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The original was posted on /r/television by /u/pizzachickenribs on 2023-06-27 16:59:49+00:00.

It’s been a little while since I watched the documentary, but in my just completing For Whom The Bell Tolls I think Burns went a little far on focusing on the suicide element in the novel.

I don’t remember if it was the narrator or a guest who said it, but there was a lot of focus on how Hemingway was already so fixated on suicide by the time of the novel.

Yes, the novel’s main character Robert Jordan talks about his father committing suicide and how it was shameful. But the documentary makes it seem like Robert Jordan was going to do it because of what I suppose could be called usual reasons, which leads you to think it was something Hemingway was already priming himself for.

In the novel, he only considers it because he doesn’t want to be captured by the enemy and tortured, which I could see as legitimate. At the end he actually decides to ready himself to attack the oncoming Fascist troops. The novel’s ending is ambiguous.

I know documentaries aren’t safe from bias, and maybe I am wrong, and Hemingway was a mess of a human, but as I reflect on it I don’t think how the documentary approached things sat right with me.