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<\/em> and An Inconvenient Truth<\/em> have all fit this description and succeeded with their formulas. Morris\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 film succeeded as well, garnering an Academy Award. But The Fog of War<\/em> 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mouth, but he never tells his audience what we should think of the man. It is the audience\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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<\/em> has very close ties to the themes of Morris\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 previous films, whether they are technical, structural, or philosophical.<\/font><\/p>\n There are a few elements of Morris\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 filmmaking that stand out. As seen previously in Fast Cheap and Out of Control<\/em>, 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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<\/em> 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 <\/font>The Third <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n McNamara\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s relationship with Curtis Lemay seems similar to Dave Hoover\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, the wild animal trainer who was inspired and motivated by Clyde Beatty in FCOOC<\/em>. 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<\/em> where David Harris admits his guilt. Kennedy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s recordings always have pictures of them around the table, and it offers a greater amount of comfort than Johnson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s disembodied drawl. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/font><\/p>\n 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 score, I wrote in a previous post about the minimalist composer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/font><\/p>\n My final major comparison to Morris\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 previous works is to the film Mr. Death<\/em>, 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 Numbers are McNamara\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s real joy, and they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s earliest memory is victory celebrations for World War One, and he recalls that Woodrow Wilson referred to it as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The war to end all wars.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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.<\/font><\/p>\n So many of McNamara\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stories are about numbers, whether it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Belief and seeing are often both wrong,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d where a battleship captain uses indefinite language concerning a torpedo attack. When asked if it actually did happen in the transmission, the captain says \u00e2\u20ac\u0153No doubt about that\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6I think.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Wishy-washiness runs rampant.<\/font><\/p>\n 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s truly at stake for Lemay and him.<\/font><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153wiz kid,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153self made,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153efficient,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153studious\u00e2\u20ac\u009d are displayed. When he is about to be fired \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Dictator,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153no good,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fascist,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and of course \u00e2\u20ac\u0153McNamara\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s War\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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.<\/font><\/p>\n 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, <\/font>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. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153My wife may have ultimately died from the stress\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6but it was the best years of our lives and we all benefited from it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Those words truly strike me as coming from someone who has more than a problem with which adjectives are appropriate to use.<\/font><\/p>\n 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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.<\/font><\/p>\n When Morris asks at the end of the film why McNamara never spoke out against Morris uses cinematic examples of contradictions similar to the language paradoxes I discussed earlier. He shows modern shots city streets in America, Japan, and 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.<\/p>\n BLOG REVIEW<\/p>\n Nathan<\/a> points out an important fact in his blog post on Fast Cheap and Out Of Control. The importance of peoples\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re the naked mole rat scientist rather than the president\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right hand man\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6.there you probably need to think things more thoroughly.<\/p>\n In her post about Errol Morris\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 movie posters, Serena<\/a> 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 PUNisher<\/a> manages to hit on something that was definitely on Morris\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153 Of course, Morris edits the film to make it seem like they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re rambling.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Robert S. McNamara says in one scene that he learned not to answer the questions he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Are you doing that to me!?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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.<\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t like writing dense pieces, so if this seems more like an Entertainment Weekly review than one of our FTC Articles, my apologies. After Robert McNamara is appointed Secretary of Defense by John F. Kennedy, he is in a … Continue reading
\nMan.<\/span><\/em><\/font> There the Dutch Angle was used at times where a character was dishonest or not being straight. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Morris\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 way to be skeptical of McNamara without coming out and saying it to either him or to the audience.<\/font>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.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/us.movies1.yimg.com\/movies.yahoo.com\/images\/hv\/photo\/movie_pix\/sony_pictures_classics\/the_fog_of_war\/robert_mcnamara\/fog3.jpg\")
<\/span><\/p>\n
\nVietnam. 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.<\/font><\/p>\n
\n<\/font><\/p>\n
\nVietnam if he was so against Johnson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s policies, the man declines saying \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know how inflammatory my words can be.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d There seems to be an understanding that words are a powerful force and can in fact hurt and lead to death and disappointment.
\nBut 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
\nVietnam. 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.<\/font><\/p>\n
\nVietnam 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s equally non-traditional documentary Koyaanisqatsi<\/em>, which translates as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Life out of balance,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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<\/em> it does still obtain some of the deeper philosophical issues at play. Issues that we can observe in all of Morris\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 films.<\/font><\/p>\n
\n![\"Fog](\"http:\/\/www.sidharths.com\/fogofwar.jpg\")
\nYes Serena, Ebert\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s there too. I think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/p>\n