Damn Ken Burns. He ruins everything for me.
First it was TV. His visual opuses — Hemingway, Vietnam, The Civil War — put other television shows to shame, including my favorites: Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, The Simpsons.
NOW he’s ruined storytelling for me. His latest non-fiction tale, Ali, ranks among my favorites. I was already a sports nut, so there was no chance I would not like the PBS series.
But what caught me flush on the jaw was his undercutting of my assumptions about not only the man, but what I believed to be true about Malcolm X, my career of choice and, more importantly, my father’s.
Ali is Burns at his poetic peak. Throughout his career, Burns has managed to affect the cadence and mannerisms of every American milieu he’s portrayed. Hemingway had the sparseness of the author; The Civil War seemed to live on sepia parchment, like the letters of long-gone soldiers; you could almost taste the horse nipple of a stadium hot dog in Baseball.
In Ali, we are ringside and blood-spattered at Muhammad Ali’s greatest bouts. Set to a pulsating house beat, Ali sets up the Kentucky boxer’s most important battles, in and out of the ring. And because Burns is, at heart, a gumshoe reporter, he invariably finds details overlooked or ignored by history. Ali even makes the outcome of fights decided decades ago feel uncertain, a masterstroke of any sports documentarian.
But Burns goes deeper, sparring with the subject matter. Like Ali the fighter, Burns the storyteller rope-a-dopes viewers, luring them into looking at one thing while — Pow! — stinging with a jab that clears whatever preconceived notions were in your head.
In this case, that would include haymaker epiphanies about Malcolm X, The Nation of Islam, and the media of my father’s era, all of which combined to turn Ali into a social pariah. Burns exposes not only the Sweet Science, but the mad scientists who were determined to turn a flawed man into flawless hero — or fatally flawed villain.
Among the mini-documentaries to emerge from Ali, no subject stands as tall as Malcolm X. Burns reveals that Malcolm X was such good friends with Ali that after the boxer claimed his first heavyweight title, he changed his name to Cassius X, enraging Elijah Muhammad, the leader of The Nation of Islam. Malcolm’s newsreel interviews reveal a principled, thoughtful soldier of faith troubled by his brothers’ descent into greed and ego. Malcolm would be exiled from the Nation of Islam by Elijah, who “granted” Cassius Clay the name Muhammad Ali, and be gunned down in an assassination he foretold.
I always thought Ali was a shameless braggart who chose his own name. The reason I thought that was because my father thought that.
Burns makes quick work of Elijah Muhammad, a spiritual leader with a Koresh-ian fondness for power and adoration. His rise to power in The Nation of Islam — fueled by Elijah’s publishing prowess — is a Shakespearean fall that the director illuminates effortlessly.
The four-part series is rife with revelations: Malcolm was a man of peace; Eliah a man of corrupted ego. That sportswriters, not the athlete, dictated Ali’s narrative (a narrative personally handed down by my father, a news reporter as snookered as I by hometown sports writers beguiled by the reputation of the sport, not the realities).
The series, like the man, sputters in the second half. We are familiar enough with Ali’s fall from grace that the series would have better fit a three-act Greek tragedy, which Ali ultimately was. The boxer was just Hamlet in boxing gloves: To be or not to be the greatest. Both caution the danger of myth meeting humanity.
Burns, of course, doesn’t give a damn about myths, reputations and legends. That makes him the king of storytellers, including those in film, music, TV and art.
In fact, an enterprising college should offer an American history course, as seen through the eyes of Ken Burns. Can you imagine a college class with educational TV as homework? Can you imagine the wait list? Just sayin.’
No offense to Muhammad, but he is the greatest.
