Frim

The Fog of War is a very timely exploration of rationality: of its potential to solve our problems and of its limits.

On paper, it is a dry, political interview documentary. On screen, it is an engaging, aesthetically hypnotizing, quick-witted chase through the last 50 years of American military engagement.

The documentary is timely in that it seems obvious that the specific rationalistic, materialistic suite of problem-solving techniques that we inherited from Plato, honed through the industrial revolution, and which is appropriately and compellingly embodied in the personal character of Robert McNamara, saturates the minds of the power-players and the policy-makers in America today.

As the film calls into question the ruling philosophy of our country, it simultaneously exists as a rather experiential take on exploration itself. It’s not a book, after all, but a film, and it makes its points by subtle suggestion and provocative juxtapositions. In this sense, it is a distinctly post-modern comment on the state of our country and world; and there could be no more fitting subject to this visual essay than the very worldwide social disasters that are said to have engendered so much bitter criticism of Modernism’s blind optimism.



But to take it a step further, combining Meyers-Briggs vocabulary with the Feminist jab that violent routines of death and destruction are the result of a political world controlled almost entirely by men, we might interpret Robert McNamara’s 20-20 hindsight lessons as an backhanded admission from one of the most stalwart, coldly-rational, “walking IBM computer” (T) individuals around that perhaps our current political leaders are badly in need of some relational-minded (F) input to help America avoid situations where we find ourselves annihilating 200,000 Japanese civilians in a single stroke or (more commonly) sacrificing innocent lives abroad in the name of our own economic interest.