Band of Brothers


Subject: Band of Brothers
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Mon Oct 08 2001 - 14:38:53 GMT


    '... the HBO series ... Band of Brothers? ... This realistic WW2
    series gives a partial glimpse ...'

    I don’t know, Paul. Our television reviewers here echoed these
    same reactions – all as enthusiastic as your own. Yet as I watched
    I felt an increasing impatience that this was almost certainly NOT
    ‘the way it was’: that film & television are no more suited to
    the recreation of ‘reality’ than ballet or opera. They require
    the same kind of acceptance of conventions as any Noh theatre
    & we’ve all absorbed them long ago without realising it.

    I haven’t experienced official war as such - but perhaps a couple
    of remotely comparable situations during air force service.
    And there was simply no way these could be reproduced convincingly
    in a darkened theater with thin shadows on a wall & a lot of
    Surround-Sound bangings, or watching a brightly lit box in the corner
    of a cosy room while trying to ignore copulating family friends
    & dysfunctional pets.

    We’ve had a terrible but vivid illustration of this in the last month.

    A common response to the World Trade atrocity was that it was
    ‘like watching a disaster movie’. But that was almost exactly what it
    was NOT like. A truer response was that it had the unreal quality
    of a dream. A disaster film maker would surely have had the aeroplane
    explode with spectacular pyrotechnics ON IMPACT with the side
    of the building. In the event, though, it didn’t. That second plane
    glided in & disappeared as effortlessly & smoothly as a something
    slipping into water. Only from the emerging wound was there
    an explosion of violence & flame.

    Reality combines both the familiar & the unexpected. When you’re
    running for your life across a ploughed field with your head down
    under a stream of Spandau fire, what you find surprising is that you
    have only two, maybe three, more breaths to take in the whole
    of this mortal life – a thought that is new, shocking & decidedly
    unexpected. But the taste of copper pennies in the mouth is familiar
    – from the first time when, as a child, you had to run a little beyond
    your capacity. This is the combination the realist artist has to try
    to capture. All the cinema can do is confusion & noise. But reality
    is slow – preternaturally so; & crystal clear – diabolically so.

    If you asked Salinger ‘what it was like’ in the Hurtgen Forest I suspect
    he would give you the same wry, impotent smile that old soldiers
    have given me when I asked them the same question & they explained
    gently that ‘you probably had to be there.’

    Scottie B.

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