After Robert McNamara is appointed Secretary of Defense by John F. Kennedy, he is in a television interview. There he is asked about the “know it all” label that many critics have been murmuring. “Are you just going around giving simple little lessons?” asks the interviewer. McNamara denies this, but director Errol Morris sees through his mask of humility. In all situations, McNamara values knowledge, whether spreading it or tallying it. Both actions are done in order to formulate the premise of The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.

Though Morris had dealt with the justice system in The Thin Blue Line a decade earlier, The Fog of War can be perceived by audiences as his most political film to date. In the past ten years, the role documentaries have been given is that of a political or sociological appeal. Films like Supersize Me, Fahrenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth have all fit this description and succeeded with their formulas. Morris’ film succeeded as well, garnering an Academy Award. But The Fog of War is less of a call to arms than it is a series of subtle suggestions revolving around McNamara. Morris records a lot of paradoxes and contradictory statements coming out of the former secretary’s mouth, but he never tells his audience what we should think of the man. It is the audience’s choice on how to judge his actions, appropriate since those actions are simultaneously being judged by historians as while being imitated by the current administration. When looking at the bare essentials though, I think The Fog of War has very close ties to the themes of Morris’ previous films, whether they are technical, structural, or philosophical.

There are a few elements of Morris’ filmmaking that stand out. As seen previously in Fast Cheap and Out of Control, the director implements the interrotron, choosing to shoot the former secretary in shots ranging from medium close to extreme close. We as the audience become intimate with our subject as he makes full eye contact with Morris. These shots are also framed with what seems to be slight Dutch Angles. Even if it’s just McNamara leaning in his chair, the background of the room has shadows of beams and columns that greatly slant. Perhaps in this technique Morris is creating the illusion of a Dutch Angle outside of the camera. Dutch Angles in FCOOC dealt more with the juxtaposition of several different men whose connections to each other seem skewed. But I think Morris uses it with McNamara in the way the Carol Reed did in The Third
Man. There the Dutch Angle was used at times where a character was dishonest or not being straight. It’s Morris’ way to be skeptical of McNamara without coming out and saying it to either him or to the audience.The picture below is of course not a shot from the film, and you can tell that because there is no eye contact, and those columns and beams are completely upright, parallel to the frame.

McNamara’s relationship with Curtis Lemay seems similar to Dave Hoover’s, the wild animal trainer who was inspired and motivated by Clyde Beatty in FCOOC. John F. Kennedy is also portrayed quite fondly. Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, is not. His phone recordings are visually matched up with a running tape recorder, similar to the final interview in The Thin Blue Line where David Harris admits his guilt. Kennedy’s recordings always have pictures of them around the table, and it offers a greater amount of comfort than Johnson’s disembodied drawl. There’s also a percussive noise on the recordings, like a heartbeat adding tensions to the situation. I noted a similar aural sensation when Morris shows his reenactment of the domino effect metaphor. When I watched the film with a friend, he laughed when seeing Johnson presenting the Congressional Medal of Freedom to McNamara. I asked him about it later and he said he had just watched that footage in a history class and it was so painfully obvious how Johnson had blown McNamara off in that ceremony. Yet in his interview, McNamara says Johnson treated him very warmly. I proposed earlier the idea of many contradictory statements made by McNamara and the people around him. This is one of them, and we will see more later.

You can hear Morris asking his questions very loudly, partially due to the fact that the two men are probably sitting at a greater distance than a traditional interview (due to the interrotron), but I think it also works because Morris seems genuinely desperate to find some sort of justification for Vietnam. It is a serious issue and he wants a real answer. Equally desperate is Phillip Glass’ score, I wrote in a previous post about the minimalist composer’s match with themes of searching. If one notes the second scene of the film, where battleship footage is used, Glass uses a flute which adds both an eastern influence and a startling note that is the musical equivalent at being out in the middle of the ocean, torpedoes could hit at any moment. Desperation.

My final major comparison to Morris’ previous works is to the film Mr. Death, which I have yet to see but know that it centers on an electric chair architect determined to construct chairs that kill people efficiently and humanely. The whole issue of humane killing comes up in both WWII and
Vietnam. McNamara questions the consequences of killing one hundred thousand people in one night during the Tokyo firebombing, should they have killed less and had American soldiers enter the city on foot, ultimately leading to losses on our side? And the use of Agent Orange begs why is it okay to use one chemical that helps us kill thousands and not another? McNamara admits that he cannot answer these questions and so he often retreats to an easier way of looking at things: Numerically.

Numbers are McNamara’s real joy, and they’re a lot cleaner than dealing with ethical and moral quandaries. It seems that numbers are the cold hard truth while language comes off as uncertain. McNamara’s earliest memory is victory celebrations for World War One, and he recalls that Woodrow Wilson referred to it as “The war to end all wars.” The irony of that statement is not lost on McNamara, who spends three years fighting in the south pacific as a soldier and seven years making near-executive decisions concerning Vietnam. Throughout his life, he is ranked in the educational system, the military, and the private sector.

So many of McNamara’s stories are about numbers, whether it’s three million killed in Vietnam, twenty thousand per year saved thanks to seat belts, 99% of Tokyo destroyed by fire bombing and so on. These are definite and recorded numbers. Compare that to the section of the film under section seven: “Belief and seeing are often both wrong,” where a battleship captain uses indefinite language concerning a torpedo attack. When asked if it actually did happen in the transmission, the captain says “No doubt about that…I think.” Wishy-washiness runs rampant.

Morris uses CGI at one point, showing numbers being dropped from planes onto Japan. Though this is a documentary, Morris never has qualms about bringing such metaphors to life. This challenges Stephen Prince’s concerns over CGI representing reality and whether one can take any truth from an image that looks real. In his essay “True Lies,” Prince asks the question “When faced with digitized images, will we need to discard entirely notions of realism in cinema?” (275) It is certainly a paradox of his own: “Creating credible photographic images of things which cannot be photographed.” (271)

What I think Morris wants us to do is not discard notions, but be able to build upon the notions we already have. The bombing numbers metaphor looks like slowed down archive footage, thus the key is to visualize what is not literally possible by allowing it to have similar semantic features to what we know of reality. Morris is ever fascinated with authenticity in his films, not by being overly cautious to make everything authentic but rather by using techniques like reenactments and specially staged sets to illustrate points. These visual features are not verbal, always occur while a subject in the film is talking, and conveys Morris’ opinions without explicitly spelling them out for the audience. It challenges Prince because it is not intended for belief, rather to show how much easier it is for McNamara to think about bombs being dropped in numerical terms, for efficiency is what’s truly at stake for Lemay and him.

What’s more is that these effects are not there to stimulate a gut emotional reaction in the way that Jurrasic Park, Prince’s main target, does with its frightening dinosaurs. Nor does it inspire the hope that comes with Forrest Gump’s ping pong career. As stated before, we are dealing with rationality…which according to McNamara, cannot save us.

And at several points in the film, Morris has scenes of extreme close up shots of texts, focusing on single terms. When McNamara is hired, “wiz kid,” “self made,” “efficient,” and “studious” are displayed. When he is about to be fired “Dictator,” “no good,” “fascist,” and of course “McNamara’s War” are shown. Morris rallies towards the power of words in these textual descriptions, and the same texts can make positive statements one day and negative ones another.

Another paradox, though not exactly language based, is mentor Curtis Lemay being willing and able to criticize military policies, such as the shipment of fuel in WWII, but McNamara exclaims that Lemay himself would not tolerate criticism from others. Also concerning Vietnam, McNamara has a quote that I missed the first few times I saw this film but absolutely devastated me when I heard it the most recent time. He speaks of the stress his family went through during the war. “My wife may have ultimately died from the stress…but it was the best years of our lives and we all benefited from it.” Those words truly strike me as coming from someone who has more than a problem with which adjectives are appropriate to use.

Despite this preference for quantifying life, the recent interviews show that McNamara is extremely expressive with his anecdotal evidence. The older man is so much livelier than the newsreel footage we see of press conferences where a colder, socially inept mastermind keeps his mistakes to himself. When asked about the Cuban Missile Crisis Calendar he has on his desk, the younger man cannot resist listing all thirteen dates sequentially. Sure they may have been thirteen of the most important days in his life, but he doesn’t win us over with his diction or vocal expression. The first shot of the movie is McNamara preparing for a conference and has to stop to make sure the chart is high enough, and then he stops to make sure the camera is working. Morris uses this grandly as an acknowledgment of his own film forty years later, but one can see his insecurity with being a newfound public figure. The man has managed to change, partially in mindset and mostly in delivery, and whether his lessons are directed towards us as an audience, to Morris as a director, or to himself, four decades previous is up for debate.

When Morris asks at the end of the film why McNamara never spoke out against
Vietnam if he was so against Johnson’s policies, the man declines saying “You don’t know how inflammatory my words can be.” There seems to be an understanding that words are a powerful force and can in fact hurt and lead to death and disappointment.
But there are also contradictions in the numbers. At Ford Motor Company, McNamara advocated safety measures like seat belts and he proudly states that if everyone wore them, they would save 20,000 lives a year. Later he states that at the end of his job as Defense Secretary, 25,000 were killed in
Vietnam. This naturally proposes the question of whether this almost balances out. Are human lives a score to be tallied? McNamara seems almost comfortable with such a clean cut concept. Numbers are easier to discuss than human lives.

Morris uses cinematic examples of contradictions similar to the language paradoxes I discussed earlier. He shows modern shots city streets in America, Japan, and
Vietnam after crucial decisions have been discussed. These scenes are double exposed with a sped up take over a slowed down take. I think this to mean that life can be a hustle and bustle for those unaware of the monumental decisions being made, while time slows down for those in charge. The threat of nuclear warfare builds tension for these people and at the most crucial point, time slows down for them. These scenes were similar to Geoffrey Reggio’s equally non-traditional documentary Koyaanisqatsi, which translates as “Life out of balance,” and spends a good amount of time examining human action, innovation, and destruction at sped up and slowed down footage, also to a Phillip Glass score interestingly enough. This all gets back to the fact that Errol Morris is not making a political powerpoint documentary, even though he deals with a politically complicated figure. His complications lie in other more subtle ways previously discussed and though the film does not have the extreme juxtaposition of FCOOC it does still obtain some of the deeper philosophical issues at play. Issues that we can observe in all of Morris’ films.

We all have our own paradoxes that lead to life mistakes, and McNamara seems to be optomistic that we can learn from them. But I think Morris is beyond that fact. Without the mistakes of life, there is no story, without the story there is no film. Paradoxes must continue to exist at all levels.

BLOG REVIEW

Nathan points out an important fact in his blog post on Fast Cheap and Out Of Control. The importance of peoples’ particular passions in drives society, even in the most dire of times. Building on that, McNamara is passionate in one of the most dire points of the 20th century, and his passion, in a way, are why things are dire. It is when we are most passionate that we end up making mistakes, and when you are the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, your mistakes tend to result in the loss of lives. Passion probably works best when you’re the naked mole rat scientist rather than the president’s right hand man….there you probably need to think things more thoroughly.

In her post about Errol Morris’ movie posters, Serena analyzed an aspect of cinema that is usually glossed over, considered part of the marketing process rather than a real art. One large focus is the acclaim from critics, and with The Fog of War, Morris received some of his most glowing reviews. Just examine to poster

Yes Serena, Ebert’s there too. I think it’s interesting since I speak a lot about contradictions, that McNamara looks both frail, due to his age, and intimidating due to his height. He is a mix of strengths and weaknesses as we all are. And upon looking at this picture, one might forget that he was reviled for an entire decade.

PUNisher manages to hit on something that was definitely on Morris’ mind while making this film. He discusses how Morris shoots an amazing amount of footage (I believe McNamara was interviewed from anywhere between 8 and 24 hours). In the post it says “ Of course, Morris edits the film to make it seem like they’re rambling.” Robert S. McNamara says in one scene that he learned not to answer the questions he’s asked, but instead answer the questions that he wished he were asked. Morris, in an NPR interview, said that right after that line, he said “Are you doing that to me!?” but he cut it out after a long debate, deciding that it was obvious that McNamara was doing that to him. Though Morris gets final cut, McNamara is clever enough to hold his own and control what goes on.

I really enjoyed Dr. Campbell’s explanation on the importance of eye contact today. It’s such a seemingly small part of communication that we take for granted, but it’s probably one of the most important pieces of body language we use. A look can say it all, whether it be love or hate, embarrassment or confidence, sincerity or apathy. Morris manages to cut himself out as the middleman of the interviews with his technique and it truly adds to the experience. We briefly mentioned in our group presentation how Morris pulls you in by setting up an interview in which the subject is talking directly to you. Dr. Campbell described the interrotron abit today, but I recall this picture that I found. It may actually make the concept more complicated, but here goes nothing.

http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/SmallMammals/default.cfm?Cam=SM1

I’m sure Ray Mendez endorses it.

Just another connection I saw with an earlier Morris film. Dave Hoover points out that he uses the chair because a lion has a one track mind. Thank goodness he wasn’t dealing with the man outside the store in Vernon, Florida who has a five track mind, because that guy could take him down!

I first heard a Glass composition in the deeply hypnotic documentary Koyaanisqatsi. In that film, the music often matches all sorts of movement, both with the camera and with the subjects in front of the camera. Such a synchronized match can lull one into a daze. I have caught this film before while flipping channels and almost been late for class because of lost track of time.

It’s no surprise that later filmmakers implemented his rhythmic movements in ways similar to Morris. Examining most of his film work shows a majority of films where the search for truth is a large factor: The Truman Show (which he did not write specifically for but his work was used in), Secret Window, The Illusionist, and Candyman. I’m extremely excited that his next project will be Woody Allen’s latest drama Cassandra’s Dream. Cassandra? How can that not be about finding out truth? Who knows? Cassandra does. 

This American Life: Death To Wacky – 3/20/98 Ira Glass notes as he exits the theatre after seeing Fast Cheap and Out of Control about how the marketing campaign passes the film off as “wacky.” As we’ve seen, Errol Morris’ movies are never just one thing, so the idea of trashing simplistic generalization to sell more tickets……sort of nice to hear. (Mentions my favorite film Brazil, along with Crumb being marketed as wacky.)

Fresh Air with Terry Gross – 1/5/04 Interview with Morris, mainly about The Fog of War. If you write your paper on the cognate “film” The Fog of War, listen to this 40 minute interview. Even if you don’t write your paper on this, listen to the interview. Morris sounds great even when he’s the one being interviewed. It really focuses on the historical importance of Robert S. McNamara, but it also gets at interviewing techniques.

“This I Believe”: Errol Morris – 5/2/05 Interesting anecdote from Morris’ childhood focusing on the importance of truth.

The way the 20th century operated in terms of technology and how ideas are exchanged is quickly falling behind us. Just the other day a friend of mine was dropping off her old computer at a friends house. As I took a glance at it I said “Wow, that’s practically an antique.” It was from 2003, had a huge heavy monitor, and in a scant four years already is a vintage item.

Once again I find myself relating to the characters of Vernon, Florida. With this surging growth in online media representation, what is reality anymore? The very fact that these obscure people Morris interviewed now have hundreds of posts and observations about things they did 27 years ago….excuse me while my head explodes. Maybe I should try and be like them. I’ll sit around and wait while everyone else gets the latest media upgrades, new wifipods and the ability to have a three way conversation about going to the park on a sunny day. (That was the upbeat ending of EPIC 2015!? We’ve come soooo far.) Therefore, in a few years I’ll be in the middle of my own figurative swamp and I’ll be saying “You can’t trust the wiki. Everyone thinks the wiki has all the facts, but it don’t. I know, I just wiki’d it.”

There is seemingly a contradiction with the Turkey hunter discussing how smart and beautiful the turkey is. The immediate question to ask is “Then why are you killing them?” But Morris lets it go, and as we see more of the hunter, we see that it’s too late for him to get a new hobby, a new lifestyle.

Kurt Vonnegut said “Life is no way to treat an animal.” As much as I like that quote, I think it’s equally applicable to humans.

If you want to see the political ads that Dr. Campbell mentioned, go to http://www.errolmorris.com/content/election04/main.html