Documentary analysis: themes, evidence, and directorial arguments

¶ … Guns, Germs, and Steel is the documentary film version of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning book of the same name. Like the book, the documentary is divided into three separate sections. This allows for the logical development of Diamond's ideas, and for the application of the underlying thesis to different time periods, themes, and human populations. Although extensive ground is covered in the three episodes, the premise and themes are straightforward enough so that the documentary never becomes complicated or clunky. The title explains the primary three issues that have impacted human history, allowing some people to have a strategic advantage over others. When these advantages occur in groups, the results can be dramatic to the victors and devastating to the losers.

Developing guns and other armament depends not only the availability of resources to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, but more importantly, the political situations that warrant their use. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond talks about the fact that geographic conditions like availability of resources or the presence of natural barriers may create situations in which people are divided into smaller and more protective tribes, or alternatively, into larger groups and expansive territories like China. Moreover, the film shows that peaceful people who have lived without great conflict have not developed military strategies and thus when they are confronted by a militaristic cultures, they are unprepared to defend themselves. This has happened with a great number of groups of people throughout history, who have succumbed to a more bellicose group of people simply because the latter was more interested in killing people than they were.

Germs refers to the fact that some people have not developed the resistance to certain diseases due to their genetic pool and geographic factors that never put them into contact with triggers requiring a biological response like the production of antibodies. Without antibodies, the person cannot fight the disease, and the person or group may be highly susceptible to plague or mass death. A perfect example of this phenomenon is the smallpox epidemic and other diseases that devastated the Native American populations after contact with Europeans.

Steel refers to the strategic advantages some groups of people have over others due to the luck of their location or climate. Regions ripe with local resources may have led to a more lackadaisical response to resources, because abundance breeds complacency. On the other hand, people and cultures that have had to work harder to survive may have been better equipped or more interested in expanding their territories. How some cultures became dominant has a lot to do with agriculture, sedentary lifestyles, and the evolution of ranching and livestock rearing.

The point of the documentary is to show why the power balance of the world had been skewed toward Europe. The success of the United States and Australia are only related to their having been former European colonies. The reasons for the dominance of Europeans had once been believed to be genetic superiority. It is one thing to know that genetic superiority is simply racism, but it is another to have the science to back up that claim. These films, and Diamond's book, provide the scientific evidence to show that historical outcomes have depended on circumstantial and situational variables, and luck. The underlying presumption may be the existence of a basic human nature. Human beings are animals who need to have their needs met. They form societies as a means to pool resources and achieve shared goals through collaboration and partnership. The forms of social structures and governments people form will depend on their immediate needs. For example, the need for social stratification is greater in societies with more wealth and natural resources, as well as societies with the need for division of labor. This is what happens in societies with agriculture. Any society that has access to grain and other agricultural products will need a system in which labor division is embedded. Labor division creates social strata, and social strata create conflict and strife. At the same time, social strata enables the empowerment of the "big man" at the hub of power, giving the community as a whole access to a potential strategic advantage due to the evolution of defense systems.