Documentarian Ken Burns has a new film about America's national parks premiering shortly on PBS. Wildly successful, he draws plenty of criticism, apparently much of it from leftists who think he's too pro-American. That just makes me want to watch all the more, along with millions of others.
If he's assaulted critically -- for being too slow, too longwinded, too sentimental -- it's not because he hasn't thought deeply about the parks, their place in American history and the challenge of translating it all to film.The key difficulty of the project, Burns says, was "how to transcend beauty. This is not a travelogue, not a recommendation of which lodge to stay in. It's a history of the ideas and the individuals that made this uniquely American thing possible for the first time in human history: Land was set aside, not by kings or noblemen or the very rich, but for everybody for all time. That's what we celebrate, but how you wrestle that to the ground is full of peril." He's aware, for instance, "that beauty is itself anesthetizing."
So he's worked to capture more than just the spiritual and political impulses that made the parks possible, the paintings that made them famous, their stirring implications for democracy,