u/Strength-InThe-Loins

My history: This movie was a pretty big hit way back in the day, so of course I was aware of it and didn’t dream of seeing it; my parents’ ban on PG-13 movies was absolute. The best I could do was enjoy the tie-in song, which was played on the radio probably once per hour throughout that summer;*1 and ask my more-worldly friends at summer camp for detailed descriptions of the plot.

Some months later, after the movie had been released on VHS (lol, remember those?), I went to a sleepover party at a friend’s house, and we watched this movie. By my count this was only the second PG-13 movie I’d ever seen all the way through. I suppose I expected to be shocked and appalled by all the amoral debauchery on the screen, but of course there was hardly any to be seen; just some ‘bad’ words and ‘obscene’ gestures that I’d heard and seen a thousand times. And the rest of the movie was quite fun and enjoyable.

That should have been the last hint I ever needed that the rules were stupid and I needn’t obey them, but the 15-year-old version of me was not especially quick on the uptake. I resolved to allow no further lapses in anti-movie discipline and moved on, not giving it much further thought.

It’s movies-in-the-park season again, and this movie was first up on the docket, so I figured why the hell not.

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And, well, it’s a pretty good movie. The goofy hijinks are great, and the movie manages to work in an awful lot of exposition and serious storytelling alongside them, which must be a lot harder than it looks. Living in New York City for the last 15 years adds a level of appreciation to some of the jokes; I especially like that the movie ends with blowing up one of Robert Moses’s most visible ‘achievements.’ 

But the main thing that sticks out to me is how powerfully OLD this movie looks. It’s very, very much a time capsule from its own very specific time, that brief overlap when the echoes of the Cold War overlapped with the beginnings of the internet age, and conspiracy theories involving aliens were all the rage. Something like it could be made nowadays, but only by people who are firmly stuck in the past,*2 and it would look as ridiculously anachronistic as the ‘modern’ business attire seen in the final scene, which somehow looks more dated than the much-older styles from the rest of the movie.

We’re fast approaching a time when no one will remember the world that this movie came from: when having CGI onscreen for about five total minutes was all it took for a movie to seem ‘special-effects-heavy,’ the Twin Towers still stood, 4^(th) of July weekend felt incomplete without a Will-Smith-starring blockbuster coming out, Smith himself was thought of as a credible charismatic leading man rather than a supremely creepy weirdo, a tentpole summer movie could exist without anyone knowing it was based on a comic book,*3 and having a big gross bug hit your windshield was a common and relatable experience.

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*1 My parents also forbade modern pop music on the radio, but that rule was much easier to break.

*2 Oh, hi, Steven Spielberg, didn’t see you there. What’s that you say? You made a conspiracy-minded movie about aliens secretly visiting Earth? Yes, I know, it’s called Close Encounters of the Third Kind and it’s been very famous for close to 50 years. Disclosure Day? What’s that?

*3 Maybe I’m just projecting my ignorance, but until the opening credits of this latest viewing I had no idea that this movie was based on anything.

This is a bike lane under construction on Grand Concourse between Kingsbridge and Fordham. I'm a bit concerned, because a bike lane very similar to this one, and just a few blocks away, opened about 3 years ago, and was immediately inundated and rendered useless by hundreds of illegally-parked cars, as I documented at the time:

https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/11awldp/counting_cars_in_the_bike_lane_day_25_the_abyss/

That earlier one had a mountable curb, which was not ideal, so I'm very glad to see this new bike lane having a more serious defense. It probably won't help, but at least they're trying.

In any case, a separated bike lane on the left side of the street is better than painted sharrows between the travel lane and the parking lane that was here before.

Part 1

Part 3

Last year I rewatched Band of Brothers, hoping to post about it for the 80^(th) anniversary of V-E Day. I didn’t quite make that deadline; I posted the following on Memorial Day, 2025:

My ‘plan’ was to watch the whole series and have my full thoughts on it ready to publish by May 8 (the 80^(th) anniversary of V-E Day), but once again my reach exceeded my grasp; on the day itself, I was still two episodes short. I did manage to publish the preamble on May 8, and finish watching the show on May 9 (which in some jurisdictions is celebrated as the day the Nazis surrendered; the discrepancy has something to do with time-zone differences that caused the near-simultaneous surrender announcements to be heard on different dates on different home fronts, plus, I assume, a dash of Cold War oppositionism), and maybe two out of three isn’t all that bad, especially if I get this joint out into the world by Memorial Day.

And of course I have thoughts. Too many thoughts.

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Is this an anti-war show? I’m inclined to think so. For many years the conventional wisdom was that war movies could never be anti-war, because they always made combat look exciting. That was more or less solved by the Vietnam movies of the 1980s, which generally made combat look terrifying rather than exciting. That key innovation, and the fall of wartime media censorship in general, and a growing public understanding of the consequences of war, have shifted things to the point that I wonder if it’s even possible anymore for a show to be pro-war without being flagrantly dishonest about what war is.

So I see a lot of anti-war and anti-military sentiment in this portrayal of military warriors, perhaps more than the showrunners actually intended, perhaps for the above reasons, or maybe just due to some combination of my own (powerfully negative) military experience and being old enough that I’m no longer hormonally equipped to see any point in combat anymore. But I suppose people with other mindsets might come away thinking that this is a positive portrayal not just of military warriors, but of the military and war in general. (My understanding is that this view of it is extremely common.)

And that’s an interpretation I reject, not just because I disagree with it objectively (war is bullshit, full stop), but because I don’t think this show really casts war or the military in an especially positive light. It views certain involved individuals very positively, but that’s really not the same thing.*1

If anything, it makes war and the military look worse: if Dick Winters and Bill Guarnere are really as awesome as the show says, we should despise the war and the Army all the more for wasting their time and nearly destroying them. And we definitely shouldn’t credit the war or the Army for making them so awesome; the show makes it abundantly clear that they were that awesome going into the Army, and that a whole lot of less-awesome people (from slightly below the Winters/Guarnere level all the way down to miserable pieces of shit) passed through the Army without really improving at all.

And so it is that I see this show as a searing indictment of the Army, militaries in general, and the whole practice of war. They do not improve people, and their maw-like appetite for exploiting and consuming good people serves no good purpose.

And that’s the absolutely most pro-war take I’m willing to read into this show, and it’s only possible by taking the show absolutely on its own terms, that is, accepting its insistence on focusing heavily on the best the Army has to offer. For every Winters who is effortlessly, automatically awesome, there’s a deranged piece of shit like Colonel Sink, an incompetent piece of shit like Lieutenant Dike, a deranged AND incompetent piece of shit like Captain Sobol, and a whole lot of guys who just show up to do their jobs. Numbskulls/assholes/zeroes well outnumber the awesome heroes, and the near-replacement-level guys well outnumber all of them, and yet we spend the most time with the heroes and are led to believe that they have much greater influence than they actually do. If the show gave proportional representation to all the different personality types and competence levels that exist in an army, that army would come off looking far, far worse than this one does in this show.

There’s also a hellacious survivorship bias at work; this show is made about (and, I would argue, for) the survivors, which badly misrepresents what really happened. It doesn’t tell the story of a 120-man company that loses some people, replaces them, loses some more (including a lot of the replacements), and so on until only like ten of the original group are still around at the end; it tells the story of like five of those final-surviving ten, and pretty much ignores the hundreds that missed the beginning or the end or both.

This is a kind of inevitable weakness of telling the story decades after the fact; the survivors are the only people left to speak, and they (understandably) have forgotten or don’t want to remember the dead, and so the story just Omega Sanctions the dead out of existence. I’d much rather have the story told as if we don’t know from the beginning who will survive, to give a better sense of the unpredictability of war and the shock and horror of suddenly losing someone who, until a minute ago, was just as alive and full of potential as anyone else.*2

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The show makes other questionable choices in its focus. It spends only a single episode on the training the troops went through before entering combat, even though in real life the training took about twice as long as their whole combat tour. That one episode has three main characters, and two of them are out of Easy Company by the episode’s end (and the third is out of it not long after), which is very odd for a show that claims to be the story of the men of Easy Company.

The second episode focuses entirely on a guy that was never mentioned in the first episode, which sure is a choice. The episode is a powerful story that does a great job of showing just how horrible combat can be, but wouldn’t it have had even more impact if the show had given us even one goddamn clue about this guy’s existence before building the show’s most important episode around him?*3

I didn’t keep really close track, but there must be quite a few pairs of major characters that we never see interact with each other.*4

This deepens the sense that the show really isn’t about Easy Company as its members experienced it at the time, but is just a random collection of events as remembered by whoever happened to still be alive in 2001.

I don’t suppose much of anyone else was bothered by this, but I was annoyed by how little the show tells us about how the company actually works. If an airborne company is anything like the Marine infantry company I ‘served’ in (and why wouldn’t it be?), the company should have three or four platoons, each with its own commander, a platoon sergeant, and three squad leaders, all of which sit above the nameless rabble of ‘non-rates’ that make up the majority. It’s clear enough that Winters starts out as a platoon commander under company commander Captain Sobol, and that Buck Compton and Bill Guarnere do some time as a platoon commander and a platoon sergeant, respectively, and members of Second Platoon joke about how many platoon commanders they’ve gone through,*5

but that’s about all we ever find out about who’s in what job. It’s not even stated how many platoons there are (is it three, or four? Or some other number?), or if they’re all rifle platoons or if there’s a dedicated weapons platoon.*6  Much is made of Lipton becoming the company’s first sergeant, but there’s no mention of whoever held this (extremely influential) job before him.

This vexes me, because in my experience it matters tremendously which position one has, and who holds the positions above one, and so everyone is always acutely aware of who’s what. That the show hardly ever mentions these positions, and doesn’t seem to know or care what any of them mean, is a very weird omission.

Much of this isn’t necessarily the show’s fault; as the CinemaSins guy often says, I’m sinning reality. The general policy of the US military throughout WW2 and for the decades since has been to switch people around essentially at random, allowing little opportunity for people to get to know each other. I’ll rant about this at much greater length a little later, but for now suffice it to say that this is as shitty a way to follow characters through a story as it is to run an actual army in real life.

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Those large structural matters aside, there are a great many smaller-scale matters that caught my eye.

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Firstly, I owe an apology (I’m not sure to whom) about Eion Bailey. I cited him as a character who appeared out of nowhere to be the main character of a single episode, only to never be seen again, but that was totally wrong. We see him get wounded (I love how self-disappointed he is about that), and he hangs around for quite a while after he comes back from the hospital. One could even argue that he’s the show’s main character (which makes it rather strange that we don’t see him in the first episode, despite it being established later that he was there the whole time). He’s the guy ranting about Ford and General Motors! I really don’t know how I managed to misremember him so.

The conflicts he has with other characters sure are interesting. They dislike each other, but it’s not just that; they’re very different kinds of people. Webster (the Eion Bailey character) is a blue-blood college boy who follows rules and doesn’t let his emotions get the better of him; the working-class guys uh, aren’t like that. I’m much more of a Webster than a Liebgott, and Eion Bailey is such a surpassingly beautiful human being that it’s difficult to imagine him being on the wrong side of anything, so of course I sympathize with Webster. But maybe that’s not all just personal bias; Webster sure does seem happier and more resilient than the others,*7 and he thinks about higher-level things like the national economy that they don’t, and he at least gives lip service to opposing the cold-blooded murder that Liebgott insists on committing, and people that have an actual choice in the matter seem to prefer the Webster lifestyle to the Liebgott one, so…maybe blue-bloods should run the world? Or maybe we should all be blue-bloods?

A key sticking point in the contrast between classes is the access to education. This was back when there were no merit-based scholarships or GI Bill, so the inaccessibility of college was just a foregone conclusion for a vast swathe of the US population (an utterly unrelatable situation nowadays, /s). So you see now I’m the one living in two different pasts: the pre-WW2 world in which college was a birthright for a vanishingly small slice of the population; and my own high-school and college years (and the post-WW2 world in general, from the 50s to ca. 2000), when college was assumed to be accessible to all. We’ve moved into a third age, with the worst aspects of the previous two: college is once again inaccessible to most as in the 1930s, but as in the 1990s it’s still mandatory for anyone who wants to ever make a decent living.

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Other matters abound. The first is, of course, related to racism.*8 You might object that this is not a story about racism, and I would agree to a certain extent: the main characters are all White Americans,*9 and the very few non-White characters are so minor that racial issues do not really come up at all, so in that sense this story is not about race.

But on a deeper level, I feel we have to ask why the main cast is so White that racial issues are never mentioned, and deal with the obvious answer: during WW2 and for decades before, the US military officially and explicitly banned Black American troops from combat units. And so by not being about race (because it doesn’t have Black characters), this show actually is about race (because of why it doesn’t have Black characters).

This is of course the whole point of segregation: relegate certain people to the margins, make it feasible to live one’s entire life without acknowledging them, and people might start to doubt that they exist at all. Because they’re already written out of contemporary life, it becomes so easy to write them out of history that the writers of this show might plausibly claim to have done it by accident.

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The second is another hobby-horse of mine, the destruction and horror that automobiles have wrought on American life. The Western Front of World War 2 was no refuge: with all the combat deaths and wounds we see and hear about, it’s still worth noting that cars took their toll in blood then and there just as they have at all other places and times. Guarnere’s first hospital stay was due to joyriding, not combat; Tom Hardy’s character is killed in an acutely preventable Jeep crash, not by enemy action; Shifty Powers gets through the whole war without a scratch on him, but can’t make it to his boat home without suffering grievous injuries in a car crash; and George Patton, easily arguable as the greatest American general of the war, was cut down in a car crash months after the war ended.

It’s a grim fact that the war killed about 400,000 Americans, but what’s much grimmer to my mind is that the war lasted only four years, and it only takes car-crash deaths about 10 years to equal that death toll, and they’ve been doing it every ten years since the war ended (and for quite a few years before; cars have killed at least 20,000 Americans every year since 1924, and last dipped under 30,000 during the war).

The death toll of the entire US war effort (around 400,000 killed) is a grim statistic, but it looks a good deal less impressively horrible when one considers that the war lasted 4 years, and cars have killed a similar number of Americans every 10 years or so since the war ended.

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Car-crash trauma is one thing, but of course there’s plenty of combat trauma to go around. This is something that I feel like media about violence in general pretty consistently undersells: action heroes often wade through knee-deep blood and shake it off like it’s just another Tuesday, but any violent incident is pretty likely to be a life-defining (if not life-ending) event for anyone involved. Public awareness of PTSD has grown a lot over the last couple of decades, but I think we still underrate just how deep the psychological scars of battle can go.

This is most effectively shown by the interview in the Bastogne episode: the guy who, in response to any discomfort he’s ever experienced, reasons that “At least I’m not in Bastogne” is a permanently broken man, and the war broke him.

Direct combat trauma aside, there’s still the fact that all of these guys were suddenly forced to spend years away from whatever they had going on. That alone had an inestimable effect on everything that came next (from Nixon’s divorce to the life plans of multiple other soldiers), and that’s before we even get to the horrors they saw, friends they made and lost, and so on. Not a single one of these guys was ever the same again for even one minute after all that.

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Speaking of Hardy, he was one of a great many familiar faces to pass through this show, some of which escaped my notice back in 2008. David Schwimmer, of course, was inescapable (and I remain enormously impressed by his performance as Captain Sobol; it takes a lot of work for an actor to make us hate anyone as much as I hate Sobol). Donnie Wahlberg had been famous before, but was pretty washed up by 2001. Ron Livingston and Damian Lewis became famous later on, but were still pretty new and obscure. And then there’s a cavalcade of bit parts from the damnedest collection of not-yet-famous players: Michael Fassbender, Simon Pegg, James McAvoy, JIMMY FALLON?!?!?*10,  Jamie Bamber, Tom Hardy, and of course Neal McDonough, king of the That Guys.

I was surprised and confused to see McAvoy appear when he did, because for some reason I’d spent years misremembering that Tom Hardy had played that role. I don’t know why I would have thought this; they don’t look alike or anything, and I’m not sure that I had ever even heard of Tom Hardy back in 2008. I chalked it up to a very weird brain-fart, and then was additionally surprised (and somewhat validated) to see that Hardy actually was in this show, albeit several episodes later and playing a totally different character (and looking terrifyingly young, almost as incongruously as Michael Caine and Ian McShane in 1969’s The Battle of Britain.

And that wasn’t even the end of it; in a supremely weird chain of misremembering roles by the transitive property, we first see Hardy boning a very blonde local; I had remembered James Madio’s character doing that, and also delivering the rant about how the forest around Berchtesgaden really isn’t much like Bastogne, but no, it’s Discount Gary Cole that does that.

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Speaking of Nixon (I was, a while back), he’s a really interesting, tragic figure. He’s badly beaten down by the stress of the war and the shock of the divorce, but he was pretty clearly a high-functioning (at best) alcoholic even before all that. My guess is that this is a clear case of the well-known tendency of previously-traumatized people to be more sensitive to further trauma; he’s obviously a poor little rich boy who’s gone through some of the usual abuses that upper-class life inflicts on its children, and that makes him less able to deal with the stresses of war.

The big tell of how far gone he is at his lowest is when he breaks into a liquor store to steal only one bottle; as addicts often do, he’ll do anything for the high he’s chasing, and can’t really think about anything else beyond it, not even the next high after that.

I’m glad he finally got a happy ending, even if it had to wait through another decade of fucking up after the war.

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And speaking of the abuses of high social station, let’s talk about the local Nazis for a moment. In the concentration-camp episode they are upset, to some extent understandably: they were already on the losing side of an apocalyptic war, and now they’re being rousted out of their homes to perform heavy labor amidst unspeakable horror. But I think their upset goes deeper than that, though maybe I’m just projecting onto them what I’ve seen from Trump supporters, their modern-day equivalents. They seem more resentful than horrified, as if the real problem isn’t that they’re being forced to bury the dead, or even that so many people have died, but that these dead Jews ever had the audacity to exist at all and then die in a way that was so personally inconvenient for the local Nazis. The attitude seems to be “Yes, we’re ecstatically pro-genocide, and that’s only a problem because you keep forcing us to acknowledge it! We could all be having a nice time if you’d just stop calling our attention to the merciless and inhuman policies we enthusiastically support!”

I’d like to think that being forced to confront the horror of their desires deprogrammed these Nazis, much as I’d like to think that today’s big viral social-media burn and/or the ongoing self-inflicted economic collapse will deprogram Trump supporters, but it doesn’t work like that; on one hand, they might not even see ‘dead Jews’ as a bad thing at all (much like so many of the modern sort see ‘innocent people illegally shipped off to foreign death camps’ as a worthy goal in and of itself, not even as any kind of necessary evil); on another hand you can’t reason or even force a person out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, as evidenced by the fact that Trump won even a single vote at any point after everyone should have known better,*11 and that Nazism was widely regarded in Germany as “a good idea, badly executed” until well into the 1960s. Society progresses one funeral at a time; most of the people that supported Hitler never really got over him and never improved their views; the views of the average German only improved when the pro-Hitler ones died off and were replaced by people who hadn’t lived through the Nazi period, hadn’t bought into or benefited from Nazism, and didn’t have any personal stake in defending any of the awful decisions anyone had made during that time.

The baker in that same episode shows a different kind of privilege-induced mental illness; an invading army has captured his hometown and seized his inventory (to feed his neighbors, who might drop dead of starvation at any moment, no less), and he dares to yell at them? Who the hell does he think he is?

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We’d all like to think we’re made of better stuff than that, but I suspect we’re not. The Americans of the show look down their noses at the ‘barbarous’ Europeans for shunning ‘horizontal collaborators,’ running concentration camps, and murdering prisoners, and yet who are they to feel so superior? They never had to think about the choices women have to make when war comes to their doorstep, because they’re not women, and in any case no American woman had needed to make that choice within the last 80 years. The US spent decades establishing and running concentration camps for unpopular and oppressed ethnic minorities of its own.*12 The troops act impressed, rather than shocked, when their own officer is rumored to have murdered a bunch of prisoners, and they most definitely do murder some guy on a very weak suspicion that he deserved it. And of course they’re not at all shy about straight-up stealing everything they can get their hands on from whoever happens to get in their way.

It’s quite telling that the concentration-camp episode opens with an interview that dwells heavily on how much the US soldiers and the Nazi troops had in common, and how much they might have sympathized with each other if they hadn’t had to fight. At first I thought it was just incredibly awkward for that particular sentiment to immediately precede the discovery of the full depth of Nazi horribleness, but now I think it was sneakily pretty clever: we all have more in common than we know, or would want to admit, with the worst people in history.

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WW2 is often cited as the peak of American masculinity, and I’ve long found it interesting how our views on (and the actual nature of) American masculinity have changed since then. Big fans of toxic masculinity will often cite ‘leadership styles’ similar to Captain Sobol’s as ideal, and use that to justify similar abuse and toxicity. The show does some good work in pointing out that such abuse and toxicity was not ideal, back then or at any other time; and in showing more-compassionate alternatives.

It’s not all good, though; even after Sobol is gotten rid of, the unit still has its fair share of assholes. Most prominent among these is the guy that yells at James McAvoy for not being around on D-Day, as if there’s any way McAvoy could have helped that. That scene proves that guy is shitty (and he’s kind enough to confirm it for us several episodes later by getting drunk on duty at a time when it’s especially important for him to stay sharp), but for my money the real asshole in that scene is Bull, who witnesses the full measure of abuse McAvoy has to endure, all the while possessing key information (the other asshole also missed D-Day) that he chooses to do nothing with until the exact instant that it’s too late to do anyone any good.

It’s also rather odd that a show about brotherhood should devote so much time in one of its climactic episodes to an unhinged rant by one longtime member about how much he hates all the newer members. I don’t doubt that people really felt that way, but if that’s the case maybe don’t call the show Band of Brothers? Maybe something more like Band of Assholes Who Mostly Hate Each Other?*13

If there’s one place where we’d expect toxic masculinity and milder forms of macho posturing to have no sway at all, it would be in a life-or-death situation where lives were unmistakably saved. Surely even the world’s most toxically insecure bully could set their pathologies aside for one second to acknowledge that someone else stepped in to save them from certain death, right? Well, I don’t know if we can or should expect that, but the men of Easy Company (and the entire 101^(st) Division) clearly and unanimously fail that test. Patton’s army saved their asses at Bastogne, and (as the show goes well out of its way to point out) not a damn single one of them ever admitted that they needed rescue. In later episodes the airborne troopers seem more angry at Patton for daring to rescue them than they are at the Nazis that were trying to kill them. One imagines that whoever was last to be added to that giant pile of dead bodies outside the church would have felt quite differently about it.

(to be continued…)

 

*1 This is something that painfully many Americans simply refused to understand during debates about the Iraq War: they loudly admired the troops (or claimed to), and conflated that admiration with approval of the war effort, and thus concluded (ludicrously) that any desire to end the war was somehow a betrayal and an insult to those same troops. It falls apart if you think about it for one second: admiring a person makes you want him to suffer great hardship and maybe die violently? Really? But of course they never did think about it for one second, because thinking for even one second is just not what these people do.

*2 Lieutenant Meehan, for example, should have been a major character in episode 1 and the first few minutes of episode 2. The audience should have been led to regard him as someone who would remain important for the duration, so his sudden death would come as a shock, and his later absence would feel like a real loss. But the showrunners knew he wouldn’t be around for long, so they didn’t bother establishing him, and so his death means next to nothing, and this allows us to think that wartime deaths typically mean next to nothing.

*3 That episode also contains the show’s one big historical error: the show reports that that main character never really recovered from his wounds, and died a few years after the war, when in fact he made a full recovery and stayed alive and in the Army for another 23 years. You’d think a band of brothers would all keep better track of each other, but oh well.

*4 Off the dome, Nixon and pretty much anyone but Winters. There’s the edelweiss scene, but I’m pretty sure that’s the only one where he talks to enlisted men at all.

*5 Seven, if I remember correctly, but of course we only see maybe three of them.

*6 We see and hear about mortars, machine guns, and bazookas, but do those heavier weapons have their own platoon, as they would in the Marine Corps, or are they integrated into the rifle platoons?

*7 and Spiers and Winters, who have very Webster-esque backgrounds, also seem like the guys who handle the whole thing best; Spiers in particular seems to put his education to very good use what with his deeply insightful ‘you think you’re still alive’ speech and strategic ambiguity about massacring the prisoners.

*8 It’s my longstanding contention that racism is THE issue in US history, inseparable from pretty much anything that’s ever happened here or under our influence, and the only way to change this situation is to finally actually implement the equality we (mostly falsely) claim as a core value.

*9 Some of them only in retrospect; it wasn’t until the 1960s that Americans of Italian, Jewish, or Eastern European descent were considered fully White, so a lot of this show’s characters would not have been considered White (by themselves or anyone else) at the time, however much modern eyes will see them as fitting perfectly into the monochrome.

*10 He was by far my favorite DiCaprio-pointing meme moment, not because I like Jimmy Fallon at all (I very much don’t), but just because him showing up out of nowhere was just so bizarre and delightfully unexpected.

*11  that is, in 2024, when it was abundantly clear that he was even more hateful and inept than ever before; or 2020, when we’d all had four years of incontrovertible evidence of his absolute unfitness for office; or 2016, when the focus of his campaign seemed to be an effort to appear as loathsome as possible; or 2012, when he created an entire political career out of thin air for the sole purpose of airing his absurd racist fantasies to the world; or even like 1992 or whenever it was that his casinos started going bankrupt, thus exposing him as one of the least-competent human beings to ever walk the earth.

*12 It’s true that during WW2 we didn’t get around to exterminating them, but I don’t think we deserve all that much credit for that; we certainly did our fair share of extermination in the decades prior to WW2 (which may have been an important inspiration behind the exterminations the Nazis did); and we certainly also did everything short of extermination: we forced people from their homes, locked them up, and spent decades in legal actions (some still successful to this day) to avoid paying any restitution. And if the war had gone as badly for the Americans as it did for the Nazis, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to imagine a US-based ‘final solution to the Japanese-American question.’

*13Perhaps I should check my privilege: I have brothers, and have mostly gotten along with them pretty well (I think I only ever did one I-hate-you rant, and in my defense I was like ten years old), so I think of ‘brothers’ and ‘assholes who mostly hate each other’ as close to polar opposites. I realize that this experience of brotherhood might be less common than I assume.

Part 2

Part 3

Last year I rewatched Band of Brothers for the 80^(th) anniversary of V-E Day. Here’s what I wrote at the time, which I posted at r/lookbackinanger:

My history: Television was forbidden to me in my childhood, cable television even more so (except for an annual week I got to spend at my grandparents’ house), premium cable even more so than that (even my grandparents didn’t have it). When this show premiered, I was more than a month into US Marine Corps boot camp, completely cut off from any outside media apart from handwritten letters from home.*1

And yet I was aware of this show in the moment, because even Marine Corps boot camps have dentist’s offices, and those dentist’s offices have waiting rooms, and those waiting rooms have TVs that are always on and always showing some 24-hour news channel or other, where programs such as Band of Brothers are heavily advertised.*2 Life, ah, finds a way.

My first main response to it was annoyance; being a recruit in Marine Corps boot camp, I was heavily steeped in Marine Corps propaganda, which identified the Marine Corps as a ‘band of brothers,’ so I felt it was a personal and institutional affront for the Army Airborne to appropriate that name.*3 My second response to it was to note that the GIs were wearing baggy pants, which seemed odd to me; it had been my understanding that from the dawn of humanity, pants had always been skin-tight as in the 1970s, until 1992 when baggy pants were invented and instantly took over the world. In any case, it seemed odd to me that clothing from ~60 years earlier would look more ‘modern’ to me than clothing that was 20-40 years newer.

In 2004 I started college and had my first sustained unfettered access to TV, and watched a frankly unhealthy amount of it. I caught a few minutes of this show being rerun on TNT or something; I remember a narrator describing his resolution to live the rest of his life in piece while an artillery barrage or something plays out on screen, and a Cajun medic advising his snowbound charges to keep their socks dry and somehow communicating with French-speaking locals.*4

I spent the winter of 2008-09 on active duty on various Marine bases in California, during which I had a LOT of free time to watch DVDs (lol, remember those?), so at some point I watched all of Band of Brothers. I wasn’t impressed with its macro-structure (or lack thereof); there was a through-line of sorts with the company in general and certain characters, but there were whole episodes devoted to seemingly random soldiers*5 we’d never seen before and didn’t see again. This didn’t seem like an approach anyone would have chosen to tell a story that emphasizes camaraderie, so I assumed that rather than telling the stories of the most important or interesting people or relationships involved, the show had simply told the stories of whoever happened to still be alive and willing to be interviewed when the show was made.

One of the interview segments sticks out in memory: the veteran is talking about the general public attitude about the war and the draft; both were very popular, and he mentions that two men from his hometown who were found unfit for military duty promptly killed themselves out of shame, and this shows what a different time it was. Just the sort of thing you’d expect a WW2 vet to think and say in the 1960s, when the Vietnam War was unpopular and all kinds of people were doing everything they could to dodge the draft. Except that he said it around the year 2000, decades after all of that, and so I had the surpassingly strange experience of realizing that this guy wasn’t just stuck in the past (as one would expect any person his age to be), but was actually stuck in two different pasts, the WW2 period and the 1960s, both of which were unrecognizably different from and irrelevant to the time he was actually living in.

Another moment that stuck out to me was when someone or other is yelling at a bunch of surrendering Nazis for wasting everyone’s time with a pointless war, rebuking their stupidity for ever thinking they could have beaten Ford and General Motors. This made me laugh out loud in late 2008, when Ford and General Motors were going bankrupt and had to go begging the US federal government for tens of billions of dollars in handouts just so they could keep the lights on.

That aside, it was very well-made*6 and true to life,*7 which wasn’t really a plus in my book; what I wanted from my entertainment was escape from the depressing, terrifying, and all-around shitty reality I was living in, which of course this show didn’t provide. I appreciated its general anti-war flavor (most especially when it decisively deflates its biggest moments of triumph with sudden realizations that war sucks for everyone and we should probably just never do it*8), and really really appreciated its explicit observation that military life just sucks and a lot of military people are just moronic, incompetent, cruel, bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling. (I was surprised and enormously impressed with David Schwimmer’s performance as just such a character, but the character is so unpleasant that I didn’t really enjoy watching him, no matter how well Schwimmer played him.)

Living in my own ‘band of brothers’ where the general mood was well-deserved mutual contempt of each against all, ineffectually ‘preparing’*9 for a stupid and pointless ‘war’ that my side stood zero chance of winning (we never even came up with a clear idea of what victory would even look like!), I was additionally bummed out by envy. The show’s characters had actually intensive experiences that challenged them and validated their manhood, which is exactly what I’d always wanted and figured I’d get from the military (and of course in that I ended up terribly disappointed). They also had something meaningful to do, which was something else that I found sorely lacking in my military ‘service.’ I felt like all the danger and trauma they lived through might have been a price worth paying for that. And, per the show’s title, they built positive relationships that lasted for decades after, which was a vast improvement over my own situation of being forced to spend inordinate time with people who I (at best) could take or leave, and in any case couldn’t wait to never see again.

For the last few months, clips from the show have kept showing up on my YouTube feed for some reason (obviously because I keep clicking on them, but I do wonder why the first one came up), and the 80^(th) anniversary of V-E Day is right around the corner (literally today if, for the first time in my life, I’ve scheduled something far in advance and then actually followed through on it), so I figure the time is right to give this show another go.

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*1 My entire six-platoon training company may have been some of the last people in the world to hear about 9/11 (about ten hours after the event, and, as it happened, two days after this show’s premiere), because our contact with the outside world was just that limited.

*2 I say ‘heavily advertised’ as if I saw these ads repeatedly, but I’m probably basing this entire memory on a single 30-second ad that I saw once during a single dentist appointment. Media content expands to fill the space available, and pretty much all of my space was available.

*3 I was too ignorant to know where the term really came from and that it didn’t actually belong to any particular segment of the US military (it’s from Shakespeare and predates not only the United States, but very nearly the entirety of English colonization in the Americas). I was also too much of a prude to really appreciate the much better (and possibly historically accurate!) nickname for the Marine Corps, ‘a gun club started in a bar.’ ‘Band of brothers’ wins only on brevity.

I was further confused by the Band in question being called ‘Easy Company,’ when by the military nomenclature I was learning it clearly should have been called ‘Echo Company.’ I may have chalked that up to yet another interservice culture clash, but nowadays I ascribe it to a generational difference. ‘Echo’ represents the letter E in the NATO phonetic alphabet, but of course this was before NATO and everything was different.

*4 it being an article of faith among English speakers that the French and the Cajuns are even more divided by their common language than the English and the Americans.

*5 Most egregiously Eion Bailey’s character, who just appears out of nowhere to be the main character for a whole episode (during which I kept asking myself who he was and where he’d been in the earlier episodes and if I’d somehow missed the part where he was introduced), and then more or less disappearing for the rest of the series.

*6 You could make a pretty strong case that this show was the actual start of the Prestige TV wave that engulfed the Zeroes and Teens and shows no signs of subsiding; it was the highest-budget TV season to date, and may have been just the thing needed to convince TV executives that Babylon 5 and The Sopranos hadn’t been flukes, and that the future of television lay in shorter series that had real structure, rather than in open-ended series that kept rehashing the same vibes indefinitely until enough people stopped watching.

*7 “War never changes” is a dirty, dirty lie, but however much war has changed over human history, the general culture of the US military apparently changed very little between the 1940s and 2008.

*8 Those deflationary moments, if you’re curious: shortly after the wildly successful Normandy landing, with Allied troops firmly in control of the shore and advancing into Nazi territory, Our Heroes enjoy this moment of triumph by mocking some Nazi POWs they’ve rounded up, with one US soldier play-acting as a gravelly-voiced general asking them “Where you from, son?” To everyone’s astonishment, a Nazi soldier replies, in bog-standard American English, with the name of an American city, and then explains that his German parents immigrated to the US before he was born, and then moved back to Germany (US-born children in tow) when Hitler called for the German diaspora to come home and build a new and glorious Germany, and it’s immediately clear that everyone present (including the POW himself) understands just how totally fucked this guy is and how it really didn’t have to come to this.

Months later, with the war all but won and the US troops advancing unopposed through legions of surrendering Nazis, they ‘celebrate’ their final triumph by…stumbling into a concentration camp, still full of walking corpses, where the overall mood is, shall we say, rather less ecstatic.

*9 By far the most common official activity of this period of ‘intensive training’ was waiting for new orders to be announced, that is, just lying around doing nothing. I didn’t keep close track, but to me it sure felt like the majority of days contained exactly zero scheduled activities of any kind, and many of the scheduled activities we did have were things like ‘stand in line for three hours waiting to spend fifteen seconds filling out some bullshit paperwork, then wait three more hours for everyone behind you to do the same, and that’s your day’s work.’ That was all stupid and depressing enough, but all the higher-ranking people wanted to treat everything with the same desperate intensity that they imagined would be apropos for actual combat. This led to a level of cognitive dissonance that amounts to constant psychological torture.