This weekend Diane and I saw the Oscar-winning documentary The Fog of War, the latest film from Errol Morris (left) about former Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara (right). I'm trying to decide what I think about it.

There can be no question that the film is masterfully made. The intense visual representations (the dominos, the skulls, the juxtapositioning of Japanese city names with names of US cities) blend superbly with Philip Glass' score to entrance the viewer.

But something bothers me about this movie. My main question as I came out was this: Suppose someone (let's call him Fred) believed that the Vietnam War (and war in general) was fundamentally just -- but that we made some mistakes about how we undertook it. Suppose Fred came out of the movie feeling that McNamara was basically a decent guy, who has learned from his mistakes and wants to make sure we don't repeat those mistakes again (say, in Iraq). Does the filmmaker have any responsibility for this erroneous feeling?

I'm well known (and widely criticized) for preferring message to subtlety (although I don't believe a movie can excel if it contains neither). Ergo, I didn't care much for Morris' Fast, Cheap and Out of Control because it felt very undirected. On the other hand, I did enjoy -- very much -- this approach in his examination of Hawking's life and theories in Brief History of Time; probably because those questions are so fundamentally unanswerable (for now, anyway) that the director has no role in guiding the discussion (and if he did, there's no way he could match wits with Hawking).

But in Thin Blue Line, Morris is not absent from the discussion -- he presents the case without explicit prejudice -- and yet the director is commenting; he must. There is obviously an injustice at play, and Morris recognizes his need to counter the prosecution's contention (and that of the loonies who testified against the innocent guy) that the wrong man had done the deed. Because Morris stepped up to the plate, an innocent man was released from prison.

Obviously, Fog of War is a very different movie, with very different goals. This film is much more about the psychology of this one individual, and in many ways Morris does a very good job of letting McNamara dig his own hole. (Insert Chemical Brothers reference here.) But I still think Morris left some of his job undone. I went looking for commentary, that I might better crystallize my thoughts; mostly I found glowing reviews (the Tomatometer is at a whopping 98%). I sought out opinions that clash with the chorus of wild applause; they've helped me figure out what I think is wrong.

Jonathan Rosenbaum makes an interesting point about the style of the movie, although I'm not sure I fully agree.

[O]ne might question the use of meditating on Robert McNamara as opposed to thinking analytically and critically about him. If we meditate on charts and figures or feel existential dread about them without even knowing what they say, there's a danger that we'll think we're doing something serious just by gaping at what's in front of us. The same thing applies to gaping at McNamara even when we know what he's saying, in part because of the high gloss of that chugging Glass music.

Again, I'm not totally on board with this; I believe there is a use in watching the flashing charts (and hearing the lying man) and thinking critically later. A much more significant point is made by Colin Speaker.

McNamara, even with only a sentence or two on a particular issue, gives the audience plenty of material to think about well after the film has ended. Yet Morris, in an off-camera questioning style that reminds you of a presidential debate crossed with old home video narration, usually fails to follow up on McNamara’s thought-provoking comments. Instead, Morris is content to allow the material to speak for itself, even when McNamara’s remarks beg for a response.

This, I think is my biggest problem -- as in Blue Line, the filmmaker has a responsibility to correct the lies put forth by one side. It doesn't have to be dogmatic or even very visible; and when the truth isn't clear, obviously the audience should decide for itself. But in some cases, the lie should be called out.

Case in point: McNamara at one point admits that if the US had lost WWII, he and other officials would have been hanged as war criminals. He asks why that's the way it happened, and the visuals sort of trail off into a Koyaanisqatsi-esque montage. But this isn't a vague or unanswerable question -- as Chomsky has pointed out, there's a very specific answer to McNamara's question.

How did they decide what was a war crime at Nuremberg and Tokyo? And the answer is pretty simple. and not very pleasant. There was a criterion. Kind of like an operational criterion. If the enemy had done it and couldn't show that we had done it, then it was a war crime. So like bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a war crime because we had done more of it than the Germans and the Japanese. So that wasn't a war crime. You want to turn Tokyo into rubble? So much rubble you can't even drop an atom bomb there because nobody will see anything if you do, which is the real reason they didn't bomb Tokyo. That's not a war crime because we did it.

So that's historic record that Morris could have -- should have -- known about. Did he have a responsibility to call McNamara on it? Or should we let the audience -- once again -- flail about on their own, left to discover this bit of info in some obscure Chomsky speech (or referenced in some shlub's blog)?

In a review for The Nation, Eric Alterman claims that the movie presents McNamara as the dove and Johnson as the hawk; whereas Alterman believes -- in accordance with the popular conception -- that Johnson was undecided and McNamara was the hawk. This distinction is important, I know; but there are deeper issues for me. Morris has responded to Alterman's claim on the movie's website (a Flash site -- thank you for making it difficult to quote text), saying in part:

It is not my intention to exonerate McNamara for his involvement in the planning of the Vietnam War. What I do intend is to help correct a common misconception that President Johnson was bullied into a war that he had no intention of fighting. . . . What do you do if you serve a bellicose President who wants to go to war no matter what? What protections are provided for this contingency within our system of government? What recourse does a cabinet member have if he disagrees with the President's policies? Should he go to Congress? To the public? Or, should he stay and try to change policy within the government?

What he seems to say here is that he believes that McNamara "disagree[d] with the President's policies," and that he needed "protections," or at the very least did what he did because of a sense of duty. Morris is indeed heard asking McNamara why -- if he didn't agree with Johnson -- he didn't protest, especially once he'd left the cabinet.

But as I said, there are deeper issues at play. I don't believe that McNamara's actions call for this kind of simple "inside the system/outside the system" discussion (more suitable, perhaps, for someone at the EPA). If your boss is committing war crimes, and you can't stop him, you leave. Period.

I know this is very black-and-white, and Fog would be a very different movie if Morris painted it this way. I guess I'm coming at the project as a teacher; I'm thinking about young people watching this film (or really, anyone who doesn't have a comprehensive understanding of the record and its nuances). I believe the filmmaker has a duty to clear up what can be cleared up, rather than just putting it all in the kettle and letting it simmer. (Note again please that I say "what can be cleared up" -- I recognize that many, many parts of the discussion do not apply.)

Alxander Cockburn points out that some of these points can and should be clarified, especially with regard to the assassination of Diem and the Gulf of Tonkin.

In fact I.F. Stone offered a remarkably accurate account of what really happened in the edition of his Weekly dated August 24, 1964. It shouldn't have been beyond Morris's powers to pull up that, or a piece by Robert Scheer, published in the Los Angeles Times in April, 1985, establishing not only that the Maddox was attacked neither on August 2 nor 4 but that, beginning on the night of July 30, South Vietnamese navy personnel, US-trained and -equipped, "had begun conducting secret raids on targets in North Vietnam."

Cockburn also points out that McNamara was not in any way opposed to stockpiling nukes, despite his current protestations that "there can be no learning curve with nuclear weapons."

Defense Secretary McNamara ordered the production of 1,000 Minuteman strategic nukes, this at a time when he was looking at US intelligence reports showing that the Soviets had one silo with one untested missile.

I think of it like this: If General Wiranto (who was responsible for massive violence in East Timor) went on camera and talked about how Allan Nairn and Amy Goodman had been inciting the crowd in the Santa Cruz cemetery to violence, would it suffice to let the lie pass? Or would the filmmaker have a responsibility to correct the record? Isn't Fog now part of the record, albeit one starring an unreliable narrator?

Ruth Rosen makes a very good point in her review at ThinkingPeace.com:

McNamara blames the "fog of war" for the mistakes and misperceptions that led to and sustained the war in Vietnam. But it was not the fog of war that killed 58,000 American soldiers and 3 million Vietnamese people. It was the fog of power that kept senior officials from admitting they were wrong.

In closing, I want to make it clear again that I did indeed enjoy this movie. My overall review would be positive -- I think it's an important story and well-told in nearly every respect. I will see it again. (TPCQ: "It was much better than Cats.") There is indeed a place for non-judgmental documentary, as Diane reminds me, and I was enthralled by this exploration of McNamara's sociopathy. (Kind of a "Non-Beautiful Mind".) I can't endorse it uncritically or without reservation, but I do endorse it.

Epilogue

In the course of my research (for funk's sake -- who does this much research for a stinkin' blog read by five people?), I came across an interview in which Chomsky responds to McNamara's book In Retrospect. It seems an appropriate note on which to end.

Q: Long before McNamara wrote this book you had compared him to Lenin. What did you mean by that?

A: I compared some passages of articles of his in the late 1960s, speeches, on management and the necessity of management, how a well-managed society controlled from above was the ultimate in freedom. The reason is if you have really good management and everything's under control and people are told what to do, under those conditions, he said, man can maximize his potential. I just compared that with standard Leninist views on vanguard parties, which are about the same. About the only difference is that McNamara brought God in, and I suppose Lenin didn't bring God in. He brought Marx in.

I haven't been able to find any comments from Chomsky about the movie itself. If/when I do, be sure they'll appear in this space.

TimeWaster™

Check out the trailer at apple.com. (Quicktime)

Today I'm listening to: Ascend!