My journey with HBO’s Band of Brothers, the mini series that is based on the book of the same name by Stephen Ambrose, began as a DVD rental in June of 2003. Prior to watching the show I knew very little about the 101st Airborne Division, a fair amount about World War 2, at least from the perspective of the average person, and had no idea what the show was actually about.
It was recommended to me by a co-workers at Blockbuster, which I had started working at three months before, maybe even my boss, and I used one of my five free weekly rentals to take home the first disc. There’s a chance I might have taken all five of them, but I think after watching the first two episodes I came back and got the other discs.
One of the benefits of living five blocks away from work.
This was 2003 and it was the beginning of binge watching, the act of viewing a tremendous amount of a TV series (or movie series, but it’s usually colloquially reserved for TV) in a very short amount of time, all relative based on the length and volume of the show.
I have never been able to watch Band of Brothers at a slow pace.
The first time I watched it, I watched the first two episodes over a day or two, and then watched the next 6 episodes in one sitting. Having just finished watching the series again for at minimum the 11th time (finishing the last episode roughly 20 minutes before starting this article), I had about the same viewing experience.
And this time, it wasn’t on purpose.
You see, I’m writing a book about movies, it’s a nonfiction story that’s part memoir and part conversation about art and the personal, and as of this typing, it’s a mess…1
As part of that project I re-read a book that one of the movies I focus on in my work in progress is based on, and that made me want to re-read Band of Brothers for the first time since 2006. My old copy of the book went out into the world, sent out without expectation of being returned, so I picked up a digital copy and thought to myself:
“Of course this is making you want to re-watch the show, why don’t you re-read and re-watch at the same pace, and not get ahead of yourself. It’ll be fun to see what’s different chapter by chapter.”
Obviously, that didn’t happen.
What did happen though is in reading the account of the attack on the artillery overlooking the D-Day landing, I read that Sgt. Buck Compton, a super baseball and football jock from UCLA before the war, hit a Nazi in the head with a grenade as it exploded.
This also happens as a “blink and you’ll miss it” moment on the show.
In the book the throw is described as being the distance from home plate to second base, which for Compton who was an All American catcher, was a routine throw. Grenades, which do not detonate on impact, but on a timer, are also not baseballs and do not have the same aerodynamic design. I’ve never thrown a grenade, but I know you generally don’t throw them like you throw a ball, due to a chance of a downward or late release on the throw.
So, to have someone throw one that far, and that accurately, and have it explode at the time of impact is a remarkable feat of skill, and chance.
It’s something that, like all of the violence of the show, and all of the violence depicted in the pages of the book, happens in the blink of an eye.
Also, yes, I know I’m talking about a real person blowing up another real person’s head, but the guy who died?
Nazi paratrooper.
Fuck him.
The only good Nazi’s a dead Nazi.
Anyhow, I’ve never been to war, and I don’t know what war’s like, but the point of a show like Band of Brothers, or movies like Saving Private Ryan, The Outpost, and Black Hawk Down isn’t to recreate the realities of war, but to communicate, via layers of abstraction, the sense and idea of what it’s like.
There is no way to capture the reality of war, even if you are watching real combat footage, because you’re still watching it at a remove, and because that remove slows everything down.
Think about football.
Ten yards is 30 feet.
When you watch a game, you see players trying to cover those 30 feet, and sometimes, in what’s actually the blink of an eye, you see a player move that distance and then some.
It happens in seconds because most plays in a football game happen in seconds, and since we’re far enough away, we can see it all as it plays out. From the vantage point of the camera, which is above the field and looking down, we are already at a meaningful remove, and that’s even before the remove of watching, not doing.
If we were down on the field, we would not be able to process how astoundingly fast everything and everyone is.
Now, take that, and add people trying to kill you.
And add the smells, the sounds, your own body, and everything else that goes into physically existing in a space, a space that is filled with death and the intent to kill, and it is impossible to know at any remove2.
Of course war is not all pants shitting terror, sometimes it’s mind numbing boredom, and from friends I talked to who served, it’s also routine.
Part of our human existence is that eventually everything becomes routine as a survival response, and the routines of war involve people trying to kill each other.
So, Band of Brothers, both book and mini series, tells the story of Easy company3, both in terror and bordem as they trained to become paratroopers, then fought all the way through jumping into Normany on the morning of D-Day through the end of World War 2.
It’s the story of one of America’s first “special operations4” outfits, soldiers with more training, more physical demands, and combat roles that existed outside of the standard parameters of the infantry or artillery etc. and it exists to create a respectful and honest depiction of those men and their stories.
Honesty in art is sense of truth, it comes from facts, and from experience, but anything that becomes art is transformed through abstraction, as art requires creative liberties, so, the show is not the book, and the book is not the actual events, and it can never be.
This is especially true in the combining of characters (though the show doesn’t do much of this), and in the depictions of battle. So, while the action is exciting and happens at an undeniably thrilling pace, and as we cannot feel the terror of life and death as viewers, the violence is spectacle, at leasy until the consequences are shown to us in the characters we’ve come to know.
This is where Band of Brothers is truly remarkable, because the action might be thrilling and ever present, but it’s nothing compared to the human face of these characters, the depiction of their struggle as people, and the suffering and loss they faced in the act of war.
What action we see matters less for its theatricality, which is all but nonexistent in the speed and viciousness of the battle scenes, than for the cost.
We see Buck blow a Nazi’s head off with a grenade in the blink of an eye, but we linger on his face until our own tears come as he watches his best friends killed and maimed in the frozen winter of the Battle of the Bulge.
There is a righteousness to the cause of the men of Easy Company, because again, it’s a good thing to kill Nazis, they’re fucking Nazis after all, but righteousness isn’t necessarily beautiful, and in the show while it is sometimes gratifying, it is always viscous, and always ugly in its honesty about killing, at least as told through the eyes and tools of fiction and adaptation.
The construction and artifice of violence in narrative, especially when it comes to killing Nazis means we will always be removed from the weight of taking another human life, both through the remove of watching, the reality that we are watching a fictional accounting that has framed the violence to fit into the narrative and the medium to be compelling and interesting, and the fact we’re watching Nazis being killed.
(Nazis are not a simple othering, they’re Nazis, which is why it’s always been okay to want them to die, have them be the bad guys, and why it’s so fucking baffling that they’re back.)
Of course, if your lived experience includes combat, and the reality of fighting and killing, then what you know and have experienced changes that calculus.
For those of us who do not know those realities, when we see hurt and loss, when we see pain and pathos, when we see the pure humanity communicated in the art and the performance, it stays with us in a different way than the thrill of violence.
The human arc of Band of Brothers is undeniable, in part because it’s a condensed coming of age story that is escalated by war, and makes it propulsively compelling, so when it is all available to you to watch, the easiest thing is to play the next episode. It could be watched slowly, or weekly, and still be good… But fast, it’s amazing.
The show also rotates point of view characters, providing different insights and capturing critical moments in the smaller and larger stories of the war, keeping things dynamic, and surprising.
The changes in perspective and structure are also served by binge watching, especially episodes 5-8, which includes episode 6 Bastogne the episode that has the ONLY female character on the show with anything like a sizable speaking role or part to play.
By the time I saw that episode the first time, I’d already watched three episodes in a row before it, and seeing a woman on screen was a breath of fresh air.
Then there is the second to last episode, Why We Fight, where after we see our last combat scene in episode 8, and American forces are moving through Germany on their way to Berlin, Easy Company finds and liberates a concentration camp… which includes having to force the detained, starving, dying people, to stay in the camp to monitor their food intake so they don’t die from complications of starvation.
Discovering the camp was inevitable, due to history, but also due to our understanding of World War 2, and the emphasis put on different characters’ Jewish heritage in the first episode.
Again, this stands out because of our understanding of the war, and of Nazis, so it’s tiddy foreshadowing, setup, and delivery of something we already know about, but that just makes it all the more powerful.
Half a year after watching the series for the first time, my store received ten or so used box sets of Band of Brothers, each one coded as previously viewed at ten dollars a piece5. So, it was dirt cheap AND part of the various previously viewed sales. That was where I got my copy of the show, and while I tried to get a few friends into it, the only one of my buddies that really did was my roommate Brennan, who also moved in in 2003.
This is important, because during a dark and challenging time in both of our lives a few years later Brennan took solace in re-watching the show, as we had watched it together once or twice, or more times than that over the intervening years.
In 2010, at the last Blockbuster I worked at, near the end of my time with the company, my store had a damaged product return of one of boxed sets, so I did the only responsible thing, processed it as damaged/field destroyed, hid it in the dumpster, and snagged it for Brennan after work.
Because, the bonds of friendship in the face of hardship, the need to rely on the person next to you in the mundane violence and struggle of life, which may not set out to kill you in the same way a war does but will kill you nonetheless every chance it gets, means you look out for your buddy.
That’s the most resonate element of the show.
It doesn’t show you what war is like, but it shows you what matters in the face of hardship and death, and the spirit of what it takes to endure.
That is the emotional truth of the show, that is where it's humanity ultimately lies, and what makes it worth watching.
In the years since Band of Brothers I’ve become a devoted binge watcher, and following that show Brennan and I moved on to watching the first 4 seasons of The Sopranos in three weeks tops… then I was going on to the first two seasons of Alias, and on and on and on from The Shield, to Rescue Me, to Deadwood, Rome, Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, Mad Men, and catching up/re-watching 30 Rock seasons too.
There are some people that prefer weekly releases, or slow rolling through a series, but that's not me.
If something is good, I don’t want to wait.
If something is mediocre, it’s not worth waiting for, not really…
And if it’s bad, then it doesn’t matter one way or the other.
And now, instead of DVDs, and having that one disk that only has the last episode of the seasons on it, and the delay between a season airing and it being released on physical media, TV exists in digital bulk.
Binging started to become TV’s natural state with DVDs because unless you bought the set, you had to rent them, and then you had to watch all the episodes in a limited amount of time, creating a manufactured need to binge.
Additionally the only shows that were making their way out into the world on DVD rentals were shows like Band of Brothers and The Sopranos, so if you were watching them on DVD you were catching up or on a re-watch, and you were watching something that was genuinely great because part of the rise of the golden age of television/prestige was the distribution of shows on DVD.
Band of Brothers was a cornerstone of that rise, and wholly unique in that it was a mini-series and HBO’s most prestigious production up to that point. It was a show about history, and it became a viewing mode that defined the future.
It was a serious story that ultimately set the pace for the frivality of how we watch stories, and I would like to end this somewhat meandering piece with a story of my own.
I was 16 years old, my Great Uncle Arch was driving me to school one morning, and when we were in the car I asked him a little bit about his military service. I asked him why, after World War 2, he re-enlisted for Korea.
He told me he thought he had a gift for leading men in battle and he thought ir was his responsibility to help the young men that would be fighting.
Five years after that conversation, in the final episode of Band of Brothers, while waiting to find out of they’re going to be shipped out to the Pacific after the German surrender, Winters, the main character of tis show (that I haven’t talkd about) volunteers to transfer early.
When asked why he’s trying to go, he gives an answer nearly identical to what my Uncle Arch gave to me.
My uncle retired as a colenel, after he got his start in the 82nd Airborne, fighting in World War 2.
A war movie or show can’t show you what war is actually like, but it can give you a better idea, not a good one necessarily, but sometimes a better one. He fought in all the places they showed on the show (and a few more), and while seeing a theatrical depiction of the Battle of the Bulge can’t tell you what it was like to be there, it can help you understand, at least in the abstract.
And so can the veterans who told pieces of their stories on film before the start of every episode, free of name placards until the end of the final episodes, connceting the abstarction and the fiction to the reality.
Yes, how we watch stories is frivelous, and what we watch can be frivelous too, but it can also be deeply moving, emotionally honest, and even necessay sometimes. And even when it becomes routine, as all things do, the stories we tell, and the stories we consume still matter, and they can be so resonant that there’s no need to wait for them if we don’t have to.
And it may not come to anything, but we’ll see. It’s a weird, three pronged endeavore, with the two elements i’ve mentioned, and the secret third element, the reason for the book having to be woven together, while also being HA HA funny… anyhow, we’ll see…
Every human experience can really only be known by living it, dare I say… experiencing it… but some events that we experience throught the abstract we can understand more easily than others, and with the amount of war that has been depicted, we can fool ourselves into thinking that since we’ve seen so much of it that we can understand it…
And we can understand anything in the absract, but the abstract and the reality are not the same.
Tangentially touching on other companies (E “Easy” F “Fox” D “Dog” etc.) and the whole 506th… and more Army numbers.
The special operations combatant (Special Forces is actually a specific thing…) has a unique appeal to American rugged individualism, and the idea of the primacy of the one person making a difference, as well as our fascination with excellence.
Obvioulsy no one person or group of people can win a war, but just the idea of the “special” fightter, the better to the best of the best, is also critical in the creation and motivation of these servicemembers, because of the confidence required.
Band of Brothers isn’t just about the Greatest Generation and men pulled into the war, it’s hte story of men who volunteered to take on more, and to fight alongside other men if not wanted to be there, then at least chose to be there and chose to take on the greater demand.
The idea of more demand is an interesting one, especially when the minimum requirement is giving you life, and taking other lives.
The box set new was still like $80 or something like that, and my theory to this day was that it was a transfer error somewhere, and tht the discs werre supposed to be individually sold, since that was how it was done before and after.