Its another post on The Fog of War because I’m really enjoying this movie! Anyway, I took it with me when I went to visit my fiancée and his family for Easter, and made him watch it with me. This was good for me since I got to see the first hour or so of the movie again. So I thought my fiancée would really like this movie since it focuses a lot on war, and he was in the Air Force ROTC all through college; while he’s decided to go into the armed forces, all of his college friends now serve in some branch of the armed forces. So before the movie begins, I’m telling him what it’s about so he’ll be prepared. “It has some action, like, there are scenes of old war footage and stuff, but it’s basically an interview with Robert McNamara.” “You mean the idiot from the Vietnam war?” This, I’ll admit surprised me a bit, since I’d never heard McNamara called an idiot before, not that he comes up often in every-day conversations. Naturally, I wanted to know why McNamara was an idiot, so I asked. “Because, he tried to apply math and formulas to war.” Now, my fiancée is also and engineer, so he loves his math and equations and all things that I, as an English major, don’t really understand. “Well, what’s wrong with equations and war?” This makes sense to me – its wrong to apply math to a situation where millions of human lives hang in the balance, and I expect my fiancée to say this, especially because several of his friends are currently serving in Iraq. But, no. He says “because there are too many variables in war, so you can’t come up with an equation for it.” Um, okay. I’m convinced this isn’t Morris’s point of view, especially in light of one scene halfway through the film, where you can’t tell if the people and city Morris shows while McNamara is talking about killing millions of people is in Japan or in America. I think Morris is saying very clearly, “you can’t turn people into numbers, into an equation.” Maybe for McNamara and my fiancée it’s a math thing. Maybe its an armed forces thing – you know its war and you know what you’re getting yourself into, so you better be prepared to die, or maybe its something else that I can’t figure out. I’m also having a hard time figuring out the organization of this movie. When I watch it, it makes perfect sense, but when I think about it later, it doesn’t make so much sense to me. Also, Morris is doing some pretty blatant cuts during McNamara’s speech, which makes me wonder if Morris is manipulating his conversation. Yet, the short conversation between Morris and McNamara at the beginning of the film seems like its there to show that McNamara frequently said things that either directly addressed Morris or suddenly went of topic, and he expected Morris to edit it out and fix it later. This doesn’t seem to be the case in any other of Morris’s movies (not that I’ve seen them all, so its possible it takes place in Mr. Death), so I’m sure there must be a good reason for it, I just wish I knew what that reason was!