Add Vietnamese People and Stir?: A Reflection on Burns’s and Novick’s The Vietnam War and A Call for New Interpretations

Abstract

To a serious student of Vietnamese history, Ken Burns’s and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War is both refreshing and maddeningly unimaginative. Perhaps the most outstanding feature of the mini-series is the inclusion of politically diverse Vietnamese voices. The film boasts a rich tapestry of interviews with North and South Vietnamese veterans, communist guerilla fighters, and Vietnamese refugees. Their stories are interwoven with more familiar accounts of American soldiers, protestors, and government officials. Although the filmmakers give more airtime to American perspectives, The Vietnam War does a far better job of acknowledging competing Vietnamese viewpoints than most documentaries. Burns and Novick hoped that this “many sides” approach would convey the multifaceted complexity of the war. As they write in the companion volume to the documentary, “From the start, we vowed to each other that we would avoid the limits of a binary political perspective and the shortcuts of conventional wisdom and superficial history. This was a war of many perspectives, a Rashomon of equally plausible ‘stories,’ of secrets, lies, and distortions at every turn.”1