Documentary offers tired narrative, with little insight
As a fiction writer, I’ve been asked about the Vietnam War at nearly every reading or panel I’ve ever attended. I am not a historian, nor was I alive during the war. I was born in America two years after the war to refugees who wouldn’t speak of their losses and trauma for years.
But people ask because I write about the war, or, rather, its consequences, particularly those experienced by the nearly 2 million Vietnamese people who left the country afterward, among them, my family. The only way I have learned to understand my family’s history is by writing about it.
I am not a Vietnam War expert, and the people who approach me after readings know that. But they are desperate to talk to someone, and my face appears familiar. They don’t really want to hear what I think; instead, they want me to affirm their understanding of what happened, to reiterate that same narrative we’ve been hearing for years, the one that Ken Burns’ new 18-hour documentary reconfirms, with little new information, insight or perspective.
When Burns and his collaborators announced plans to make a documentary on the Vietnam War, I felt wary. Surely, the nationally beloved documentarian knew his audience, and the film would focus on the American military experience. Yet we heard that Burns’ treatment would be different, that producers had taken great efforts to interview people from multiple sides of the war — including South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese military and civilians. They even solicited Yo-Yo Ma and other Asian musicians to accompany that ’60s soundtrack we already knew by heart.
But when the first episode began with American military vet Karl Marlantes, my heart sank. I knew where we were going, and yet I couldn’t get off the ride.
For two weeks, I committed hours every night to rehashing and reliving the experience through the increasingly narrowed lens of the filmmakers. As each new episode started, my partner and I would ask aloud if we’d already seen it, because the images, words and music all felt so familiar. Though there were some excellent and, at times devastating, interviews with Vietnamese soldiers on both sides, and African American soldiers, the narrative always veered back to its shiny center: the white American soldier and his complex feelings of fear, hatred, guilt and remorse.
The little coverage these other voices receive does little to right the balance. Like nearly every movie or book about the war, Vietnamese lives remain in the background, no matter that it is their land, homes and people the war is destroying. American prisoners of war receive significant airtime, while the aftermath of the war and the refugee experience are hardly acknowledged. Little respect is paid to the Vietnamese voices, which are diverse and complicated, and communicate as much pain and regret as the Americans’.
Perhaps this documentary would have been better received 20 years ago. But in 2017, we deserve better. Indeed, recent documentaries on the war continue to be directed by white American filmmakers. Along with Rory Kennedy’s Oscar-nominated 2014 documentary, “Last Days in Vietnam,” Ken Burns’ version perpetuates the story of white American saviors failing to rescue poor, incompetent South Vietnamese from the ruthless, wily North Vietnamese; conventionalizing problematic assumptions, not only for people who survived the war, but also for younger generations watching it on PBS for the first time,
Critics have lauded the documentary as a masterpiece, and this universal praise will likely cement it as a leading resource on the Vietnam War. This is demoralizing, but not surprising. Most of these critics, and the millions of viewers who watched on television, crave the echo chamber provided by Hollywood’s Vietnam War movies. But for those viewers who are not satisfied, this can be a wake-up call: If we Americans will ever be able to look beyond our own experiences and desires, this dangerous style of self-centered storytelling must be disrupted.
In a recent NPR interview, TaNehesi Coates remarked that Americans love a bedtime story, and the feeling that everything is going to be OK. Perhaps these periodic revisits and confirmations of American significance in the Vietnam War are our national attempt to assuage our nightmares, but it also makes us oblivious to the biases that doomed us before.
This isn’t a bedtime story, and none of this is going to be OK. Perhaps once that is said aloud, more room can be made for all of our voices to count.