This gets at my most serious criticism of the film. That, in a way, as troubling as a lot of this great footage is, of battle after battle after battle — and you do see depictions of people who have died and are terribly wounded — it does somehow put that war safely in the past, in the rear-view mirror.
To me, this film is all about memory, forgetting and history — complicated, densely related topics I’ve been drawn to for years. I wonder if you agree with this point — that these lie at the heart of the film. The question concerns "social memory," as Maurice Halbwachs, the French scholar who defined the phenomenon, called it nearly a century ago. Another French scholar, Pierre Nora, would call this film un lieu de mémoire, a site of memory.
Such places or objects or productions are important, powerful exercises. They tell us to remember, but not only to remember — they tell us what to remember and how to remember and then what to forget. Finally, they tell us that remembering in the indicated way is part of what it will mean to be — fill in the nationality — French or Chinese or American. I wonder if you agree this is a good way to look at the film.
Absolutely. It is a way to understand the American public’s collective memory of this now 50-year-old war. There is a pretense of exhaustive coverage any time you present an 18-hour documentary. There is the expectation that everything will be remembered. But of course that couldn’t be the case. The film does give us a sort of index of the state of American memory, at least the dominant strain of it.
One of my disappointments is that we don’t have a wider range of responses. We don’t hear, for example, from an American who would take the view that this was without question a war of American imperial aggression in the pursuit of counterrevolution, as opposed to the dominant narrative told by Burns and Novick, which is that this was a great tragedy on all sides. That, I would submit, is the dominant American view. And maybe increasingly in Vietnam as well, as they look back on 3 million lost lives and ask, “Was it really worth it?” But it certainly doesn’t explain the mix of wartime feelings, when people would get into open battle over these different interpretations of the war.