#I first saw the powell picture on a newspaper article on Barthes and it has haunted me ever since

[selfconsciousfangirl]

All this talk of Band of Brothers being haunted on account of us seeing these men as young, healthy and living, portraying men who are —by the time the show was made and aired— old, some of them fragile, some of them even dead, it got me thinking about a Ronald Barthes quote that goes “He is dead, and he is going to die …”

The Barthes quote is about the infamous Lewis Powell (he of Abraham Lincoln assassination plot) photograph, the one where Powell looks oddly modern and young and yes, attractive. It's about the haunting power of photography, how in this particular case the "photograph simultaneously witnesses to three related realities. Powell was, he is no more, and in the moment captured by this photograph, he is on his way to death".

Webster is Powell in those last images, when we see him being young, healthy, carefree, playing baseball. He is alive, but text is superposed to remind the audience that he died many years ago, under tragic circumstances. He is going to die in the future that does not yet exist in the alternate reality of the show. But he is very much alive for those moments in the fiction of the show, unaware of the fate that awaits him (unlike Powell in the photograph, it must be said). Webster is doomed by the narrative of real life. He is dead, and he is going to die …

Of course Webster didn’t kill Lincoln. He was not a racist part of a conspiracy to overthrow the United States government, but the quote is true all the same, more true perhaps because it’s based on fiction. We see a fiction that reinforces the hauntedness (it should be a word), the sort of unspoken tragedy of making a show about young men who are by now, if they’re lucky, very old men; men who see their old dead friends as young living men, who get to see themselves as young, living men who nonetheless are going to die.

Here's the article on Barthes and the Powell photography where I got my quotes from.