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Customer Reviews of The West: The People

Rewriting history's myths.
'The West' boasts all the virtues and vices of senior producer Ken Burns. It is an epic, nine-hour documentary narrating the history of the American West, that vast cauldron of national mythologies, hopes, dreams and delusions. Part of its project is to demythologise the West, correct the Hollywood lies, where comforting legend was preferred to prickly truth. When we think of the West, we probably think of John Wayne and Monument Valley, the White Man's Manifest Destiny, 'Go West, young man' and all that; so it is deliberately provacative of the film-makers to foreground the Native American experience, making their history central, the norm, with the white man's story something (catastrophic) that happened to them, rather than something the white man achieved. This, though, seems little more than a gesture - later episodes deal with the usual, canonical white-centred stories, the Pioneers, the railways, the Civil War etc., albeit from an impeccably liberal perspective.

'The West' is a history, and features contributions from leading historians. Unlike their British counterparts, who are obsessed with prosaic detail and unglamorous methodology, gathering information and than cautiously constructing narratives, US historians are poets, with a striking vocabulary full of expansive, Faulkner-like phrases, good at expressing the 'idea' and the 'myth' of the West, but not so persuasive on the fine print, the actual, unmythic daily realities. There is a need to create and connect stories, to tame the unfathomable West, that can only fail.

This is a documentary aimed at the senses - the rich soundtrack is full of Indian chants, period recreations and glorious American folk; visually, the film offers eye-popping vistas of endless plains, deep sunsets, raging rivers and lofty mountains. The vast photographic evidence is a continual marvel, lending these myths some kind of reality, and reminding us that the American West was probably the first history systematically caught on camera. This edition takes us back to the pre-white period, the lives of the Indians, the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors and other European colonisers, right up to the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson's purchase of French land, and the discovery of the Northwest Passage.

The series is indispensable for anyone who cares about history and truth. For all its good intentions, however, there is something wearily humourless and solemnly p.c. about the whole enterprise, as if the very excitement about the American West that probably attracted you to the programme in the first place, is somehow in bad taste.