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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   36578 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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I'm not in a real position to argue for or against them as factual representations of the Vietnam war, I've never been in a fistfight in Vietnam let alone a war there.

But I can tell you that's what these guys told me. They experienced it, and they felt that the information from that experience could best be communicated to me by those fictional films. They felt it captured something about what it felt like. When you say the films are all very different: the experience of the war was different for different people. When you say they drew influence from other fiction: there's a universality to the experience, and the soldiers themselves would have viewed it through those narratives.

They experienced it, and they felt that the information from that experience could best be communicated to me by those fictional films. They felt it captured something about what it felt like.

I agree that the value of fiction is, among other things, in its success in conveying emotional truths. If "how it felt" is best conveyed with disturbing depictions of atrocious savagery told in flat matter-of-fact manner (like in Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"), then that's what the author does. Nobody need question whether this specific instance of atrocious savagery happened, or even whether this type or this level of atrocious savagery happened somewhere in this time-and-place. Nobody need question such thing, because that's besides the point, so long as the depiction serves to convey "how it felt".

The problem arises when fiction gets presented as historical fact. I would have a problem if a documentary on Vietnam intermixed historical footage with scenes from "Apocalypse Now", while Tim O'Brien reads excerpts from "The Things They Carried", especially if the intended audience is not familiar with either work or the author and thus is unaware that they are works of fiction.

This just feels very standard in a lot of documentaries.

Maybe you're right. I have drifted away from watching documentaries in the past decade, and even then my preference was for nature and science themes. It's possible that the standards of presenting evidence have significantly changed (deteriorated?) since then.

Ken Burns used to use actual letters and archive documents, and made it work without being scummy.

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