THE BIG EVENT
In the same way it can be difficult not to judge a book by its cover, there are times it’s impossible not to build a picture of a television series just from its title. It is that way when confronted by something like Oliver Stone’s Untold History Of The United States. Before I watched, I already had a vague mental image: essentially, the climax from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, with Stone in the Kevin McCarthy role, running wild-eyed through the traffic screaming “they’re here!”, with his hair on fire.
As it happens, in later episodes, Stone includes clips from Bodysnatchers among the welter of archive footage assembled for this mammoth, 10-part essay. But Untold History is not the barking, bat-crazy, paranoid conspiracy-nut assault you might expect, or, indeed, hope for. If anything, the tone is tragic, as much a what-if tale of paths not taken as an investigation of what did happen, and what Stone posits as “the real” – that is, military, industrial, corporate – reasons lurking behind them. Acting as narrator, he delivers it in a gentle, lulling manner, full of … unexpected pauses.
Stone’s history begins with the Second World War and ends with Obama. Born in 1946, he states the impetus for the programme was his realisation that pupils in American schools today are still being taught the same, US-centric version of history – one based on concepts like American exceptionalism – he was fed, and which led him to serving in Vietnam.
Co-written with historian Paul Kuznick, this sets out as a corrective. The series attracted flack in the US, but on these shores, the first episode seems less provocative. Its argument boils down to this: that it was Stalin’s USSR that won the war, not the USA. This doesn’t seem so inflammatory to British ears, although some might suggest it was actually many things combined, and Stone’s tendency to gloss over Stalin’s atrocities will raise hackles, if not sniggers. Sometimes his alternative history is as conveniently uncomplicated as the kind it criticises.
But there are fascinating ideas. Things really get going in episodes two and three, as Stone devotes time to his fascination with Henry Wallace, a practically forgotten name here. A progressive, left-leaning Democrat, Wallace was FDR’s vice president and, Stone argues, could have become President instead of Harry S Truman – a much-loved American figure, painted here as a weak-willed, bullying villain.
Had Wallace been nominated, the argument runs, the US would not have dropped atomic bombs on Japan, and the Cold War might never have happened.
For good and bad, the series is entirely in tune with Stone’s body of work. It comes out of his recent excursions into documentary – films on Castro and Hugo Chavez – but Oliver Stone’s Untold History Of The US could easily be the title of a box set collecting movies like Platoon, Wall Street, Born On The Fourth Of July, JFK, Nixon and W. Stone once said that whether or not JFK uncovered “the truth” about Kennedy’s assassination, he hoped it would be seen as an alternative myth to the official myth. This wonky new series goes charging after myth again.