The New Yorker & Me: Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old": Gopnik v. Brody

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old": Gopnik v. Brody

Two New Yorker pieces deepen my appreciation of Peter Jackson’s brilliant WWI documentary They Shall Not Grow Old: Adam Gopnik’s “A Few Thoughts on the Authenticity of Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old” (newyorker.com, January 14, 2019) and Richard Brody’s “They Shall Not Grow Old, Reviewed: The Indelible Voices in Peter Jackson’s First World War Documentary” (newyorker.com, February 19, 2019). It’s interesting to compare them.

Gopnik is struck, as I was, by the “immediacy of the imagery.” He says,

The immediacy and sudden contemporaneity of the film makes one feel the inferno of the Western Front as one never quite has before. Mud and rats, sandbags and trenches, sniper fire and mortar attacks—all of these things that we’re accustomed to experiencing abstractly through a distancing veil of archaisms and antiquity are suddenly real before us.

In contrast, Brody considers the soundtrack to be the “core of the film.” He writes,

The movie was made using elaborate manipulations of archival footage from the Imperial War Museum, and that technical work is its highly publicized raison d’être. But it proves utterly inessential to the dramatic power of the stories that are told in the movie—literally told, not by way of the images but on the soundtrack alone.

It’s that “alone” that causes me difficulty with Brody’s argument. As far as he’s concerned the images in They Shall Not Grow Old “are mainly just illustrative—a sort of visual backdrop and temporal space-filler, stretched and condensed to suit the soundtrack.”

But surely that’s too reductive. For me, the power of Jackson’s film derives from both the imagery and the soundtrack. I think Gopnik gets it right when he says, “Though the immediacy of the imagery is in itself astounding, the addition of a vocal track only adds to the effect.”