About Digging Deep
Post 974:
As a kid I wanted to be an archeologist. When it was brought to my attention that most archeologists don’t conduct themselves like Indiana Jones, I lost a little bit of interest. That said, my fascination with the past has never fled. It’s one of the passions of my life. History fascinates on so many levels. Things have certainly happened. Billions and billions of things. How we understand and interpret them is the tricky part. Different people can possess completely different interpretations of what certainly did occur. We only have so much evidence. Witness accounts differ. Hell, we can’t agree on things that happened yesterday. That’s history. It’s actually kind of a pain in the ass. The good kind. Otherwise, boring.
I was glad to see Netflix adapted The Dig, the story of an Anglo-Saxon burial ship discovered just before WW2. It’s a lovely adaptation of a book I read many years back, methodical as it pulls back its layers. Sort of like archeology. Of course I enjoyed it, though the film came off as a little more melodramatic than the book. And of course there has to be Winston Churchill saying that England’s at war. That part annoyed me. WW2 has to be in your historical film or book, it seems, because producers and writers assume that’s the only event we have any knowledge of. Whatever, small gripe. And they found the frigging ship on the doorstep of WW2, so I don’t know what I’m complaining about.
I think I enjoyed being able to see them excavating the site of this noble warrior buried at quite a distance from the sea. You get a visual example of the work it takes to uncover the truth. It’s a painstaking bit of business, truth-seeking. It takes great care, trust, and even faith. I’m grateful to the obsessed men and women who have discovered so many treasures of our past, undeterred by the elements, getting buried alive, getting divorced, dying—that sort of stuff.
And it’s a reminder we still only know fragments about who we are and where we came from. History will always fascinate, because it will always be incomplete. That’s why we have myths and other stories. For filling in the gaps.
Of course I endorse both the book and the film. They’re not going to blow your hair back with excitement, but the characters and storytelling are good enough and very strong in parts. That it’s based on real work done by real people is an added bonus, and the arc of the “uneducated” main character who made the discovery is a nice touch of the underdog. An ordinary man with a powerful curiosity is a formidable thing. It can change the world. Check it out. I’d go with the book, then watch the movie a month or two after to appreciate the differences and not be bothered by them. Cheers and see you after.
