Hemingway…on PBS…a review…spoiler alert

PBS is showing a three part series on Ernest Hemingway.  I just finished watching it.  I’m a member, so I could watch all the episodes at once.

I find it interesting that they concentrated on two things…blood and death.  So much blood and death.  He killed so many things.  Horrifying to actually SEE IT, even though I didn’t really look, once I saw it coming.  And the wars, of course, mangled bodies, piles, or lines of the dead.  Death, death, death and death. I don’t know how he had time for anything else, actually.

He did have time for women/wives.  He was an alcoholic and he was mean.  Mean to people who helped him in the beginning, mean to pretty much everyone.  He hated his mother with a passion and she hated him.  His kids pretty much hated him, or at least didn’t really like him.

They did point out, right away, how much he LIED about the things he said he did.  How he just made things up to make himself look so much better than he was.  He also had a lot of head injuries.

His sexuality was different than what most thought, that’s for sure.  Maybe that’s why he wanted to kill everything, to prove he was a man.  Never realizing that real men DON’T kill things, they protect them.

He believed his own lies (not uncommon for anyone).

He lied about living on nothing, in Paris, with his first wife.  She had money and they were never starving, or living in a terrible place…and on and on it goes.

I’ve read books on him, mostly books he happens to be in, when I read about the Lost Generation in Paris…but I’ve read about him as well.  I realize that it’s impossible to give the full story of a person, because of all the things that have to be left out.  He knew the Murphy’s and of course the Fitzgerald’s, but none of that is in the program.

It’s a depressing program, at least for me.  It’s a program about DEATH, and a sometimes charismatic, alcoholic who kills things and is mean.  Oh, yeah…he was also a writer and he liked cats.  Hate the bullfights and glad they’ve been banned for cruelty.  All those screaming people cheering for DEAH, PAIN AND SUFFERING.  HATEFUL.  He loved it.

If you’re a Hemingway fan, you may feel differently about the program.  He was a show off, a liar, and a bully.  And he killed things.  The program is about the true ugliness of war war, death and the killing of animals.  That’s really what the program is all about.  It’s about him watching death, or killing things, thinking about death, writing about death, thinking about killing himself, and then killing more animals, fish, birds, or going to the bullfights to see other people kill animals.