I can't remember when I last saw anything as chilling as this great documentary... maybe the original 1988 version of The Vanishing, which equally left one profoundly disturbed at how studied and artful yet gratuitous and without any ultimate meaning or purpose the genesis of certain evil is.
The lifetime analytical/"intellectual" opus of McNamara, on behalf of the US government, as portrayed in the records shown on the Fog of War, is eerily reminiscent of those obsessive Nazi written orders and documents that we see in WW2 documentaries. Everything counted and tabulated, percentualised and extrapolated. Such infinite trouble and such enormous pains taken, such an exemplary work ethic shown, such savage analysis and documentation undertaken... and all for what, other than the pursuit of goals actually lying between pure amorality and utter immorality?
It's understandable and thereby almost tolerable that one - nation state or individual - should fall into unforgivable amorality or immorality by default, by sloth, out of disorganisation, cluelessness or personal weakness. But to somehow achieve an utter darkness of spirit after such effort, study and personal severity is devastatingly eerie, perverse and perplexing.
McNamara does have a momentary tear in his eye as he recounts his decades of power across several utterly brutal wars, and it is for Jack Kennedy and his final Arlington resting place. Ultimately, he can be summed up via the school-captain smirk he wears standing next to Kennedy as he announces his appointment as Secretary of State in 1961. Power for the sake of power, success for the sake of success, any claims made to morality and right as meaningless as they are irrelevant. The man a perfect reflection of his country post WW2. Macchiavelli would consider himself surpassed.
These are conclusions that someone, ethically sensitive but not at all prejudiced here (indeed barely knowing anything about this man), can reach just by viewing what is effectively a documentary self-portrait. Director Errol Morris' genius consists in having allowed McNamara to reveal himself so eerily and damningly even while being given free use of a stage to lay out a grand sophistry of reflections, rationalizations and truisms to justify or expiate his lifetime's work.
Quite an unforgettable experience, and all the more because so unexpectedly and improbably given the self-portrait format. Phillip Glass' own genius should be acknowledged, as well as Morris' brilliance in exploiting it in The Fog of War, with eerie minimalism the perfect soundtrack here as in The Thin Blue Line 15 years earlier.
We may not quite have plumbed the depths of gut-emptying futility and Shakespearean despair with this documentary X-Ray of McNamara, but we are close. I can only think of Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and a few of the latters' soul mates as subjects that could supply an even more devastating moral experience and take us to rock bottom itself.
The lifetime analytical/"intellectual" opus of McNamara, on behalf of the US government, as portrayed in the records shown on the Fog of War, is eerily reminiscent of those obsessive Nazi written orders and documents that we see in WW2 documentaries. Everything counted and tabulated, percentualised and extrapolated. Such infinite trouble and such enormous pains taken, such an exemplary work ethic shown, such savage analysis and documentation undertaken... and all for what, other than the pursuit of goals actually lying between pure amorality and utter immorality?
It's understandable and thereby almost tolerable that one - nation state or individual - should fall into unforgivable amorality or immorality by default, by sloth, out of disorganisation, cluelessness or personal weakness. But to somehow achieve an utter darkness of spirit after such effort, study and personal severity is devastatingly eerie, perverse and perplexing.
McNamara does have a momentary tear in his eye as he recounts his decades of power across several utterly brutal wars, and it is for Jack Kennedy and his final Arlington resting place. Ultimately, he can be summed up via the school-captain smirk he wears standing next to Kennedy as he announces his appointment as Secretary of State in 1961. Power for the sake of power, success for the sake of success, any claims made to morality and right as meaningless as they are irrelevant. The man a perfect reflection of his country post WW2. Macchiavelli would consider himself surpassed.
These are conclusions that someone, ethically sensitive but not at all prejudiced here (indeed barely knowing anything about this man), can reach just by viewing what is effectively a documentary self-portrait. Director Errol Morris' genius consists in having allowed McNamara to reveal himself so eerily and damningly even while being given free use of a stage to lay out a grand sophistry of reflections, rationalizations and truisms to justify or expiate his lifetime's work.
Quite an unforgettable experience, and all the more because so unexpectedly and improbably given the self-portrait format. Phillip Glass' own genius should be acknowledged, as well as Morris' brilliance in exploiting it in The Fog of War, with eerie minimalism the perfect soundtrack here as in The Thin Blue Line 15 years earlier.
We may not quite have plumbed the depths of gut-emptying futility and Shakespearean despair with this documentary X-Ray of McNamara, but we are close. I can only think of Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and a few of the latters' soul mates as subjects that could supply an even more devastating moral experience and take us to rock bottom itself.