War Porn: A Certain Lack of Greatness

IN WHICH KEN BURNS' NEW DOCUMENTARY "THE WAR" IS REVIEWED AND REVEALED.

Scarcely relevant, but desperately desired in this time of national identity crisis, Ken Burns' "The War" drops this week onto our television screens like the grim discharge from a B-17.

Finally! A World War Two documentary I can masturbate to...


Over a pastiche of enchanting black & white footage of machine guns, amorphous explosions and assorted death, we are treated to a vying of narrational space by the septuagenarian "witnesses" and the omniscient "Lord of History," whose husky, muted tone--that of a middle aged man setting down his cigar to lean into our ear--sounds like nothing so much as a child molester.

When we do see the old-timers, it's an explosion of orange. And it's the warmth of the present compared to the grainy past that is most jarring; the story of their survival and the resemblance between them and our grandparents are similarly astounding. The stories are evocative and dear. Immediately, warning sirens go off in my head.

Am I being pandered to? Do treacly, sentimental talking heads captured by a camera lens smeared with vaseline paint an honest picture of history or is it all fantasy? I know and understand that Ken Burns is the master of the genre he created, because my raw emotional involvement with everything he does proves that.

But every time Tom Hanks affects a colloquial speech pattern, or the stylized editing calls attention to itself, or the cuteness of the old people bursts the lid, I sense the manipulation... Ken Burns running his fingers along the luscious flesh of my national pride, churning up a greasy self-loathing; enabling a stirring of vintage, nationalistic swelling; a self-imposed, self-testing of self-worthiness that bottoms out in self-love. A little Narcissistic smile ripples, transferred on the surface of a television to the nation, already eyeing the fife and drum hanging--waiting--on living room walls across the country. Did Paul Revere ever stop riding?

Beautiful, skin deep wraiths of history haunt our lurid fantasies, entwining with our self-worth, which balances against what we might be able to offer the world, and contrarily, wring from it for ourselves. That is masturbation. An unattainable desire leapt at. What we want for the future must always pass by the boards of the past.

Paul Revere haunts the woods of New England still, alert to bustles in the bushes. He will kick down the bedroom door and find you at your most vulnerable, asleep, a virtual baby, or in your most awkward prostrations. The ransom to pay him for knowledge of these humiliations (we are born with), is to accept his offer: this sacred monster's particular fantasy of a perfect, ideological identity. The true blessing of procreation: becoming.

It's that kind of sloppily motherly mythologizing that renders the atrocities meaningless and the images of death here so profoundly unmoving, pushing them past absurd into the realm of the fabricated. You get the sense that Ken Burns revels in this stuff, just so he can tell a "fantastic" story. I would be destroyed by the reading of the achingly beautiful article in Life Magazine if I couldn't also hear the producers loudly chewing on its entrails offstage.

Paul Revere's ride, interrupted by dark, pre-Freudian
urges: And a nation's Creation Myth fuddbuckered in the
ancient New England Woods

But I'm not so callous as to be unmoved by these autobiographies and to not feel for these veterans and interviewees. My heart breaks at the first mention of ice cream by sprightly Katharine Phillips, the ace example of the simple pleasures in her idyllic Mobile before bombers darkened the sky. I find myself looking for my grandfathers in the footage. One was in Alaska serving as a mechanic, and so I searched for him in vain from the edge of my seat among the faces in the film when the "Alaska" vignette took to the center.

Tonight I could have sworn I saw the other, pointing to a map, explaining something to other soldiers somewhere in Normandy with that sardonic, sober face he always had. I snapped to attention on the comfy couch, 800,000 miles from that stolen moment, either absolutely true, or completely fabricated by my brain.

I need this documentary. And I don't. It's like beating off that way. Repulsive and desirable.

I alternate between bubbling sadness over wars existence and anger at the enemy of my granddads. Meanwhile, my semi-studious face raises an eyebrow in salute to unknown facts... shocked and emboldened to learn that 60 million people died, the massacre of supply ships in the Gulf of Mexico, the zealotry of the Japs, etc. But the plot immediately performs a swan dive off the precipice of observation into the blubbery, gurgling tub that is national soul-searching. From there, it's a delicate ingress to the nursery, a softly wall-papered room adorned with gentle twin American flag sets, where my inner-child sleeps and paws at the cradle, tended to with a spatula by the miniature manservant that is my ego.

Like knotted muscles these concurrent emotions rub against each other, two globes of queasy emotion. It's that oscillation between feeling and knowing, that dull pumping motion, that begins to stroke my brain, lusciously. The confluence of empathy and knowledge of fabrication whips up the whirlpool of fantasy.

Dark Arbor Harbor

Fantasies are not always sexual, and whatever the medium, they can cast a harsh light on what it is we are attracted to, and what we want from life. I say "can cast" because for the most part we get lost in swoons of reverie at their random appearance. You can't document life and live simultaneously.

To those who aren't paying attention, almost getting there is the same as getting there. It's the full acceptance of gauzy, adumbrated fantasies that calls a nation of paintballers to arms, and for them to violently reenact the quelled past with the murderous, livid present. Those that don't trust the past are forever condemned to be sustained at the fountain of mawkish biographies of it.

Unable to rectify what's happening outside with the primordial urges inside him, the wanker will recede to the nearest, darkest arbor to perform the rite of homage to the fantasy.

That's the danger of this documentary. An artist floats his work out into the ocean like a toy boat and hopes that it catches the Gulf Stream, or the larger current of history. But how can something as ham-fisted as this temper our thoughts on the current war? Why should it, you ask? Because Ken Burns wants it to:

“The War” was begun before the United States went into Afghanistan and Iraq, and Mr. Burns is adamant that his film is not a political statement, but he acknowledged that parallels will be drawn. History “is the set of questions we in the present ask of the past,” he said. “It is informed by our anxieties, by our failures, by our successes, by our hopes, by our wishes, by all the questions we have.”
-New York Times

Is this the deepest we can go in attributing the past to our current woes? A weak similarity? The point of history is to forever compare it to the present, yes. I'm not asking for this documentary to compare itself to the Iraq war, just that it compare itself to something other than pornography. This, unfortunately then, is the deepest it will go--maudlin, storied pandering to the scant few of the US Weekly-addled crowd who feign to dip their toes in this or any other thought-provoking PBS documentary.

I immediately call into question Ken Burns' political affiliation, especially now that I hear him lamenting how we're not sacrificing anything for our war like they did in the 40's. Does PBS know that such a fierce conservative stalks their halls?

Someone call Bill Moyers,
there's a stranger in his house

The only connection to the present I can find so far in this documentary is that we won The War over insurmountable odds, thanks to the nascent stirrings of an as-yet unlearned beastly national identity. So here we are, with our well-proved identity, ready to install it anywhere it isn't wanted by those in power who refuse to learn from history. (Rape or masturbation, depending on the recipient being a human or a dirty shirt.)

Oh, how we come back to ourselves when no one will love us; alone in a sickbed with our empty ardor, waiting for the blood to condense in all the right glands, wanting only to be wanted again, promising to strike at the next opportunity, strengthened by our first mistakes.