Filmmaker Ken Burns dominates the media this week as his 15-hour documentary on World War II airs on PBS. After sitting glued to the tube for the first installment, I feel safe saying that everybody should tune in.
Burns gets it right. He concentrates upon the human element. Sixteen million Americans fought in the war. Those who came home haven't always been eager to talk. But each of them has a story.
History books concentrate upon the big picture. Battles. Generals. Presidents. Summit meetings. Diplomacy. Treaties.
But those larger issues are often debated and well documented. What gets lost as the World War II veterans age and die are the blood and guts stories of the grunts on the ground.
It is important to keep those stories alive so that war doesn't become a distant abstraction to those of us who have never fought one.
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I usually avert my gaze from the worst of the war stories when they show up on TV. I am familiar enough with the big events to know that film footage of the fighting at Guadalcanal, to use one example, is going to be gruesome.
So, I usually turn back to the Twins game rather than watch this history stuff, which just gets me thinking and disturbs my sleep.
Trouble is, Ken Burns is a genius. His documentaries are designed to keep you glued to the tube until the final credits roll, at which time you sit and stare blankly at the screen, your head still spinning.
That's the test of a good filmmaker. If you can get the viewer to absentmindedly watch the credits, you've done your job.
To do that job, to get people to think, to hit people in their gut and not just their brain, to get jaded viewers to stare blankly at the credits at the end of a couple of hours of relatively slow-moving narrative, a historian like Burns has to back away and take a new look at old facts.
Burns dug deep to uncover stories, pictures and film footage that haven't been shown before. He started from scratch, and he told the story from the viewpoint of the participants.
Several reviewers have criticized Burns' film for ignoring the Holocaust until the end of his documentary. But the fact is, Americans didn't find out about the Holocaust until the end of the war.
Others argue that Burns, like most American historians, overlooks the unimaginably brutal Eastern Front, where as many as 30,000,000 Russians and Germans lost their lives.
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But you can't blame Burns for not succeeding at what he didn't attempt. Burns wanted the viewer to better understand the experience of the dewy-lipped 17-year-old American kid who suddenly ends up gathering the body parts of his buddies for burial in the jungle.
To accomplish his goal, Burns, like all historians, was forced to pick and choose. For this documentary, some of the big events weren't recounted.
And that is fine. We see too many scenes of leaders wining and dining and posing for photos at summit meetings. That's where the cameras are, of course. Fame draws more fame. But press conferences and photo opportunities aren't where the action is.
The important stuff in World War II happened to the kids who were fighting in the jungles, on the desert, all across the Pacific, through the mud of Italy, and who climbed the cliffs of Normandy. They faced daily terror. They lost buddies. They won the war. They came home changed in brutal ways.
The raw experiences of war, when retold by the participants, seldom serve a present-day political agenda. They aren't neat little moral tales. They don't rev one up to go out and shoot the bad guys.
But if at the end of a documentary you stare at the screen, lost in thought, watching the credits roll - you've probably gotten the point.
Visit Eric's Web site at www.countryscribe.com
