THE VIETNAM WAR (2017): Déjà vu all over again

We're now on the back nine (hours) of the latest Ken Burns opus, The Vietnam War on PBS. Tonight's episode was on the first half of 1968. I was born in December 1968, so I was in utero for the assassinations of both MLK and RFK--but this terrible historical moment has only become more of a touchstone to me as I raise my own son.

My reverence and respect for my own parents, starting a family in the midst of all this? What a defiant piece of optimism. Decades later, I'm still cribbing notes, I kid you not.But I'm being reminded, watching this series, of the iconography of death that the Vietnam War brought home: frozen in time, burned in collective memory. From a Buddhist monk's protest self-immolation to a Viet Cong's street execution, to a student cut down at Kent State.

I remember, as an undergraduate, studying about how the war was the first to be directly piped into American living rooms via television, and how crucial that was in the domestic perception of what was happening half a world away in our names. Hearing Johnson complain about "damned media lies" tonight, you can't help but see the table being set for the putrid rhetorical assertions of "fake news" to which we're now regularly subjected by the current administration...

The first of The Vietnam War's ten episodes is called "Déjà vu," connecting France's experience as a colonial power with that of Americans trying to stem the falling dominoes. The film convincingly argues that JFK and the US forces made a fundamental misread of the situation as early as 1961: that this was about the Cold War rather than colonialism. That as a result, the whole enterprise was essentially lost as soon as it began--a long, slow, bloody tragedy.

To me, one of the most striking aspects of the series has been the soundtrack--along with usual suspects from the 1960s, there's an ominous, electronic, decidedly 21st Century howl cutting through the documentary as well. Trent Resnor, my friends, is all over this doc. Let that sink in. You know: Head like a hole, black as your soul, Nine Inch Nails Trent Resnor? Yep.


An absolutely inspired choice: the soundtrack refuses the reflex to assign the film (and the war) to the dustbin of history some half-century previous. This isn't only about THEN, it's about NOW. Our war in Afghanistan has now gone on longer than our war in Vietnam, with no end in sight. Svetlana Alexievich's Zinky Boys (1989), the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature's oral history on the Soviet war in Afghanistan, now feels that much more imperative to read...

Finally, watching The Vietnam War, I'm struck by how the rhetoric of the Right we hear from the 1960s seems at times to fit that of 2017 hand in glove. One example: a caller to WEEI this afternoon asserting athletes' protests during the National Anthem were "spitting in the eye of the military."

You can't make this stuff up. Head-shakingly incredible.

Or not. Innit.

Grant Hart (1961-2017), RIP

I opened up Facebook fast before squeezing in a car payment before leaving the house this morning... and read the news that Grant Hart had passed away overnight. Stunned--though apparently if I was paying more attention it really wasn't unexpected (see this blog post from The Current for more)...

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April 1987. Spring of senior year of high school. What still holds as the best week of non-festival concert-going: U2, X, and Hüsker Dü. The Hüskers played an all-ages show up in Phoenix--and if I remember right I have a flier somewhere with autographs. We didn't know it at the time, but this would be their last tour, in support of their final album Warehouse: Songs and Stories. Specifics are hazy, but I do remember being blown away...

Despite the electronic drum set, Picture Picture's set included a cover of "Celebrated Summer." That was a Bob Mould song, but I guess I sort of pulled a Grant Hart by singing while playing that one. Perhaps mercifully, I have no recording to document our reverence--but we were playing it as straight as we could (with Tama Techstars).



And I remember getting psyched to start college that fall in Minnesota: the land of Hüsker Dü and The Replacements, the land of Prince and the Suburbs and Soul Asylum (and even bands not yet on the radar, like Gear Daddies and Trip Shakespeare)... Going to school at Gustavus, on some level, was about gaining entry to a vibrant music scene of which I only vaguely had a clue.

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Grant Hart was only 56. I find myself sitting quietly this morning, at a coffee shop in Plymouth, sitting outside and streaming a playlist of his music. An early Hüsker song erupts into my ears, Hart pleading/shouting: "WHAT DO I WANT?!?! WHAT WILL MAKE ME HAPPY?!?! WHAT DO I WANT?!?! WHAT WILL MAKE ME HAPPY?!?!"

How can you not cry.

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Driving up this morning, I took a deep breath and told Loreta how happy I was that we sorted our wills and such last year. Because we all want to live to 100, but... On Tuesday, my students were introducing themselves in part by offering up their five-year plans--and mine is to see my son in 3rd grade. But... You just never know. Every day is precious, and unfortunately the universe offers up regular reminders.

Tell those you love that you love them, my friends.

What teaching Hitch taught me: five things

Let's pick up the thread in media res, and we'll eventually work our way backwards (and forwards)...

Summer I ended Monday--I had the opportunity to teach a Topics in Film course on Hitchcock at the BSU Cape Cod campus in Yarmouth as a hybrid. I tried to pitch it really broadly (no pre-requisites / no assumptions about film studies backgrounds going in) to attract not only Strat Comm students I advise there, but also potentially folks in other Cape-based programs (education, business). We had enough students for the class to run--barely!--but I had more students driving "over the bridge" than not, which was a real surprise... Regardless, I'm really glad the class ran... and here are a few things I learned in the process.

1. That Hitchcock/Truffaut book? It's as crucial as advertised. I've had a copy of this book on my shelf for a while now, but never had taken the chance to dive in. But now, having read it all twice this summer, I can affirm its usefulness in accessing the notion of Hitchcock as an auteur--not least of which because it was Truffaut who did this book as an object lesson in auteurism. Thanks to Arthur for alerting me to the documentary film centered on the book from 2015--talking heads from Peter Bogdanovich to Martin Scorsese supplement Hitch clips + fragments of original interviews that comprised the book.

2. Surprise vs. suspense: it matters. A key conversation in the book, a crucial distinction made. Surprise lasts seconds, suspense can last for reels. The former can be a thrill, but the latter is what keeps the engines humming. One of those OF COURSE / WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT head-slap moments, once you get your head around it.

3. MacGuffins: they don't matter.  Another thing that shines through in the book-length interview is the inventive use of "MacGuffins" as an excuse to move plots forward. Sometimes whole film projects would get waylaid by studio misunderstandings on this count--what are The 39 Steps, after all?!

4. Hitch is a "matrix figure" in film (history). Hitchcock made 53 feature films in his career, spanning from silent pictures in the 1920s to the beginning of the "New Hollywood" era in the mid-1970s. He was in Germany during the filming of Murnau's Der Letzte Mann (1924). He negotiated the coming of sound, Classical Hollywood and the Paramount decree, the coming of television, wide-screen and 3-D... And it's not just Hitchcock and his films: the study of Hitch, as our other textbook A Hitchcock Reader makes clear, reads like film historiography--from auteur studies to feminist film studies to industrial studies. Hitchcock becomes a way to think through film history itself. That's what John Orr meant when he referred to him as "a matrix figure," and why I think it worked so well to integrate Gomery's "four ways of doing film history" into the course's conversation.

5. You could do a whole lot worse than watch 25 Hitchcock films in a summer. This was an arbitrary number, but I've set a goal for myself to see about half of Hitch's total output this summer... With only five weeks, and it not being a full-bore film studies course, I think it's right that we kept ourselves to about ten required films this semester. I figured I wouldn't get to 25 by the end of the semester, but I did complete #18 last night (Spellbound, 1945)...