April 07, 2004
Dark Side of the Mind
Time for another movie review, everybody! Whee! Get funky! It's Robert McNamara, in the house!
Robert McNamara tries to know Vietnam for the first time
By Aaron Mesh
Published in the March 31-April 5 issue of the Pulse
Errol Morris is a big geek, the sort of guy who gets so lost in his own head that he forgets to modulate his voice when he speaks, and ends up shouting a lot. So it’s an intriguing paradox that Morris makes documentaries about the limits of reason, about people who discover that their minds aren’t big enough to control the shifting ambiguities of the world. He’s profiled a lion tamer, a topiary gardener and, most recently, an electric chair designer who became convinced the Holocaust never happened, because the Auschwitz gas-chamber construction didn’t match his own theories on execution.
Robert S. McNamara, the former United States secretary of defense who oversaw much of the Vietnam War, is hardly the sort of eccentric that Morris usually examines. But early in “The Fog of War,” Morris’ haunting set of interviews with McNamara, it becomes clear that the powerful cabinet member gazed over the brink of insanity as much as anyone. A Berkeley philosophy major with a head for logic, McNamara soon found himself calculating formulas for firebombing Tokyo, and arguing with John F. Kennedy about the security risks inherent to blowing Cuba off the face of the earth. He tells a story about a phone call with Fidel Castro years after the Cuban missile crisis. He asked the dictator if he knew the consequences of a nuclear war, and if he ever talked to Nikita Krushchev about those effects. Yes, Castro said, he knew that nuclear war would mean the horrific destruction of his country. And he told Kruschev to bomb America anyway.
Robert McNamara is 85 years old now, and he tells such stories with a mixture of boyish exuberance, ingrained arrogance and overwhelming regret. He talks to Morris through a device called the “Interrotron,” which allows him to stare directly into the camera while he speaks. His ruminations would be fascinating enough unadorned, but Morris frames the interviews with disquieting visuals. This is not a typical Cold War documentary, with clichéd footage of soldiers marching through rice patties. It feels less like a rehash of past events, and more like a vision of some awful mechanistic future, with pilots shielding their eyes from the fiery orange explosions of their own nuclear tests. The impression is of a society so impressed by shiny gadgets – Morris uncovers a hilarious Ford commercial featuring cartoon cars delivered by comets – that no one realizes that the technology is slipping beyond human understanding. It’s almost unsurprising when McNamara remembers Petagon officials speculating that Russians were about to test weapons of mass destruction on the far side of the moon. When McNamara declares that “rationality will not save us,” the observation has the cold ring of wisdom.
This truth hits hardest in a sequence where McNamara recalls helping cigar-chomping general Curtis LeMay orchestrate the firebombing of Japan during World War II. Morris flashes images of ruined cities on the screen in rapid succession, along with the names of similarly-sized American towns. (McNamara makes special mention that Toyama, a city “the size of Chattanooga,” lost 99 percent of its buildings.) And Morris provides another visual, one that lingers in my head long after the film is over: the sight of numbers, endless calculations deliberated by McNamara, raining down on Tokyo like syllogisms from Hell.
Recounting these horrors is clearly a wrenching experience for McNamara, a man whose former confidence in his own judgment is now bookended by a creeping certainty that he was a war criminal. At the end of “The Fog of War,” he takes a measure of solace in lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding”: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” But Morris’ disturbing implication here, as in all of his superb films, is that no journey can grant the human mind an adequate understanding of how to live. The thickest fog is in our own minds, he says, and it will not lift.