“The Fog of War”: An Interview with Errol Morris

While many documentarians are praised for their breakthroughs in realism, Errol Morris defiantly remains the great abstract expressionist of the genre. His filmmaking style—which he once defined as “anti verité”—favors restaged events over live ones, self-conscious talking head interviews over eavesdropping, and brooding collage sequences over the classic “you are there” approach. Morris tends to illuminate his subjects while simultaneously stripping them of concrete meaning, thus opening them up to both greater scrutiny and strangeness. His landmark work, “The Thin Blue Line,” which so thoroughly investigated the wrongful arrest and conviction of Texas drifter Randall Adams that it led to Adams’ exoneration from death row, would seem the exception to the rule: even there, however, Morris’ obsessive repetition of banal details like milk shakes and pages from TV Guide made the movie feel more like an experimental film than a murder mystery.

Such close-ups appear throughout Morris’ filmography, from the tombstones in his debut feature, “Gates of Heaven” (about pet cemeteries in California), to rows of dominoes in his latest, “The Fog of War,” which opened last Friday at the Lagoon. While they may obfuscate the material, these details are nevertheless essential to his style on the whole. More importantly, their steady recurrence makes Morris as much a filmic response to American minimalist composers like John Adams and Philip Glass as it does a non-fiction update of the Germanic film noir directors to whom he’s often compared. As in the early compositions of Adams and Glass, Morris reveals his central motifs plainly and early on, then allows them to develop gradually through permutation. (It’s not surprising that Glass has scored three of Morris’ films, “Fog of War” being the latest.)

In this regard, the 1997 film, “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control,” represents the summit of Morris’ work, as it creates a maximum of possibilities from a seemingly limited and incompatible group of subjects: a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, a robot scientist and a biologist specializing in an obscure species of African moles. The movie’s climax—in which the robot scientist’s musing that silicon-based life may eventually replace carbon-based life sets off the most rapid-fire montage in Morris’ canon—seems to make reference to both a creative brainstorm and the apocalypse without introducing any footage not previously shown in the film.

Once an Errol Morris movie takes hold (as it does at the climax of “Fast, Cheap,” for instance), the effect is a bit like wandering through a planetarium: You’re well aware that every item around you has been set up for exhibition (assuming it isn’t a complete replica), yet the arrangement still opens doors to the most vital questions of existence. Ultimately, all of the director’s work aims for this kind of transcendence—not spiritual in nature, but more closely akin to the enlightened position that considers mankind in relation to the cosmos. This orientation would explain Morris’ fascination with Stephen Hawking, not to mention his perversity in calling his documentary on Hawking, “A Brief History of Time,” a “love story”; it would also explain his curious relationship to death.

Mortality and, more specifically, the funny ways human beings try to avoid thinking about it are central themes for Morris, and they’re made manifest even in the soon-to-be-extinct professions of “Fast, Cheap.” If “Mr. Death” (about execution-equipment repairman and subsequent Holocaust denier Fred Leuchter) is Morris’ most potent work, it is because that film connects the two themes for the most darkly ironic impact.

Despite the mass deaths alluded to in “The Fog of War,” the new film initially feels like a step backward for Morris in that it seems more concerned with man’s place in the world than man’s place in the universe. A feature-length interview with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, it considers the ins and outs of military strategy and the character of a top government official. Some highlights of the film—if one accepts Morris’ dark humor and considers them as such—include McNamara’s accounts of U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, as well as some carried out in Japan during World War II, for which he is less well-known.

Jonathan Rosenbaum has faulted the film in a recent Chicago Reader review for being at best historically gutless and at worst deceptive; this criticism, though, regards “Fog” as McNamara’s film more than Morris’, implicitly demanding hard rhetoric where the director usually offers free-form philosophy. (Morris, after all, got his college degree in philosophy before taking up filmmaking.) Still, Rosenbaum’s point remains a vital one to consider for anyone seeing the film— which is primed to be Morris’ most controversial. His previous work may have caused some to scratch their heads in response to the willed abstraction, yet those films concerned the lives of outsiders, not a figure who already took up so much space in modern American history.

“There is starting to be a lot of comment on the movie,” Morris conceded in a recent interview. “There are people quibbling with the history of the movie—or the history expressed in the movie. And at first I thought, ‘I’m not going to react to any of this,’ because I think the movie is about something other than [what] the exchange would imply.” He then added, with a trace of irritation, “You know, people are arguing about the details of the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, and so on and so forth.”

For the record, Morris can speak articulately about the history of U.S. foreign policy (as he demonstrated in a recent editorial in The Nation, which responded to historian Eric Alterman’s attack on the movie), yet his true concerns seem to lie with that history’s effect on McNamara. This isn’t entirely surprising, given Morris’ tendency to refer to the subjects of his movies as “characters,” even discussing their actions as though they motivated a plot. Does McNamara represent a break from this tradition, then, since his personality has been familiar to the American public for decades prior to making his movie debut?

“I guess the real question is, is the image of McNamara in the public eye correct?” Morris ponders. “My feeling is, to a large extent, it’s not. For people of my generation, McNamara was despised, particularly with the anti-war camp … What was interesting to me was that, in the course of making the movie, I discovered there’s a lot of historical material that has not been addressed elsewhere … For example, there was a cabinet meeting with Lyndon Johnson chastising McNamara because of an October 2nd, 1963, meeting [with JFK, on U.S. involvement in Vietnam]. Johnson was saying, ‘I listened while you and the president talked about taking out advisers; I didn’t agree.’ This is very powerful and interesting, and it provides a different perspective on McNamara than most people have.”

Morris’ perspective on McNamara is colored to a large extent by a familiarity with his quirks, and “Fog of War” may be most revealing when the former Secretary discusses his primary education and early dating experiences. Once a politician becomes part of History (another one of the movie’s “fogs”), it’s a lot easier to think of him as a mass murderer than as a family man. Morris, however, presents his subject with an almost affectionate intimacy, as though he were a favorite grand-uncle. He continues to take this stance when in conversation: “There were points where I’d become annoyed or irritated because I just wanted him to go on or talk about things more.” This may explain Morris’ brusque interruptions, which enter the film at several key junctures, though the director disagrees. “That may be because I’m yelling,” he says sheepishly. “People have asked me why am I yelling, and it’s just because McNamara’s hard of hearing.”

Morris freely admits that his subject dominates the interview—which negates, in a sense, one of the more prominent criticisms of the film. To even consider Morris an interviewer is something of a moot point; he prefers to say that he facilitates monologues performed by his subjects. As he’s demonstrated in past work, this strategy will often reveal unexpected truths about character. “When he goes through that routine [on the Cuban Missile Crisis]—‘We were that close on three separate occasions’—[some have asked] is this the only time he’s ever said it? No. I believe he’s said that many, many, many, many times. But I think that’s the interesting thing about the movie: that perhaps there is that feeling that some of it is rehearsed—rehearsed in the sense that it’s stories McNamara’s told over and over again—and there’s stuff that’s actually quite different.”

Not surprisingly, Morris is especially adept at answering questions once he’s in the position of interviewee. When discussing his own work he frequently says “I’m thinking about that,” and with sincerity—as if to imply that the process of deriving meaning from his films is as important as making them. He is also frank about his personal philosophy, unafraid to turn himself into a character for the sake of good conversation. “I have a sort of dim view —you could even call it misanthropic—when it comes to people,” he says wryly. “What really fascinated me with McNamara’s history of the twentieth century is that it’s about confusion, error, mistakes, wishful thinking, false ideology. It’s not about conspiracies and evil people calculating how to create havoc with the world. It’s about all-too-human people making grotesque mistake after mistake.”

Wouldn’t this seem like the opposite of misanthropy, then, to accept the errors that almost brought disaster to the Western world (to say nothing of the Vietnamese)? “Well, I’m not saying I accept it. I just think it adds spectacle. It’s a spectacle, if you like, of a bunch of chimpanzees running around…”

In a Morris-like intrusion, I ask, “Is that how you’d classify US involvement in Vietnam?”

“That’s how I’d classify almost everything,” he responds, without missing a beat.

“The Fog of War” opens Fri., Feb. 6, at the Uptown Theatre at 2:00, 4:30, 7:00 and 9:30. Call 612-825-6006 for info.