The looking Glass
Robert McNamara and Philip Glass give Errol Morris's Fog of War the sounds of apocalypse.

By Susan Gerhard

 

FACED WITH THE unspeakable, say, the killing of 100,000 civilians in one night of firebombing in Japan, an artist could be excused for choosing not to speak. Or at least for not using speech as the primary means of expression. Werner Herzog drew his Lessons of Darkness about the Gulf War in blazing orange fire, set it to music by Mahler, Wagner, and Verdi, and used his own reflections on the otherworldly destruction of Kuwait's oil fields mostly as footnotes. Bruce Conner let Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley's synth-y, hypnotic score do the talking in Crossroads* while he harvested the horror of the 1946 underwater A-bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean's Bikini Atoll. Even Michael Moore, never one to put a muzzle on it, reached for his Louis Armstrong to spread an ironic smile over an American imperialism clip show he inserted into Bowling for Columbine.

You certainly can't blame Errol Morris for offering up Philip Glass's assertive soundtrack as a fig leaf for Robert McNamara as he stands naked in a survey of a half century of horrific war footage he had some part in creating. Morris's primary challenge in The Fog of War: 11 Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, the documentary about the frightening fallibility, the terrible inevitability of the American war machine, is that he doesn't just have images of chemical warfare, missiles dropping, nations destroyed. He also has a speaker, a practiced one, to explain and reflect and second-guess – to, in essence, misdirect. Which may be why Morris gives this former secretary of defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson so much room to speak, even when he's evading; it's Glass who gives us the real interpretation. Glass's take comes through loud and clear in wind and strings: be afraid, be very afraid.

The fear is pungent in an opening sequence that plays dread notes over the cheerful choreography of sailors sighting targets and hopping to their stations. That the naval footage comes off as stagey camp – a connection to the TV cute-ification of military reality – only makes Glass's music feel all the more anxious, a distillation of decades of anger made tougher by its origins in optimism. Only seconds before the sequence, the archival McNamara, clean shaven and touchingly nervous, is setting up a press conference in which he will undoubtedly tell major lies. And though what he actually says may not matter too much in the end, McNamara is the main event, the reason we're assembling around this campfire of a film, because he will speak the unspeakable and do it in great, sacrilegiously amusing, detail.

His narration is unreliable at times, like those of other big docs of the past 12 months, and meant to be witnessed as hindsight – not exactly 20-20, but foggy, like the windshield of the car McNamara drives in the last segment or the opaque eyeglass lens Morris closes in on near the end. He is a war criminal in a state of self-reformation, perhaps: Robert, whose middle name is "Strange" (Morris lets us know in the humanizing segment of the film), McNamara is now strange indeed – his face existing on-screen the way so many of Morris's faces live there, as sculpture. This one's a Mt. Rushmore crumbling, with teeth half rotted and askew, as if it were about to fall over and crush a small family looking up from below. He is the empire declining. We came "this close," he says, fingers squeezed nearly together, to nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What saved us, McNamara says, was luck.

"Luck" is an interesting pivot in this film, because the point being made by Glass's methodical music and the collages Morris matches to it is that Americans have long fetishized the machine and the standardized surety that supposedly comes with it, the means of avoiding the pitfalls of relying on luck. When the screen isn't filled with the face of the man nicknamed an "IBM machine with legs," it's filled with other representations of the machine: bombing machines, driving machines, text from machines, IBM punch card-sorting machines, machines that make the machines. McNamara's biggest gig before entering public service was working for Henry Ford; he helped make a safer car through statistics. He wants us to know he saved people before he transferred his expertise in efficiency toward finding better ways of killing them, by delivering bombs.

McNamara is the robot who almost comes to life as a human in front of the camera (actually in front of Morris's filmmaking robot, his Interrotron interviewing machine). One the one hand, McNamara sheds a tear for Kennedy, whom he believes would have saved us from the epic Vietnam War, but is icily stony about what happened under his watch there. On Agent Orange, which he ludicrously claims was only later seen as "toxic": "I would never in the world have authorized an illegal action; I'm not really sure I authorized Agent Orange. I don't remember it. But it certainly occurred while I was secretary."

Clearly, "safety first" was never McNamara's motto. His statistics suggested the best way to get the most firebombs dropped on Japan during WWII was to bring the planes down from their safe-flying height to closer proximity to their targets, leaving more dead on the ground as well as in the air. Still, it's amazing to watch an ex-public official even begin to question his actions, and McNamara does more than that. He implicates himself in war crimes. When McNamara explains that those firebombs did their job, decimating the country, followed by two nuclear bombs, he issues the understatement of the century. "Killing 50 to 90 percent of the people in 67 Japanese cities, then bombing them with two nuclear bombs, is not proportional in the minds of some people to the objectives we were trying to achieve." Yet he then plainly states that he and Gen. Curtis LeMay, who ordered the bombings, "were behaving as war criminals."

There's hope in that last admission, and Morris and Glass try to hit a few happy notes. The picture's so grim that even McNamara's apocalyptic musing gives one reason for optimism: "The combination of the fallibility of humans and nuclear weapons will destroy nations." Morris wants his subject to be able to come across as a reformed warmonger, yet McNamara – ever aware of the legacy-making implications of this interview – keeps backpedaling from taking responsibility for his own deeds.

Why did Morris let him? There may be a perverse logic to documentaries these days, where the defying of audience expectations almost demands that the "average" person get mocked while the "great" get more than fair play. Think back to Morris's own 1999 character Mr. Death, a man who designed execution chambers and believed the Holocaust was a hoax. He is barely humanized by Morris, but count it up: how many deaths did Mr. Death actually order?

That Morris engages McNamara on an intellectual level could be seen as falling prey to a spell. Jay Rosenblatt chose another direction altogether – ridicule – to comment on those "great men" responsible for murder in his 1998 film Human Remains. The bizarre personal habits of Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Stalin are contrasted with their frightening public habits, raising the question of how such men can dote over, for instance, a grandchild while engaged in wholesale murder.

Morris, on the other hand, never doubts whether one of the "great men" behind so much misery can be human. The way Morris films it, Robert Strange McNamara, a fragile, elderly statesman, is most definitely a member of the species – he's got the wrinkled skin to prove it. Hey, we even get an anecdote about his grade school; top of the class, as always. But numbers – the ones he mined and sometimes mismanaged – couldn't save McNamara from doing great harm. With Glass by his side, creating a soundtrack that is brain-splittingly tense with fear and awe, Morris wants us to recognize just how much damage humans like us can do.

'The Fog of War' opens Fri/23 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.