I once interviewed Ken Burns. He announced to his entourage he was going to be interviewed by the Valley Advocate, then asked if he could call me "Valley." He spoke without looking my direction, reciting canned answers so full of hot air they were nearly capable of taking flight. The man claimed to have singlehandedly brought jazz back, for crying out loud.
But I didn’t come here to bury Caesar. I bring up Burns because of The War, which is being received as if Burns had walked it over to PBS across the Sea of Galilee. I am predisposed, I guess, to distrust the guy after our interview. Still, I enjoyed much of episode one of The War, talking heads, slow pans across photos and all. One interviewee seemed quite like a poet in his observations.
But it was as if episode one had two endings. At about two hours, after epic coverage of Guadalcanal, suddenly we were exposed to a Norah Jones music video so drippingly, fluffily patriotic I it seemed like a campaign ad. Between her, the odd addition of a musical saw passage clashing with an interview, and the yet stranger addition of old-timey acoustic music, I had to wonder if the soundtrack for The Civil War had gotten grafted on with a little Norah for good measure. Norah’s jarring sentimentalism made it seem as if Burns’ film had been confiscated by the Bush administration, who added a little bang-you-over-the-head Americanism. (Apparently, there was an addition of stories about Hispanics, who Burns initially didn’t include–he doesn’t seem to have included them with any sort of grace.)
What is up with Burns? Was he afraid of being thought too liberal for presenting what had till then been a fairly distanced historical document? Why did Burns feel it necessary to tell us, as he did with words keyed in, that millions of people served and each had a story to tell? Next he’ll tell us that many people have lived, and each of them lived somewhere. Thanks, Ken!
When, after Norah crooned, they returned to Guadalcanal, then wrapped up the episode in a very sudden manner, I wondered if someone had forgotten to tell Burns he could, in fact, do some wrong.
Now that I’ve gotten that out, I’m sure I’ll return to enjoying what I can of the rest of this often grand series. But someone really needs to have an ego intervention with that Burns guy. Could somebody give Frederick Wiseman a call, maybe?
