Tuesday, March 2, 2010

WHY WE FIGHT, EASTERN DIVISION: With apologies to fans of Richard Chamberlain and Alex Haley, the greatest miniseries of all time, hands down, please don't bother objecting, was Band of Brothers. I roll my eyes at baby-boomer self-congratulation and loathe reruns, yet I've watched this series in its entirety three times. So, as I've said here before, I'm pretty excited for The Pacific, Spielberg & Hanks's companion to BoB, focusing on the American campaign that fought leftward, rather than rightward. Set your DVRs for March 14.

BoB was largely about heroism and cameraderie, but it also did a good job showing some of the innumerable hellishnesses of war -- cold, confusion, the enormous consequences of both large and seemingly small decisions and mistakes, murderous egotism and bureacracy, painful or numbing attrition, the hollowing out of stout men; to say nothing of the ceaseless violence and inhumanity that they experienced or found. I do not mean to diminish the horrors of the European theater by saying that, from what I've read, the Pacific was far worse. Both sides of the Pacific campaign believed they were fighting a savage and subhuman enemy, something that should have been a mutual fallacy but that became, in some measure, a self-fulfilling truth. Because the Japanese were, for various reasons, unwilling or unable to consider surrender, the territory in play so discrete and small, and the Japanese defensive preparation time so great, the battles were more intense than in Europe. Because the battles were fought on volcanic rocks, not in forests and across farmland, it was impossible for the Americans in the Pacific to dig foxholes or find much decent cover. Because of the greater difficulty in crossing an ocean than in crossing a continent, the forces in the Pacific rotated off the front lines less frequently than did their European cohort. The casualty rate of junior officers -- college boys fresh out of officer training school, targeted by the Japanese because of their leadership and susceptible because of their inexperience -- who landed on Okinawa was ridiculous, something like 80%, if I remember correctly. BoB was brutal, but lyrically so; expect the same, but more so, in The Pacific.*

The emblem, or one emblem, of the brutality in the Pacific theater was the battle for Sugar Loaf Hill, a small mound of barren rock on Okinawa. It took the Marines a week and 2600 casualties to take Sugar Loaf.

Today, it takes a few minutes to climb the stairs up Sugar Loaf -- at least the part of it that's not a luxury-goods mall. For the trickle of veterans who have returned, that's got to be a surreal place.

*Steven and Tom -- if one of you wants to send me a screener, you know where to find me.

8 comments:

  1. I am equally excited for The Pacific. I have the primary source material, Robert <span>Leckie's "A Helmet for My Pillow" & Eugene Sledge's "With the Old Breed"</span> at the ready so I can read along as the series progresses.

    I was a bit concerned about the miniseries after hearing it stars Jon Seda, whose Homicide role still haunts me.  However, I'm giving both Seda and the series the benefit of the doubt due to a theory I'm calling the Reverse Matthew Settle:  I can't imagine someone watching Gossip Girl and thinking the guy who plays Sad 90s Dad would give a performance as wonderful as the one Settle gave as Captain Spiers.  Seda gets the added benefit of years of additional acting experience since he played Falsone.  Hopefully the casting people created an equally perfect marriage of character and actor this time around.

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  2. isaac_spaceman6:48 PM

    Yeah, Settle didn't even register for me when I saw him on Gossip Girl, which I watched for almost a year.  And then when I re-watched BoB afterward, I was like "ooooooh," worrying that it would color my enjoyment.  But when he took over for Foxhole and then made the dash in the village, across and back, chills.  Other than that Eugene guy with the shellshock and the hysterical blindness, I can't think of a bad performance in BoB.  Perconte was on a Peter Engel show -- USA High, for crying out loud.  If a filmed entertainment can feature a Peter Engel alum and still be transcendent (LA Confidential; BoB), its makers have earned your trust.

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  3. The Pathetic Earthling7:07 PM

    I'm looking forward to it.  I gotta figure out an HBO pricing package that makes sense.  Earthling finances are tighter than usual.

    Btw, Isaac, based on our discussion at the Cal-Maryland Game, I bought "Racing the Enemy" for my Dad and he's rather enjoying it -- but taking his sweet time, alas.  I'll be on it soon.

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  4. isaac_spaceman9:11 PM

    TPE -- you're welcome to watch it at our house, though I recognize that it may not be entirely practical for you to leave your house every Sunday night for ten weeks. 

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  5. The Pathetic Earthling11:01 PM

    Practical, no. But I might come over for the premier -- this would pretty much be the opposite of lashing me to the mast -- I'd knowingly tempt myself and force myself to get the HBO for the duration.

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  6. Andrew11:36 PM

    <span>I can't think of a bad performance in BoB.</span>

    Jimmy Fallon in a Jeep fleeing from Bastogne?

    All in all BoB was so excellent, I'm very excited for The Pacific-- so much so, that I'm subscribing to HBO for it. 

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  7. You make a good point about the trust having been earned. And although it took me far too long on my first viewing of Band of Brothers before I stopped saying "Hey, it's Lazzarini!" all the time, ultimately I got over it and was impressed with so much of the acting in BoB.

    I'm particularly excited to see the George Pelecanos-penned episode, and hope that The Pacific HBO message boards have a writer/cast participation similar to when BoB first aired in 2001. It was fascinating to learn how much the project meant to everyone involved; it definitely showed onscreen.

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  8. kevbo nobo7:32 AM

    The malling of Okinawa put to mind a perverse "interactive exibit" shoppers can experience, with mud, maggots and numbing despair.

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