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EAVESDROPPING ON DESTRUCTION
the fog of war
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ROBERT S MCNAMARA WAS INTIMATELY INVOLVED IN SOME OF THE KEY HISTORICAL MOMENTS OF THE PAST HALF CENTURY.
IN THE FOG OF WAR, RENOWNED
DOCUMENTARY MAKER ERROL MORRIS TURNS HIS CAMERA ON HIM - WITH STARTLING RESULTS. MARTIN DONNELLY REPORTS.
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Along with his countryman Michael Moore, Errol Morris has done more to counter the notion that documentaries are solemn, dry and forbidding, than almost anyone else (tellingly, Morris prefers the term ‘non-fiction’). His work prides itself on being approachable and entertaining; watching it, you have the rare sense of being taught something that is worth knowing. He’s always interesting (and interested), never faintly boring or condescending. You feel he’d be an ideal person to find yourself sitting next to at dinner.
This affability doubtless endears Morris to his subjects, both encouraging them to open up to him and enabling him to interview some tricky (not to say downright elusive) characters, all with their own highly subjective versions of the truth. But none more so than in his latest feature, The Fog of War, which presents a study of Robert S McNamara, one of the most controversial figures in US political history.
According to Morris, his film is “a 20th-century fable, a story of an American dreamer who rose from humble origins to the heights of political power”. Certainly, McNamara was both a witness to and a participant in many of the crucial events of the 20th century, from the crippling Depression of the thirties, through the rapid industrialisation of the war years when, as a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force, he helped oversee the development of a different kind of warfare, based on supremacy in the air. This theory which, thanks to the close relationship between McNamara and US General Curtis LeMay, saw the firebombing of 67 Japanese cities, killing nearly one million civilians, including 100,000 in Tokyo on a single night in March 1945. This, Morris takes care to emphasise, occurred before the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet has barely featured since in official Western histories of the war.
For Morris, The Fog of War furnishes the most gravely serious subject-matter yet and, as such, marks another stage in the long, painstaking refinement of his craft. He made his film debut in 1978 with Gates of Heaven, a documentary about a pet cemetery in Los Angeles, the creatures buried there and the owners that mourned them. But he first gained serious attention a decade later with The Thin Blue Line, a mesmerising inquiry into the shooting of a Texas police officer and the subsequent life sentence handed to one of the two men accused, a youth named Randall Adams, on evidence that seemed, at best, piecemeal and circumstantial. (The other man in the car, meanwhile, one David Harris, seemed to be in the middle of a full-blown crime-spree, and himself ended up on Death Row for a separate offence). The film’s huge international success prompted a re-evaluation of the case and succeeded, finally, in getting the conviction overturned and Adams released.
With its heavily stylised re-enactments of the crime, accompanied by a hypnotic score (courtesy of composer Philip Glass), the film announced Morris’ desire to break with the traditional restrictions of screen documentary, and it’s a path that he’s followed in his subsequent work: A Brief History of Time (1991), which attempted to represent the mental processes as well as the theories of crippled physicist Stephen J Hawking; while in 1997, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control drew parallels between four apparently disparate individuals - a topiary gardener, a circus lion-tamer, an animal-behaviour scientist and a professor of robotics at MIT. From these, Morris advanced some fascinating theories on the passing of time, the human need for community and the nature of consciousness. Then there was Mr Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred Leuchter Jr. (1999), a remarkable study of a world-famous designer of execution equipment, who found himself coerced into the neo-Nazi movement.
Along the way, Morris has refined his methods, notably through his use of the ‘interrotron’, a system involving two-way mirrors and television monitors, which allows a subject to be interviewed by the director and yet seem, at the same time, as if he or she is speaking directly to camera. This technique serves him especially well in The Fog of War, enabling an extraordinary intimacy with the normally reserved Robert McNamara.
In examining McNamara’s WWII legacy, Morris’ film calls into question one of the most basic of all assumptions: that the war was a ‘just’ one, in which the Allies fought on the side of good. No one can deny the evil of Nazism nor the need for freedom and democracy to prevail, but McNamara himself poses a series of moral questions about his own decisions regarding Japan, about the actions of his government and, by implication, about the entire Allied role in winning the war against that Imperial nation by any means necessary.
“In order to win a war,” he asks, “is a nation justified in killing 100,000 civilians in one night?” The flipside to the question is hardly easier to resolve: Would it be more appropriate not to burn to death those Japanese civilians, but instead to lose hundreds of thousands of American lives in an invasion of Japan?
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