Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Band of Brothers thoughts
Several people recommended Band of Brothers to me, a ten episode mini-series produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. The miniseries covers the travails of Easy Company paratroopers from Normandy through to the end of the war. The subject matter hit home for me particularly because my grandfather was a paratrooper in World War II.
After watching the ten episodes in a span of a week, I came away with mixed feelings, and probably a lower overall impression then most of my friends. The series made me think, for that I give credit, and the actors and action scenes were all up to par. I had some problems with technical aspects of the series, such as choosing to shoot the entire series in what I term “blue light;” basically dimming any bright or vibrant color from the surroundings to give off the atmosphere of war. My main problem is with the overall theme of the series, which ties into several problems I have with the current representation of World War II within American society.
As I explained to my Singaporean roommate, World War II was the pinnacle of American history, where our soldiers bravely defeated the armies of evil, and we’ve been living off that ever since. “The sleeping giant,” awoke. First off let me say that Band of Brothers actually made me ashamed of myself and my generation at first. Most of the men in this company were of my age or younger, and for the most part they were volunteers. They were being sent into hell basically, as the series illustrations of Normandy and subsequent battles effectively illustrates, with long odds of making it out of the war with their lives or avoiding serious injury. As one of the soldiers put it, “you didn’t question it.” I could never see my generation stepping up to a challenge like that, and it made me embarrassed at first.
On the other hand, one of the reasons our generation isn’t so quick to jump to fight in the War on Terror is that we are smarter and more in tune with how the political system really works. Important events like the Vietnam War and Watergate illustrated the fallacy of politicians and the military. In the end, when you are a solider, you are a pawn, a statistic, a number who is at the mercy of men sitting comfortably in safe territory planning your next brush with death. In World War II, the “greater cause,” overrode any questioning among the soldiers in Band of Brothers, and in most World War II movies. Of course, read Catch-22 and you get a different idea what soldiers were thinking at that time, and what soldiers thought the army was really all about. Nowadays, we question the righteousness of the cause before we volunteer for war. Is this a bad thing? I don’t know.
My other major beef with Band of Brothers stems from the episode “Why we fight,” where the troop stumbles across a Nazi death camp, in order to graphically remind us of what the Germans were really all about. I took an entire year’s of high school history on the Holocaust, which was one of the best classes I ever took. We built up to the Holocaust slowly from different angles, trying to understand how Germany got to this point politically, but also learning that the Holocaust was not a one time event, but a pattern in human history, a part of human nature. It is an ugly truth about us homo sapiens; from time to time, we will slaughter other defenseless humans for some “difference.” It happened before the Holocaust, it’s happened since.
Rather than explore this, Spielberg and Hanks would rather throw in some emotionally wrenching footage to remind us of how bad the Germans were. Intellectually, that pisses me off, because it’s misrepresenting history. It plays into the propaganda side of World War II and American militarism that bothers me even today, that somehow our exertions of force are allowable because our ideals are right. What crap. War is war, and the Germans and Japanese that died in World War II had friends, mothers, wives, and children like all other humans. And yes the Holocaust was awful, and we should be studying it as an event to determine why it happened and how to keep it from happening again. But we shouldn’t be using it as a post-war justification for fighting the Nazis. The Holocaust had nothing to do with World War II, the war was fought for the same reason most wars are fought; territorial infringement by a group of nations trying to snag more land.
(Someday, I want someone to make a movie about dropping the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two brutal hours of a ball of fire killing tens of thousands of people, destroying the entire city, followed by footage of people in hospitals dying of radiation poisoning. These were innocents as well, weren’t they? Shouldn’t their story be told?)
So what lesson did I take out of Band of Brothers? Not much, other than reaffirming my belief that war is terrible. I didn’t become emotionally attached to the characters, so I tended to view the mini-series as more propaganda then art. But the series made me realize that, the legacy of my grandparents generation is that they fought and defeated the fascists when they were my age. My parents' generation can perhaps point to the expansion of civil liberties as their legacy. What is to be our legacy? What can we do as youths to positively impact the future of the world? Or will we be known for doing nothing?
Band of Brothers: 3.5 stars out of 5
After watching the ten episodes in a span of a week, I came away with mixed feelings, and probably a lower overall impression then most of my friends. The series made me think, for that I give credit, and the actors and action scenes were all up to par. I had some problems with technical aspects of the series, such as choosing to shoot the entire series in what I term “blue light;” basically dimming any bright or vibrant color from the surroundings to give off the atmosphere of war. My main problem is with the overall theme of the series, which ties into several problems I have with the current representation of World War II within American society.
As I explained to my Singaporean roommate, World War II was the pinnacle of American history, where our soldiers bravely defeated the armies of evil, and we’ve been living off that ever since. “The sleeping giant,” awoke. First off let me say that Band of Brothers actually made me ashamed of myself and my generation at first. Most of the men in this company were of my age or younger, and for the most part they were volunteers. They were being sent into hell basically, as the series illustrations of Normandy and subsequent battles effectively illustrates, with long odds of making it out of the war with their lives or avoiding serious injury. As one of the soldiers put it, “you didn’t question it.” I could never see my generation stepping up to a challenge like that, and it made me embarrassed at first.
On the other hand, one of the reasons our generation isn’t so quick to jump to fight in the War on Terror is that we are smarter and more in tune with how the political system really works. Important events like the Vietnam War and Watergate illustrated the fallacy of politicians and the military. In the end, when you are a solider, you are a pawn, a statistic, a number who is at the mercy of men sitting comfortably in safe territory planning your next brush with death. In World War II, the “greater cause,” overrode any questioning among the soldiers in Band of Brothers, and in most World War II movies. Of course, read Catch-22 and you get a different idea what soldiers were thinking at that time, and what soldiers thought the army was really all about. Nowadays, we question the righteousness of the cause before we volunteer for war. Is this a bad thing? I don’t know.
My other major beef with Band of Brothers stems from the episode “Why we fight,” where the troop stumbles across a Nazi death camp, in order to graphically remind us of what the Germans were really all about. I took an entire year’s of high school history on the Holocaust, which was one of the best classes I ever took. We built up to the Holocaust slowly from different angles, trying to understand how Germany got to this point politically, but also learning that the Holocaust was not a one time event, but a pattern in human history, a part of human nature. It is an ugly truth about us homo sapiens; from time to time, we will slaughter other defenseless humans for some “difference.” It happened before the Holocaust, it’s happened since.
Rather than explore this, Spielberg and Hanks would rather throw in some emotionally wrenching footage to remind us of how bad the Germans were. Intellectually, that pisses me off, because it’s misrepresenting history. It plays into the propaganda side of World War II and American militarism that bothers me even today, that somehow our exertions of force are allowable because our ideals are right. What crap. War is war, and the Germans and Japanese that died in World War II had friends, mothers, wives, and children like all other humans. And yes the Holocaust was awful, and we should be studying it as an event to determine why it happened and how to keep it from happening again. But we shouldn’t be using it as a post-war justification for fighting the Nazis. The Holocaust had nothing to do with World War II, the war was fought for the same reason most wars are fought; territorial infringement by a group of nations trying to snag more land.
(Someday, I want someone to make a movie about dropping the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two brutal hours of a ball of fire killing tens of thousands of people, destroying the entire city, followed by footage of people in hospitals dying of radiation poisoning. These were innocents as well, weren’t they? Shouldn’t their story be told?)
So what lesson did I take out of Band of Brothers? Not much, other than reaffirming my belief that war is terrible. I didn’t become emotionally attached to the characters, so I tended to view the mini-series as more propaganda then art. But the series made me realize that, the legacy of my grandparents generation is that they fought and defeated the fascists when they were my age. My parents' generation can perhaps point to the expansion of civil liberties as their legacy. What is to be our legacy? What can we do as youths to positively impact the future of the world? Or will we be known for doing nothing?
Band of Brothers: 3.5 stars out of 5
# posted by Marmaniac @ 1:12 AM 
Comments:
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I think our genereation might be known for stuff like the information superhighway. Not as moral as giving your life for your country or those disenfranchised, but very important to the growth of our society.
# posted by 
: 7:56 AM
: 7:56 AM
I would also love to see a movie on the A-bomb. My brother went to Hiroshima (he was stationed at the nearby Marine base) and said for him the most shocking thing (which is never discussed in history class) was seeing a POW camp and realizing American soldiers had died that day, along with all the Japanese civilians.
# posted by : 4:52 PM
: 4:52 PM
Great post - I'm impressed at your willingness to confront the orthodox party line on these subjects. As Catch-22 points out, thinking for your self is unpatriotic, and takes a good deal of courage.
I also like your point about our use of the A-bomb in Japan. Like most everyone, I knew the story, but it was just an abstraction. When I visited the peace museum in Hiroshima, however, a curious thing happened. While I was actually in the museum, I didn't have much reaction to it all. But just after leaving, I was overcome with intense grief and sadness, and sat on a park bench and wept. I'm not a very emotional person as a rule so this was very surprising to me.
The point, I guess, is that it's very easy to support war from a distance, but confronting the reality of its aftermath makes it much more difficult to be cavalier about. I believe that one of the main reasons we are involved in the current war is that the people responsible for pushing us into it have never been truly involved in a war. It's just theory, ideology, and abstraction to them, and all they see is the profit to be gained instead of the toll it will take.
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I also like your point about our use of the A-bomb in Japan. Like most everyone, I knew the story, but it was just an abstraction. When I visited the peace museum in Hiroshima, however, a curious thing happened. While I was actually in the museum, I didn't have much reaction to it all. But just after leaving, I was overcome with intense grief and sadness, and sat on a park bench and wept. I'm not a very emotional person as a rule so this was very surprising to me.
The point, I guess, is that it's very easy to support war from a distance, but confronting the reality of its aftermath makes it much more difficult to be cavalier about. I believe that one of the main reasons we are involved in the current war is that the people responsible for pushing us into it have never been truly involved in a war. It's just theory, ideology, and abstraction to them, and all they see is the profit to be gained instead of the toll it will take.
# posted by : 1:39 AM
: 1:39 AM << Home
