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The Fog of War, Errol Morris’s documentary about the life and life-lessons of Robert McNamara, won the 2004 Academy Award for best documentary and continues to attract interest. Will it withstand the test of time and, fifty years from now be regarded as a classic?

Only time will tell, of course, and the best I can do now is predict.

The Fog of War is an extended interview of Robert McNamara, former President of Ford Motors, US Defense Secretary from 1961 to 1968, and World Bank President from 1968 to 1981. The movie begins with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then cycles back to McNamara’s childhood and moves forward chronologically, but with its major emphasis on the most controversial – and traumatic – period in his life, his role in the Vietnam War.

Morris used his unique interview technology in which he and McNamara confronted one another directly through the lenses of video cameras. The audience thus sees McNamara looking it in the eyes, rather than watching McNamara and the interviewer conversing, shot from a standard vantage point above one of the interviewer’s shoulders.
McNamara was 85 years old at the time the film was made, but still enormously lucid, forceful, and controlling. The film represents a struggle for control of the narrative between McNamara and Morris, particularly with regard to the Vietnam War. McNamara wants to discuss the lessons of Vietnam while avoiding, or at least minimizing, personal responsibility, while Morris wants to confront McNamara with his personal responsibility, regardless how uncomfortable it makes him. It is for the audience to decide who prevailed.

This confrontation is enhanced because Morris makes considerable use of archival footage, so we continuously see pictures of a younger and more self-confident and energetic McNamara that contrast with the stooped and self-questioning older man.

Morris – wisely in my view – chooses not to devote too much screen time to his aged though animated and articulate interviewee. Approximately three-quarters of the time we are looking at archival footage of the events McNamara is discussing. This includes pictures of armaments, military operations in Vietnam, McNamara on field trips to Vietnam, and Ford automobiles and advertising during the Fifties. Morris often uses visual collages, for example rapid-fire views of the text of the Defense Department’s quantitative analyses of the Vietnam war interspersed with pictures of the horrors of jungle fighting, or collages of newspaper articles criticizing McNamara increasingly vociferously as the war goes on. Accompanying the visuals, and often serving as a background to McNamara’s voice, is a musical score by Philip Glass. Glass’s music is never clich

This Eighties BBC television satire about the conflicted but codependent relationship between politics and bureaucracy over a quarter century later bears all the markers of a classic. Its DVD and paperback versions continue to sell well, many clips are available on YouTube and elsewhere, and it ranked sixth in a 2004 poll to choose Britain’s best sitcom. My concern here is with how it was constructed.

Authors Tony Jay and Jonathan Lynn started with public choice theory, the notion that public sector agents are ultimately pursuing their own self-interest rather than any vision of the public good or public interest. This translates into hypocrisy, which always has humorous potential. Thus politicians are seemingly public-spirited but ultimately deeply cynical power-seekers. And public servants are industrious and seemingly deferential, but ultimately preservers of bureaucratic empires and opponents of change. Paul Eddington, as the Right Honourable James Hacker, and Nigel Hawthorne, as Sir Humphrey Appleby, both portrayed hypocrisy brilliantly.

The third member of the ensemble, Derek Fowlds, as Bernard Woolley, Hacker’s executive assistant who owed his ultimate loyalty to Sir Humphrey, played a strong supporter role as a sounding-board for both Hacker and Humphrey, and as an embodiment of the humour of insecurity stemming from divided loyalty.
Because a picture is worth a thousand words, and blog posts have a far smaller word count, I refer you to any of the YouTube clips to see what I mean about the brilliance of the acting.

There was another key to Yes Minister’s humour, which was its use of language. Here the authors are echoing, though less harshly, George Orwell’s concern about the debasement of language in politics. This is done in four different ways. First, in every episode, Humphrey gives a short speech in classic bureaucratese, using in its entirety the passive voice and abstract vocabulary; Hacker asks for a pr

Over the next three posts my intention is to look at three narratives, two of which have become classics and one that I predict will become a classic. The two confirmed classics are Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie Doctor Strangelove and Tony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s television series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, and my predicted classic is Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary about the life of Robert McNamara The Fog of War.

Doctor Strangelove deals with a real public management concern in the early Sixties, the possibility of unintended nuclear war occurring in the context of the cold war between NATO and the Soviet Union. Director Stanley Kubrick carefully studied the literature on nuclear arms control and originally intended to make a thriller, but ultimately turned to satire. At its core, the film has a plausible scenario, namely unintended nuclear war due to inappropriate decentralization of authority. On the American side, it assumed air force base commanders had the authority to order their planes to attack the Soviet Union in the event that the President’s command capability had been lost, say due to a Soviet nuclear attack on Washington. On the Soviet side, it assumed the existence of a doomsday device which would automatically launch a nuclear attack on the US if the Soviet Union was attacked. The events are set in motion when a deranged American base commander orders the bombers under his control to attack. Once that fateful decision has been made, the situation is out of control, despite the Herculean efforts of both the Americans and Soviets to bring the situation under control. The management lesson here is that there are situations in which decentralization of authority, either to individuals in the field or to an automatic technology, is inappropriate.

The satire comes in because all the individuals play their roles seriously in a disastrous situation. They are not winking at the audience and playing for laughs, as in the case in much satire, but rather are playing their roles straight-forwardly and making us laugh at the absurdity of the situation into which they have been cast. The American military characters are all overly zealous about their responsibilities. The deranged base commander who orders the attack does so because he is concerned that fluoridation of the water supply – which the far right at the time saw as a Communist plot – has impaired him sexually. The air force general, when presented with the opportunity for a first strike against the Soviets, urges the President to go for it – which indeed was the thinking of Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The one bomber that gets through the Soviet air defenses is led by a determined and resourceful pilot who, believing that the US has been attacked, goes far beyond the call of duty to ensure that his crew retaliates. The President is thoughtful, creative, and empathetic with the Soviets, but he cannot control the situation.

The movie has a lot of satirical markers, such as allegorical names (base commander Jack D. Ripper, Air Force Chief of Staff Buck Turgidson, commander “King” Kong of the one B-52 that “succeeds” in its mission) and ironic music. Scenes on the B-52 are always accompanied with the Civil War tune “when Johnny comes marching home again” – of course on this mission Johnny won’t come marching, or flying, home again – and the final collage of nuclear bombs exploding is accompanied by Vera Lynn singing “We’ll meet again,” one of the iconic tunes of World War II.; after a nuclear war, we won’t meet again. And the movie has the structure of a thriller, as the movie builds to its climax with the scene continually shifting between Kong’s B-52 and the situation room in the White House. But, ultimately, the humour comes from the plausible situation Kubrick has created, which he then lets over-the-top characters play out seriously to an absurd conclusion.

There is a classic dominant fable about the transformational teacher in an urban ghetto high school. The school is failing in its mission: the students aren’t learning, but they are getting into trouble. A transformational teacher arrives on the scene and, through hard work, long hours, commitment to excellence, and empathy for the students wins their trust. The students become interested in the curriculum and their performance starts to improve. The teacher sets a stretch goal and the students meet it. They raise their hopes and career aspirations. And one teacher’s success becomes a model for others.

Three relatively recent films presenting this dominant fable are Stand and Deliver (1989), which deals with a mathematics teacher in East Los Angeles; Dangerous Minds (1995), about an English teacher also in the Los Angeles area, and Freedom Writers (2007), which focuses on another English teacher in Long Beach. Besides their Southern California location – which has the considerable advantage of proximity to Hollywood – they are all based on true stories.

The implicit message of these dominant fables is that ghetto public high schools are not hopeless, and what is needed is simply hard work, dedication, and middle class values – as opposed to more expensive interventions or a more radical reform agenda.

When comparing the cinema’s dominant fables with the actual historical record, the big difference is that Hollywood focuses entirely on the classroom, while it actually turned out that these teachers were also effective organizational politicians, in that they mobilized support within the school and the school system. In addition, the teachers went far beyond the extra mile in terms of their time – and even their own money – invested in the classroom. These facts lead one to question the likelihood of this dominant fable as a model for reform of the public high schools.

Counter-fables question the dominant fable in a different way, namely by telling stories that invert, subvert, or reject it. Here are two recent examples. Half-Nelson, a 2006 film starring Ryan Gosling, tells the (fictional) story of a would-be transformational teacher who has a big personal problem – an addiction to crack cocaine. And teaching in a ghetto high school makes it very easy for him to score. So instead of the teacher inspiring students to transcend the grim social and economic conditions of their lives, the teacher himself is dragged down into the most degrading aspect of that reality.

The HBO movie Cheaters (2000) – very faithfully based on a true story – stars Jeff Daniels as a teacher who coaches the academic decathlon team from a lower-middle class ethnic neighborhood in Chicago. Daniels inspires the team and they work hard and scrape into the last spot in Illinois state finals. They are given an opportunity for instant success – a stolen copy of the exams for the state finals. After considerable soul-searching, coach and team decide to go for it and, after the hard work of prepping for the questions they know they will be asked, the team wins the state competition.

Their meteoric and unexpected success leads to questions, a police investigation, confessions, and – for the coach – dismissal. But the careers of the students themselves are not impaired. The movie succeeds because it is presented in the form of the dominant fable, but its content is satire. Its subtitle (“putting the system to the test”) and its entire narrative question the intrinsic value of the academic and career success that transformational teachers are supposed to inspire. It is both entertaining and disturbingly thought-provoking.

These examples should make clear what I mean by dominant and counter-fables. In this instance dominant fables are intended to inspire, and counter-fables to question the uplifting story. We can learn from both.