The view of a hawk
The Fog of War dir. Errol Morris, takes as its subject former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a man described as an IBM machine on legs, and a coldly rational hawk held responsible by many for pushing Lyndon Johnson into the Vietnam War. Errol Morris certainly offers a more complex perspective on the man. McNamara’s reflections on the processes by which the US drew itself into a war he now clearly regards as a mistake, have a startlingly direct message for the current course of US foreign policy. At one point McNamara says apropos of Vietnam, ‘If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better re-examine our reasoning’.
The more fundamental problem that both McNamara and the film confront is ultimately to do with how one can know the truth. What means do we have at our disposal to understand and interpret the world around us, and how can we know if they are adequate guides to action? This is a defining problem for all documentary film, expressed in the tension between the idea that the cinema can in some simple or direct sense ‘document’ reality or even the truth, and its status as film, that is, as an aesthetic and creative work of mediation. It is also a defining problem for McNamara. His speciality was the statistical analysis of data, the extraction of a clear numerical picture out of the messy blur of lived experience, representing the world through numbers. His analysis of the failure rates of bombing missions over Japan in the Second World War led to fire-bombing raids that killed over a million Japanese; an act he concedes would have been prosecuted as a war crime had the Allies lost the war. His obvious distress during this discussion invites the interpretation that he now feels that a statistical picture of reality is not an adequate basis for action (or as he puts it ‘rationality alone won’t save us’).
What is remarkable about this film is the way that Morris is able to manifest these tensions (‘objective’ documentation versus ‘subjective’ aestheticism, ‘rational’ statistical analysis versus human cost) in a single image: the view from a bomber as it flies over the burning ruins of Tokyo dropping not bombs, but numbers, statistics. This is not a ‘documentary’ image, but it captures what is essential about documentary: not