Film After Film - J. Hoberman

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Glass’s now axiomatic angst-drone, the movie allows the still-formidable octogenarian to reveal what he was taught by the Cuban missile crisis (“we came that close—that close!—to war”) and to detail his lesser-known experiences as contributor to the World War II firebombing of Japan and later, pioneer of the automobile seat belt.

      Once upon a time, McNamara personified the military industrial complex. A stellar technocrat and a brilliant efficiency expert, this so-called walking IBM machine went from running the giant Ford Motor Company (the first non-family member to do so) to administering the even more colossal US Defense Department (where he was similarly credited with putting the Pentagon under civilian control).

      The young McNamara was the most iconic of Kennedy’s New Frontiersmen. His bulldog look—slicked-back hair, rimless glasses—and arrogant pugnacity made him a star. Four decades before Donald Rumsfeld, McNamara invented his successor’s steely smile and jaunty certitude, which is only one reason why The Fog of War is almost ridiculously relevant. Vietnam is the war that remains to be resolved. Senator John Kerry, the leading Democratic challenger to George W. Bush, established his integrity as a decorated and wounded Vietnam vet who became an outspoken—and consequently vilified—opponent of the war. Bush, on the other hand, used his family privilege to secure alternate service in the National Guard and then dodged even that when it proved inconvenient.

      Distressingly, Morris generally allows McNamara to put his own spin on the Vietnam War. Following a line advanced by Oliver Stone among others, McNamara suggests that Kennedy was waiting until after the 1964 election in order to disengage from South Vietnam and blames Lyndon Johnson for the debacle. But Johnson’s White House tapes—which is to say, the phone calls that he bugged for posterity and which were released in 1997—tell a different story. In one of the first, made six months after Johnson became president, McNamara invokes the verdict of history in warning his new boss that the US can’t allow itself to be “pushed out of Vietnam.” That summer, the exaggerated and bungled Gulf of Tonkin “incident,” which The Fog of War acknowledges without pressing McNamara on his long years of dissembling about it, served to stampede the Congress into supporting Johnson’s policy.3

      While McNamara several times broaches the subject of war crimes and appears prepared to re-examine his own mistakes, he’s remarkably unwilling to accept any personal responsibility. If McNamara does not come across as a grandstanding prevaricator like Henry Kissinger, one may still well wonder how so brilliant a man can claim to have been ignorant of certain historical dynamics (the antipathy between Vietnam and China, for example) readily available to any moderately aware high school student in 1966. On the other hand, one may also be amazed to hear the octogenarian powerhouse suddenly launch into a criticism of US unilateralism. Curiously, that aside seemed to resonate more positively with American than foreign critics.

      A skeptical review in Le Monde accused Morris of demonstrating too much sympathy for the devil. More than providing the satanic former secretary with an all-to-human face however, The Fog of War offers additional evidence that the road to hell—or at least, the way to Dogville—is paved with good intentions.

      Opening as it did in many American cities on the same December weekend as The Return of the King, pundits might have been pardoned for subtitling Morris’s movie, “Robert McNamara and the Ring of Power”—particularly as the wrinkled and bony former Secretary of Defense appeared as a sort of animated, Gollumized husk of his younger self. Although clearly and profoundly corrupted by power, McNamara was the only senior American official to ever admit to an error under the coercion of his own conscience alone. In their year-end meetings, the various US critics’ conclaves saw more than a few votes for Best Actor cast in favor of an elderly neophyte. McNamara’s bad teeth and liver-spots notwithstanding, the beauty of The Fog of War is entirely skin deep. McNamara concedes that mistakes were made but when asked why he didn’t speak out against the war, he can only take refuge in his anguish: “I am not going to say any more than I have.” As the Frodologists of the ’60s might have put it, the former secretary carried the Ring of Power to the rim of Mount Doom, but refused to throw it in.

      In another sort of Vietnam flashback, on August 27, five months into the Iraq War, the Pentagon held the first of several informational screenings of The Battle of Algiers. As the Pentagon flier put it: “Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafés. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar?” The last half of The Battle of Algiers illustrates the flier’s hook: “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas.” French reaction is personified by the newly arrived Col. Mathieu who accepts the mission of demolishing the revolutionary FLN. “There are 80,000 Arabs in the casbah‚” he tells his men. “Are they all against us? We know they are not. In reality, it is only a small minority that dominates with terror and violence. This minority is our adversary and we must isolate and destroy it.” How familiar that must have sounded!

      Mathieu’s campaign is successful but—as he, more than anyone else in the movie, realizes—history belongs to the FLN. At one point he turns on a press conference full of hostile French journalists and forces them to clarify their own privileged positions. “I would now like to ask you a question: Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer ‘yes,’ then you must accept all the necessary consequences.” A montage of Algerians subject to torture follows. This, one imagines, was the key moment of the Pentagon’s Battle of Algiers. To succeed, the American occupation must consign such abuses to the Ba’athist past—indeed, the rationale for the invasion of Iraq long ago shifted from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction to his dungeons of horror. But didn’t the invasion itself demonstrate that, in the war against terrorism, all means are available?

      NEW YORK, JULY 2, 2003

      “The future has not been written …” the young narrator solemnly muses at the beginning of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. That’s true enough—although in the pre-sold universe of summer entertainment, the box-office brawn of this Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle is as close to a given as the laws of gravity.

      If it’s Terminator time, there must be a Republican president running for re-election. Appearing unheralded on the eve of the 1984 election, the original Arnold Schwarzenegger robot opera, directed by then unknown James Cameron and featuring the most compelling Frankenstein monster in fifty years, provided a dystopian alternative to the Reaganite “new morning.” Released as Bush I girded his loins in the summer of the New World Order 1991, Cameron’s vastly inflated, post–Desert Storm T2: Judgment Day resurrected the president’s fitness adviser as a kinder, gentler killer cyborg. (T2 was for a time the most expensive movie ever made; Cameron modestly described it as “the first action movie advocating world peace.”)

      There are no term limits on sequels, and now, as the Bush II juggernaut gets ready to roll, der Arnold—once hailed by Time as “the most potent symbol” of Hollywood’s “worldwide dominance”—returns to save the world, or at least the designated world-savior, the now grown John Connor (Nick Stahl). Soreheads will note that this JC becomes humanity’s leader either by mistake or through a strategic deception—but so what? Cameron, meanwhile, has bequeathed the franchise to director Jonathan Mostow, author of the submarine thriller U-571 and evidently a man with far less baggage. Where Judgment Day exhibited the profligate sprawl of a military operation, the leaner, less grandiose Rise of the Machines has the feel of a single Hummer careening through an earthquake in downtown Burbank.

      Dispatched once more on a mission from the future, the latest model of the Arnold android materializes in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Born naked and flexing into this world, he makes his now traditional foray to an unsuspecting human watering hole; in short order he denudes a snippy male stripper of his fetishistic glad rags to re-create his own ultra-butch image. Somewhat less paternal here than he was in T2, Schwarzenegger is in fine, which is to say humorously ponderous, form. His refurbished Terminator remains an unsocialized machine—if not without a certain professional pride. Referred to disparagingly as a “robot,” he’s quick to correct: “I’m a cybernetic organism.”

      The first two Terminator movies projected a sort of muscle feminism in the person of Nautilized Linda Hamilton’s warrior woman. But this time around, despite Claire Danes’s intermittent facility with

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