Burns back in the trenches
Comprehensive ‘Vietnam War’ tries to move past mythology and toward reconciliation
Ken Burns has been finished with war movies a couple of times now. He thought that after “The Civil War” aired in 1990. § “I vowed to never do another film on war,” he said while visiting Houston Public Media earlier this year. “Civil War soldiers who had been in combat said they’d ‘seen the elephant.’ If you’d been in combat, you’d seen the elephant. It doesn’t compare, but those of us who worked on that film had a strong emotional reaction from working on it. We all thought, ‘I don’t need to do that anymore.’ War is the worst thing humans do. But it’s a paradox. It also brings out some of the best of human behavior.”
When Burns heard in the late ’90s that World War II veterans were dying at a rate of 1,000 per day, he made his second war documentary, “The War,” which aired in 2007. Then he was done, again. Which is why the late, great Yogi Berra — featured in Burns’ “Baseball” film — might chuckle at the title of tonight’s first episode in Burns’ latest film, “Vietnam.” With “Déjà Vu,” Burns returns to the subject of mass armed conflict all over again.
“Vietnam” begins to air Sunday on PBS, spreading its 18 hours over 10 episodes — five this week and five the following week. Burns and co-director Lynn Novick — his collaborator on “The War” in 2007, “Baseball: The Tenth Inning” in 2010 and “Prohibition” in 2011 — spent six dedicated years working on the film: viewing footage, reading historical accounts, pouring through recent scholarship. They also listened to hours and hours of tapes made by Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
“Wonderful for us,” Burns says, “terrible for them.”
They also tried to reach as many people who could offer different perspectives on the war. They interviewed more than 100 people.
“I live in New Hampshire, and we make maple syrup there,” Burns says. “It takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. That’s a good analogy for this film, or any film I’ve worked on. In our world, you subtract, like a sculptor who starts with a block of stone.”
Part of the exhaustive process arose because Burns and Novick wanted to present a panoramic view of the war in which they “shed all biases.” They interviewed numerous American soldiers, obviously, but also sought commentary from soldiers and civilians from both North and South Vietnam. And they also present stories of the anti-war movement in the States.
“There was an enormous amount of mythology to contend with and a lot of misinformation,” Novick says. “We had to check all that at the door. But it’s hard not to be mindful of some of these iconic images, especially from Hollywood movies. They’re powerful cultural tropes. And some of them have come to represent what Vietnam really was. And they don’t.”
Both Burns and Novick point to contemporary cultural resonance that can be traced back to the war.
“We live in a country beset by divisions that first metastasized in Vietnam,” Burns says. His hope was making the film would allow them to “pull the fuel rods of animosity and get beyond it.
“Everybody has their opinions. The South doesn’t like the North. The North doesn’t like the South. The soldiers don’t like the protesters. Everybody stays in their camp. What if it was possible to create a space where all views could coexist and be tolerated? To have a conversation about war. When I made a film on the history of jazz, Wynton Marsalis said, ‘Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing can be true at the same time.’ War is one of those places where there are multiple truths.”
They hope the horror of armed conflict would be the one common theme that could pull viewers of differing opinions together. The accepted number of U.S. military fatal casualties in the war is more than 58,000. Estimates of casualties in North and South Vietnam vary wildly. But military and civilian casualties in North and South Vietnam likely top 3 million.
“There’s no silver lining, no greater good,” Novick says. “It didn’t work out for the best. So the best you can do is try to make sense of the tragedy, survive and endure. At times telling this story felt like being at the bottom of a well. But hopefully it can help people with deeply held beliefs to open up a little, be more respectful of others. To find some reconciliation.”
That sense of reconciliation, the filmmakers hope, will be the connective tissue of their film. They deliberately set out to put a face to all the forces in conflict. “War is the great objectifier,” Burns says. “The enemy has to be reduced to nothing, to be cyphers. We wanted to do something different there. But we also have other sides. We have a woman from the anti-war protests apologizing for all the things she had said to soldiers.
“There are a lot of very intense interactions.”
Looking ahead, Burns plans to look at much lighter fare: heartache as entertainment. He’s spent time in Nashville recently and is currently editing a documentary about country music.
“People ask how I choose the subjects I’m going to do, but to me it’s all been American history,” he says. “That itself is such a diverse topic. I think in a way I’ve been making the same film over and over again, just asking a simple question: Who are we?”
He’s working on a film about Ernest Hemingway, too. “As insane as it sounds,” Burns says, “I’m already starting to block out what the entire 2020s will look like.”
But he’s surely done with war. Again. For the time being.