Band of Brothers
Aug. 1st, 2005 11:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amari_zI finally watched Band of Brothers, and if it were a work of fiction I would only say I liked it very much. However, since it's supposed to be more than a work of fiction, I suppose it gets held do a higher standard. Over all, I (with my utter dis-knowledge about the subject at hand) still thought it was excellent. It was definitely enthralling to watch.
But one thing that bugged me was the second to last episode, "Why we fight." The episode is suppose to show, at the start, the weariness of the soldiers who have now been fighting for close to a year if they were there from the beginning. The German army is practically defeated and our soldiers' terror and determination seems to have given way to impatience, irritation, disgust and general upset. So at that precise moment our company happens upon a concentration camp. This is all no doubt "true" but what I found irritating was actually the title of the episode more than anything else. "Why we fight." The implication is clear. Easy Company learns why they are fighting when they find the concentration camp.
That all seems good, but, really, why they were fighting wasn't the horrors of the holocaust. America didn't get into the war to liberate the concentration camps. The soldiers had no idea that such things existed (though by this time I think the U.S and British governments knew at least most of it, but the common soldier, no). So to me the implications of the title are dishonest. These men were fighting for a lot of reasons adequately put forth in the series, I don't see the need to present the holocaust as the reason. It smacks of the same revisionism that I generally find troubling when people discuss WWII. I know that WWII is presented as being a noble war, a crusade (man, I hate that word) and because Hitler is such an out and out evil villain who is actually threatening the world in a way that I think is pretty uncommon in history, the rhetoric is hard to fight. It is good that Hitler was stopped. There was no way to stop Hitler except violence. The Allies were in the right. Just look at the concentration camps. Look at Nazi philosophy. Evil stuff, no question. But that doesn't change that the true madness of the Nazis really only became clear long after America entered the war. American soldiers were fighting for the same types of reasons they fought in WWI, in Korea, in Viet Nam, in Iraq. Because they believed their leaders that it was the right thing to do to protect their country or the world at large, because they were patriotic, because they were forced to, because it was a job--those types of reasons. I hate to put it this way, but in someway the vets of WWII were lucky. The war their leaders led them into was a war that turned out to be one in which they could feel, in the over all picture, they were on the side of righteousness. But in truth, why were the soldiers of WWII any better or different than those soldiers who have fought in other wars? Really, they weren't, despite all the greatest generation rhetoric. I don't mean to diminish any part of the horror or the sacrifices made in WWII, but how much worse is it for those soldiers who fight and kill and suffer for a war they come to realize was utterly pointless or even wrong? I don't know that I'm articulating this very well, but anyway, the implications of the title bugged me.
Another minor complaint is that, while over all the acting was excellent, the fact that most of the actors were Englishmen playing Americans occasionally provided a distraction. This wasn't true for me in the case of any of the main characters, but there was the character of the replacement in Ep. 9 (name forgotten if ever known) who doesn't sound to even my tin ear to be anything but some type of British. He has quite a few lines, and it's rather surprising that they cast an actor that couldn't imitate an American accent.
As for the "true story" part--I can't speak at all to accuracy, but I have to say that whenever I thought too hard that the characters on the screen were supposed to be real people, some of whom were still alive or whose families were still alive and probably watching, it made me a bit uneasy. Almost the same way I feel when I warily eye real person fic (unless the person has been dead for at least a century or more). From what I understand the series might not have been completely accurate in its representations of all the characters (in fact, how would it actually be possible to be?). How bad is it to claim you're presenting a true story but to distort the character of an actual person whose name and likeness you are using? I'm not saying that people behind the series did such things deliberately, but apparently there were some people who thought they had seriously misrepresented some of the men--for example in the case of the portrayal of looting by the E Co. captain. in Germany. But this is a problem with the genre itself, I guess.
Despite these complaints, I very much liked the series, and I think it is something that could grow even better on repeated viewings. In fact, it might significantly benefit from further viewings, given the number of characters and how much you are probably failing to pick up.
But one thing that bugged me was the second to last episode, "Why we fight." The episode is suppose to show, at the start, the weariness of the soldiers who have now been fighting for close to a year if they were there from the beginning. The German army is practically defeated and our soldiers' terror and determination seems to have given way to impatience, irritation, disgust and general upset. So at that precise moment our company happens upon a concentration camp. This is all no doubt "true" but what I found irritating was actually the title of the episode more than anything else. "Why we fight." The implication is clear. Easy Company learns why they are fighting when they find the concentration camp.
That all seems good, but, really, why they were fighting wasn't the horrors of the holocaust. America didn't get into the war to liberate the concentration camps. The soldiers had no idea that such things existed (though by this time I think the U.S and British governments knew at least most of it, but the common soldier, no). So to me the implications of the title are dishonest. These men were fighting for a lot of reasons adequately put forth in the series, I don't see the need to present the holocaust as the reason. It smacks of the same revisionism that I generally find troubling when people discuss WWII. I know that WWII is presented as being a noble war, a crusade (man, I hate that word) and because Hitler is such an out and out evil villain who is actually threatening the world in a way that I think is pretty uncommon in history, the rhetoric is hard to fight. It is good that Hitler was stopped. There was no way to stop Hitler except violence. The Allies were in the right. Just look at the concentration camps. Look at Nazi philosophy. Evil stuff, no question. But that doesn't change that the true madness of the Nazis really only became clear long after America entered the war. American soldiers were fighting for the same types of reasons they fought in WWI, in Korea, in Viet Nam, in Iraq. Because they believed their leaders that it was the right thing to do to protect their country or the world at large, because they were patriotic, because they were forced to, because it was a job--those types of reasons. I hate to put it this way, but in someway the vets of WWII were lucky. The war their leaders led them into was a war that turned out to be one in which they could feel, in the over all picture, they were on the side of righteousness. But in truth, why were the soldiers of WWII any better or different than those soldiers who have fought in other wars? Really, they weren't, despite all the greatest generation rhetoric. I don't mean to diminish any part of the horror or the sacrifices made in WWII, but how much worse is it for those soldiers who fight and kill and suffer for a war they come to realize was utterly pointless or even wrong? I don't know that I'm articulating this very well, but anyway, the implications of the title bugged me.
Another minor complaint is that, while over all the acting was excellent, the fact that most of the actors were Englishmen playing Americans occasionally provided a distraction. This wasn't true for me in the case of any of the main characters, but there was the character of the replacement in Ep. 9 (name forgotten if ever known) who doesn't sound to even my tin ear to be anything but some type of British. He has quite a few lines, and it's rather surprising that they cast an actor that couldn't imitate an American accent.
As for the "true story" part--I can't speak at all to accuracy, but I have to say that whenever I thought too hard that the characters on the screen were supposed to be real people, some of whom were still alive or whose families were still alive and probably watching, it made me a bit uneasy. Almost the same way I feel when I warily eye real person fic (unless the person has been dead for at least a century or more). From what I understand the series might not have been completely accurate in its representations of all the characters (in fact, how would it actually be possible to be?). How bad is it to claim you're presenting a true story but to distort the character of an actual person whose name and likeness you are using? I'm not saying that people behind the series did such things deliberately, but apparently there were some people who thought they had seriously misrepresented some of the men--for example in the case of the portrayal of looting by the E Co. captain. in Germany. But this is a problem with the genre itself, I guess.
Despite these complaints, I very much liked the series, and I think it is something that could grow even better on repeated viewings. In fact, it might significantly benefit from further viewings, given the number of characters and how much you are probably failing to pick up.
