“Fog of War” is a documentary unlike many. After watching Hearts and Minds most recently, which also looked at our presence in Vietnam during the Cold War, I was whole-heartedly expecting to be confronted with juxtaposed clippings and an overall bias perspective.
Director Errol Morris takes a different approach to portraying America’s involvement in arguably one of its biggest failures. Using Secretary of the Defense Robert MacNamera as the primary interview for the entire film, we are instead shown that failure is not even the issue at hand; this has already been established. Instead, we are encouraged to “try to learn and understand what happened” during this controversial era, given eleven rules as guidance throughout. Ranging from Rule #1-Empathize with your enemy to Rule #11-You Can’t Change Human Nature, the documentary made me feel as if I was receiving real, genuine advice from perhaps one of the most qualified people to do so. MacNamera’s interview was even recorded in such a way where he appears to be speaking directly to the audience. There is no question of his motives or what is trying to be portrayed; rather, we are made to feel like this is the truth, even as something that most chose to avoid or make excuses for.
Failure is something our country does not like to admit to, which is perhaps why the Vietnam War is rarely capitalized on as a major event in history. "Fog of War," in my opinion, does an excellent job of reexamining our past mistakes as a country and then looking to gain acceptance and understanding to be able to ultimately benefit. In one of his most honest statements, MacNamera provides that "The conventional wisdom is: don't make the same mistake twice. Learn from your mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the mistake three times, but hopefully not four of five."
No comments:
Post a Comment