or George Bush speech? Unfortunately, so far its coming off more as light entertainment than as substantial history.

Tags: ken burns, second world war, the war doucmentary, world war two