NY Times November 11, 2012 Television Review Not the Standard Textbook Tales By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
The title alone is easy to scoff at. “Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States” sounds almost like a parody, a sendup of that filmmaker’s love of bombast and right-wing conspiracy. This documentary series, beginning Monday on Showtime, isn’t a joke, though some may find it laughable. It’s deadly serious but also straightforward: a 10-part indictment of the United States that doesn’t pretend to be evenhanded. The series doesn’t focus extensively on many of the things the United States has done right, Mr. Stone and the historian Peter Kuznick write in the introduction to their similarly titled companion book. It is more concerned with focusing a spotlight on what America has done wrong. And that’s fair enough. There are plenty of documentaries that celebrate American exceptionalism. There should be room in today’s vast television landscape for a series that points out the exceptionable. And Mr. Stone, the director of “Platoon,” “Wall Street” and “J. F. K.,” is an all-too-eager cicerone: a dramatist of truth who tramples facts to spin alternative histories that may be grandiose and grotesque but can sometimes have a hint of grandeur. In this reworking of the past Henry A. Wallace, the progressive who was vice president during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third term, is puffed up as a greater hero than Roosevelt and Churchill. Stalin was bad, but Truman was just awful. It’s too easy to focus on what Mr. Stone does wrong; it’s also useful to focus a spotlight on what he gets right. And in all the overblown rhetoric and self-righteous hyperbole (Mr. Stone is his own narrator) accuracy is sometimes hard to find. The first four episodes made available to critics focus on World War II and the cold war, but the series, like the book, spans World War I to the Obama administration. President Obama, in Mr. Stone’s interpretation, isn’t really any better than Woodrow Wilson or George W. Bush: someone who took a bad situation and made it worse by selling out to “Wall Street funders with deep pockets.” But Mr. Stone’s most pressing obsession is the atomic bomb and the cold war, which in this telling are the roots of all American foreign policy and the answer to what seems to be Mr. Stone’s unspoken question: “Why was I in Vietnam?” Along the way he raises some valid points, notably that Americans too easily overlook the Soviet contribution in waging and winning World War II. Steven Spielberg and his ilk popularize the greatest generation and D-Day and other hard-won American victories, whereas the Russian film world has yet to produce a Slavic equivalent that could move an international audience. There is no “Band of Comrades” or “Saving Private Ivan.” What happened in Russia between 1941 and 1945 has mostly stayed in Russia. “Untold History” makes the point that while fewer than a half-million Americans died in World War II, Mr. Stone says that as many as 27 million Soviets, military and civilian, lost their lives, though he doesn’t factor in how many of those were killed by Stalin’s repression. Different historians put that figure at anywhere from under a million to over five million. Mr. Stone pays as much attention to Operation Barbarossa as Pearl Harbor, and shows archival material not just from Normandy and Iwo Jima but also the Battle of Stalingrad, the German invasion of Ukraine and other calamities of war. Almost all war documentaries find room for clips from Frank Capra movies and works of propaganda, and so does this one. Mr. Stone also includes a less familiar newsreel clip of Shostakovich after he composed the Seventh Symphony, which became a hymn to the Siege of Leningrad. Mr. Stone makes no mention of how Shostakovich was stifled, but he doesn’t overlook Stalin’s atrocities, including the 1940 massacre of Polish officers at Katyn. More often, however, he positions Stalin as a victim of British and American mistrust and double-dealing, a brutal tyrant forced to be his worst self because his Western allies didn’t do right by him. And Truman, in this iteration, is the bigger villain, a hick and a bully who — pushed by a cabal of right-wing, racist party hacks — unfairly took the place of Wallace on the 1944 Democratic ticket and who was persuaded by those same conspirators to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Their real motive was not to end the war and save American lives, Mr. Stone argues, but to deprive the Soviet Union of victory and its spoils in the Far East and to scare Stalin into submission. Mr. Stone is not the first to argue that Japan was ready to give up before Hiroshima, and that it was the Soviet invasion of Manchuria that caused Emperor Hirohito to surrender (though he didn’t surrender until after Nagasaki). Mr. Stone takes pride in calling his version of the past an “untold” story, but actually that same thesis was presented on American television in two documentaries on the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima, one a British-Japanese production on A&E and History, the other an ABC News special. Mr. Stone brings a more stentorian absolutism, leaving no room for doubt or nuance. He doesn’t allow for the idea that both versions could coexist, that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria was one of several factors, along with the two atomic bombings, that finally did the trick. He is among those true disbelievers who cannot accept that a course of action can be both unforgivably awful and apparently necessary, given the facts known at the time. Instead, he doubles down on his passionate indignation. “Despite his denials,” Mr. Stone intones about Truman, “his flawed and tragic decision to use the bomb against Japan was meant instead as a ruthless and deeply unnecessary warning that the United States could be unrestrained by humanitarian considerations in using these same bombs against the Soviet Union.” In this “Untold History” Hiroshima, the cold war, Vietnam, Iraq — none of that would have happened if Wallace had become president in 1945. What a wonderful world this would be. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
