i. Reading Looking For The Good War has, among many other things, I think really helped me to clarify and articulate what I find so disquieting about "Points" as an episode. (Which is not all of it! There are certainly plenty of scenes that I find fascinating and/or enjoyable to watch.) But:
"It is much easier to tell a sentimental war story with a happy ending, in which valor eclipses causes and reconciliation triumphs over everything--a comedy, in other words--than it is to tell another, unsentimental kind of story." (page 89)
This is what it is, exactly--"in which valor eclipses causes and reconciliation triumphs over everything" could more or less be the logline of "Points." This is most egregiously evident to me in the scene of Nazi general's surrender, but the scene where Winters tells the Nazi officer to keep his sidearm is also I think highly indicative of this drive towards reconciliation, however rotten, above all else. And Samet articulates that wonderfully, and articulates as well the cost of this type of narrative:
"Yet sentimentality does more than shape the way we commemorate wars. It informs all those cultural and sociological attitudes in the shadow of which wartime and postwar policies are crafted, and it prevents a more productive and enduring sympathy that, in cooperation with reason, might guide our actions and help us become more careful readers of war's many ambiguities and false seductions." (page 83)
ii. The layers of dislike I have for the Nazi general scene are manifold; the mirroring of Winters and the Nazi general and thereby Easy Company with the Nazi soldiers feels incredibly sinister, perhaps most aggressively so in its weird push to rehabilitate the Nazis as soldiers, and thus to both foreshadow (within the world of the show) and echo (in the world of the audience) the archetypal defense that Nazi higher-ups would put forward at Nuremberg and beyond, that they were just following orders.
iii. The mirroring of Winters and Easy Company with the Nazis is clearly intentional, and somewhat bizarrely explicit ("You've found in one another a bond that exists only in combat among brothers") and maudlin (the panning shots over the Nazi soldiers' faces and wounds), and by the end the urge to parallel the two leaders and the two armies--indeed, to collapse one into the other, in order to make them functionally the same--seems to cause a sort of scriptwriting amnesia about who these words are actually being said by and to. Once again the greater historic context makes this especially chilling, Operation Paperclip being perhaps the most salient point to evoke. (I am also haunted, forever, by a statistic that Michael C. C. Adams cites in The Best War Ever, that a September 1945 survey of American GIs found that 22% believed the Nazi treatment of Jewish people to be justified. Granted, this survey would not have been taken using modern sampling methods, and who knows what the sample size was to begin with or what soldiers in particular were being surveyed. But still.)
iv. The scene leans heavily into the idea of a unique soldierly bond that unites not only each individual army within itself but bonds the two armies together. ("You've found in one another a bond that exists only in combat, among brothers who've shared foxholes, held each other in dire moments, who've seen death and suffered together.") Besides being disquieting for reasons I state above, I think it's notable that the Nazi general's speech emphasizing the brotherhood of soldiers happens directly after the short scene between Winters and Sobel, wherein Winters chides Sobel on a point of military ritual ("We salute the rank, not the man"). Sobel is outside the brotherhood; he doesn't understand how to be a soldier; whereas the Nazis are within the brotherhood, so much so that they are allowed to articulate its terms. (This is egregious no matter what, but becomes all the more so when it is framed as a Jewish man being excluded from the "club" of military brotherhood while WASP Americans and literal Nazis are allowed in.) (Meanwhile, Liebgott occupies a sort of bizarre placement in this scene, there to ventriloquize--indeed, perhaps neutralize, or even legitimize--the Nazi general's words, but not speak for himself.)
v. This gets to another point that Samet makes that stuck out to me, about the inherent tautology of military culture. She quotes William Styron, who in a 1964 review of General Douglas MacArthur's memoir said:
"Anyone who has lived as a stranger for any length of time among professional military men, especially officers, is made gradually aware of something that runs counter to everything one has been taught to believe—and that is that most of these men, far from corresponding to the liberal cliché of the super-patriot, are in fact totally lacking in patriotism. They are not unpatriotic, they simply do not understand or care what patriotism is. [...] A true military man is a mercenary [...] and it is within the world of soldiering that he finds his only home." (Samet quotes Styron on page 233; I'm quoting here from the full review)
The point of being a soldier is to be a soldier; the point of the military is to have a military. She also has this to say--especially saliently, I think, for obvious reasons--about Ambrose, and his perspective specifically in Citizen Soldiers:
"By means of emphasis and convenient omission, Ambrose preserves his focus on unity, not division; right, not wrong; liberation, not subjugation. Paradoxically, given that he makes so much of American idealism, he often subordinates a consideration of causes altogether to a veneration for the magnificence of the army itself. The creation of that army, rather than the victory it made possible, becomes 'the great achievement of the American people and system,' just as the nation's 'greatest nineteenth-century achievement' had been, according to Ambrose, 'the creation of the Army of the Potomac' rather than the end it eventually secured--the abolition of chattel slavery." (page 46)
Here we are back to the first Samet quote from above: valor eclipses causes and reconciliation triumphs over everything. To be a military man--to be part of the club, the brotherhood, the "bond that exists only in combat"--is to "subordinate a consideration of causes altogether to a veneration for the magnificence of the army itself." The country and the cause that the Nazi general and his soldiers fought "bravely, proudly" for become sublimated, while that bravery and pride, stripped of more specific meaning, is extolled. What matters, by the time this scene happens--and it's the last scene in the core section of the episode, followed only by the close of the frame structure with Winters and Nixon and then the baseball scene-cum-epilogue--is not the American cause that Easy Company was fighting for, and certainly not the Nazi atrocities they were fighting against, but rather a reconciliation that views the experience of war as preeminently important. Sobel, who did not experience combat, is dismissed; the Nazi general, who did, is legitimated.
vi. And that, I think, is the core of the message that Band of Brothers promotes. Fandom often refers to the show in passing as propaganda, but I'm not sure that really gets to the heart of what it is, in the end, saying. I would suggest that it's not merely propaganda; it's a recruitment poster. It's not selling truth, justice, and the American way (or if it is, it's doing so only incidentally); it's selling the experience of being in the military as a transformative and ultimately positive one, that unites (a certain subset of) men through the unique crucible of battle, beyond any concerns about what, exactly, one is fighting for. So long as you know when and how to salute, you too can be a part of the brotherhood.
vii. All of which gets back to the scene earlier in "Points," when the Nazi colonel surrenders to Winters. The colonel first makes the explicit parallel between the Nazis and the Americans, and between himself and Winters in particular: "I wonder what will happen to us, to people like you and me, when there are finally no more wars to occupy us." He serves to explicate here more or less exactly what I was saying above: he sees himself and Winters united as military men, above and beyond their particular countries and causes.
Winters doesn't look thrilled about the comparison--but then almost immediately tells the Nazi colonel to retain his surrendered sidearm. I suppose this is supposed to read as magnanimous and fair-minded on Winters's part, but it also serves to reinforce the Nazi colonel's own words, validating the colonel's prioritization of their shared military positions above and beyond their allegiance to the countries and ideologies they were (at least nominally!) fighting for. As the scene itself shows, giving up a sidearm is an expected part of the surrender process, both practically and symbolically; by refusing it Winters is stepping outside military precedent--indeed, bending over backwards--to help the Nazi colonel retain dignity as well as firepower. On its own it is, I think, a frustrating and uncomfortable scene; in the broader context of the episode it sets up and reinforces the Nazi general's speech later on and the ways that Winters and the show itself find meaning in paralleling and reconciling the Americans and the Nazis with one other. (The Nazi colonel knows how to salute; and when he does so, Winters salutes him back.)
viii. Of course it's historically true that American soldiers tended to identify with German soldiers and civilians much more than they identified with people from Allied countries, as Samet herself and even the veteran interviews at the beginning of "Why We Fight" document. (And I don't believe that paralleling the Americans and the Nazis is necessarily something to be dismissed out of hand.) But because the end of "Points" is so overtly sentimental, paralleling the Americans and Nazis serves not as an indictment of American soldiers' amorality but rather as a rehabilitation of the Nazi soldiers and officers as soldiers and a paean to military culture divorced from meaning or cause. As Samet says--"valor eclipses causes and reconciliation triumphs over everything." The military, as an institution, whether it be American or Nazi, becomes the greater good of the war; while the causes those militaries were fighting for become not only secondary, but recede entirely.
ok, I'm sure somebody else has said this before but it just clicked for me now.
this scene:
is the precursor to these scenes:
don malarkey is the keeper of the dead. he has been from the very beginning. again and again, he is handed things that the dead have left behind in place of a body.
meehan and evans blew up with their plane. hoob was carted away, to be buried in a mass grave away from the line. skip and penkala were literally obliterated by that mortar. in all instances, there isn't a body to mourn. but there is laundry. there is a luger. there is a piece of a rosary.
and as long as these things exist, donald malarkey will gather them into his hands and he will keep them. because that is all he can have.
I was reading Ghostland and came across this passage:
“Here, then, is a central paradox in the way that ghosts work: to turn the living into ghosts is to empty them out, rob them of something vital; to keep the dead alive as ghosts is to fill them up with memory and history, to keep alive a thing that would otherwise be lost.”
— Colin Dickey, Ghostland
and immediately had band of brothers thoughts. band of brothers being a ghost story has been covered and mused about many times very brilliantly but I felt this articulated a thought I’ve had about it. some of the characters who were alive at the time of the show do feel like they were emptied of something vital, that in having to honor and do justice to a living person the character lost the complexity that makes us human. I don’t think I’m the only person who’s had the thought that dick winters the real person is so much more compelling and strange than the character in the show. meanwhile, the characters who were dead (roe, nix, web, liebgott) feel more human. they regained life through being fictionalized certainly, but also by being depicted as flawed—like real people are.
While working on my wip i realized something about the scene where Babe and Spina try to wake Eugene during the shelling when Harry got hit.
Eugene has a one man foxhole, it's big (or rather small) only for one man. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but amongst the rest of easy company, there would be at least two guys in one foxhole (I can think of Dike being alone in his foxhole as well, but I'm not counting him okay lol). And I'm thinking how it once again represents Gene distancing himself from the rest of the guys. (Or maybe I'm just looking too much into it lol but-)
Then Babe and Spina come running in and those two are the only two guys that Eugene actually bonds with, like I know he cares for all of the easy company men, but with these two it's different. With Spina, he talks about his life outside of the war, he talks about his grandma, and with the way Spina had asked about the cajun healers, I think they had talked about this before. And Babe, well, do I even have to say anything? Their relationship is just something else.
Spina and Babe just went "we know you're trying to put a wall around yourself but let me ask you about your people and let be ask you to call me by my really weird nickname, let us find you and help you get up when you're struggling, even if you didn't want that let us be there for you like you're there for us" and I think that's beautiful.
One thing I don't often consider during my bouts of "let's mix DND with my latest fandom obsession" is the difference between what class my blorbos would be and what class they would play (at least for their first game, we all know players tend to vary after a while)
They might be the same, but they also might not be.
For example: I think Joe Liebgott would be a fighter, probably dex based. Not just because he's from a no magic setting, but because he doesn't strike me as faithful enough to be a paladin, or as having the inclination to study enough to become an artificer. He does however have enough smarts to be a battle master.
As a player, I think he'd either go for maximum tanking with a moon druid/bear totem barbarian multi class OR a spy master rogue build for investigation and espionage (it'd make him feel like he's in one of his favorite comics).
Similarly, I think David Webster would be a wizard. I know bard seems like an obvious choice because he studied literature, but I don't think he has the charisma for it, and wizard fits better with what we see of him in the snow imo.
As a player, though, I do think he'd go for bard: it fits his artistic inclination, his general ability for intense studying AND his cautious nature by allowing him to stay out of harm's way if he plays his cards right
during the NCO mutiny in episode 1, I always found it very telling that Talbert's first reaction, upon hearing Dick was lost to mess duty due to court martial, is that Nix better get Dick out of it... implying that Nix 1) is capable of doing so and; 2) is willing to do so (and would!). it is especially telling when you consider how, out of all the NCO's under his command, Dick considered Talbert an actual friend... meaning that Tab might have had some sort of insight on Dick and Nix's relationship-- or at least the lengths Nix is willing to go to save Dick from trouble.
I think the ouroboros at the center of Liebgott as a character on the show is that he was specifically crafted around the void that the actual Liebgott left by not getting in touch with any of the other Easy men after the war. Plenty of the other guys were also dead by the time the show was being made but most of them had been in touch much more recently and/or had left documentation of some kind. But because Liebgott's character had to be created out of the other men's fifty-plus-year-old memories of the actual Liebgott he is being automatically seen through that lens (guy they haven't spoken to in fifty years) and created in that image. And so while it is never made explicitly canon that show!Liebgott walks away from Easy after the war in some ways his character is predetermined to do so because he was created out of memories colored by the age and distance that resulted from his choice to walk away. Liebgott as a character is always-already disappearing after the war.
anyway, let's talk about how Alton More, out of all of easy, is actually the first one to see through the façade of violence and ruthlessness Ronald Speirs puts up around himself because something about this scene--
-- is a direct pipeline to the Carver scene, when Ron pistol whips then trains the gun on Carver's face, and the others flinch away or closes/averts their eyes altogether--
--Alton More is one of the few who keeps his eyes right on Ronald Speirs with that fucking look on his face.
what the fuck does that mean, Alton!? is it morbid anticipation? are you waiting for the final blow, the execution that'll finally satisfy you? are you waiting for him to finally snap and betray his own morals just for your petty revenge? or are you afraid? are you afraid that he's not who you thought he was and he'll actually do it? prove you wrong and everybody right, after months fighting beside him and following his orders? are you finally considering that perhaps the violence and ruthlessness are part of him after all? are you afraid that maybe it's part of you, too?
well, you'll be glad to find out it isn't. part of him, that is. and maybe it isn't part of you, either. not that you care, Alton. brushing up against that existential question is more than you can bear at the moment because the next time you see each other, it's back to business--
--and all is well.
tl;dr Alton More can play Ronald Speirs like a fiddle because he's got him read and sorted. and the funniest thing, is that Ron doesn't realize it.
or maybe he does.
but whether or not he likes it is a different story.
