'Pacific' a Sequel to Exalt War Passions, Not Reflection

Almost 10 years ago Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg teamed up to
produce "Band of Brothers," the thick-blooded story of a U.S. Army
company making its way from Normandy to the end of World War II in
Europe. The 10-part HBO miniseries cost $120 million. This month the
Hanks-Spielberg team launched its follow-up, "The Pacific," also in 10
parts and on HBO. That one cost $200 million and remixes an almost
identical soundtrack. The similarities end where history bows to
worship.

The first at least made an effort to render war the way "All Quiet on
the Western Front" was about war: Valor matters, but it doesn't trump
horror no matter how noble the mission. The second is a memorial to war,
much like the strangely Third Reich-like World War II memorial in
Washington. It's more self-conscious pride than sorrow, more gauze than
blood, and disturbingly flirty with propagandizing war's necessity.

Lines like "this great undertaking for god and country" and
"everybody's got to make sacrifices" (a strange line to hear in a decade
of wars when no one but military families have made sacrifices) occur
early on. When a young man can't join the service because of his health,
he's crushed and cries the tears of an Achilles denied. As if on cue,
when a brainy Marine is asked to tell his company "why we're here," he
quotes from the "Illiad" ("Without a sign, his sword a brave man draws/
And asks no omen but his country's cause") -- an unfortunate reference,
the Trojan War marking, as historian Barbara Tuchman put it, the first
step in Western civilization's march of folly. When a hero dies, violins
are louder than bullets (just like the water geysers are the loudest
things at the World War II memorial) -- "a lie about death," as the
critic Nancy Franklin describes it. Far from an original or
groundbreaking production, this is the Pacific war as Life magazine
snapshot it 65 years ago: Sanitized of context or nuance or anything
else that might interfere with the deification of the American fighting
man. This is the kind of movie you make to jazz up men for battle, not
trouble us with reflection.

I've only seen the first episode of the spectacle, though I sensed
I'd seen them all before the first frame. When "Band of Brothers" came
out anticipation couldn't be too dented by advance publicity. That's no
longer possible. Between YouTube, Facebook, blogged spoilers, reviews
more wordy than the screenplay and saturation marketing, the original is
old news before you see it. You can safely wait for the DVD collection
as a Father's Day present and miss nothing. Not that there's too much to
miss in a sequel that speaks at least as much about where we are as a
society today than it does about the war 65 years ago, beginning with
the motive behind "The Pacific."

When Maya Lin designed the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.,
veterans groups were upset that the memorial didn't pay homage to living
soldiers. So a sculpture was commissioned to show three fighting men
(one black, one Latino, one white) frozen next to the memorial. Then
Korean War veterans complained they had no memorial, so they got theirs
(an appropriately grim one showing a platoon of soldiers walking
unquestioningly in a winter of that war). Then the women and nurses of
Vietnam complained that they'd been ignored, and they got their
memorial.

"Pacific" was made the same way. Veterans of the Pacific war wanted
their "Band of Brothers," as if that series didn't speak a truth
universal enough about the entire war. But it did. The Pacific war was
not a sequel. It is here, with all the hand-me-down fatigues of war
sequels.

War worship aside, I'm also getting tired of our nation looking back
at World War II for validating heroics of brotherhood and egalitarian
selflessness on the battlefield when we can't muster the same sense of
national purpose today at home, where matters are slightly easier. The
wealthier the country has become as a whole, the more unequal and
fragmented in its parts. The more idealistic we are in our easy
nostalgias, which cost nothing, the more grasping and Darwinian we are
in our laws and businesses, which cost millions their chance at a decent
living. Equal opportunity and the dignity of those who have less, let
alone those who need more, is held in contempt.

"Band of Brothers" may have worked because it resonated with what
made the nation into what it is. "Pacific" works only in so far as it
reflects what the nation has become: a monument to itself more bloated
with pride than possibilities.