The war in Vietnam revisited
Ken Burns' The Vietnam War is dynamic, to be sure, and endlessly watchable. It's 18 hours in full, and I've been plowing through it as quickly as I can (only 2 of 18 remain) with a plan to double-back for a complete encore. The iconic filmmaker that has already given us The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The West, and so many memorable other historical templates can't tell the entire story of this most important war-- even with such a vast canvass upon which to operate, and he was never going to go as far as he could-- or should-- in his editorial condemnation of the war. He would have to declare Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, and Kissinger all war criminals to do that, and this taxpayer-funded production has to appeal to the widest possible audience to be what Burns wants it to be-- an art piece that will be a touchstone for the populace. America's not ready to fully face the reality of our crimes in Southeast Asia, and I fear we never will be. We've spent four decades since its conclusion still debating the war, and we could spend four more just debating Ken Burns' Vietnam War. I feel he has touched on everything that I've felt was important, coming into it as I did with my natural biases, though he hasn't hit some as hard as I would have liked. We need to know about the fragging though, the mutinies on the battlefield, the aerial holocaust, the shameful ambitions of government technocrats, the unequal sacrifices of so many ethnic groups, in general, and American families, in particular, and broadly speaking, we need to know about and accept the moral failures of our leaders and of ourselves. Precious Lord, how we need to know about the moral failures. I hope that the current United States President was watching, but I'm certain that he wasn't.Burns lets the men and women of that time tell their story. He lets the war's engineers indict themselves with their own words. We have Oval Office recordings that tell us precisely what we need to know about the inadequacies of those men. Perhaps it's best, actually, if Burns doesn't give us exactly what it is that I wanted from the film in advance. The truth is there for all to see, without our being bopped on the head with it. I hope people found it or eventually come to it. I've been shocked at how little cultural buzz and critical analysis it has garnered.
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I haven’t written about television in forever’s time. In May, I recall seeing Michael McKean’s witness stand meltdown as Chuck McGill on Better Call Saul (an episode entitled "Chicanery") back in June and declaring him instantaneously the winner of 2017 Emmy’s award for best supporting actor in a dramatic series. And then McKean didn’t even garner a nomination. With the Academy now discredited by that sin, it probably doesn’t matter then that Maggie Gyllenhaal just rendered the rest of the field superfluous-- in the contest for the best lead actress in a drama-- with her performance in the fifth-ever episode of HBO’s The Deuce. The episode this past Sunday was called “What Kind of Bad?” and it featured a tour de force scene of fiction on the streets of 1972 New York City, supported as she was also on the screen by the artist known as Method Man. Wow. Just wow. You will see it and you will be transported in a gale of wind.
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Quote of the day: Umberto Eco once wrote of the classic film Casablanca, “Two clichés make us laugh, but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.” If it was me that had said that, and not him, the world could really just kiss my ass.
posted by CM @ 8:31 PM
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