December 22, 2003

Fog Of War

Fog of War is quite simply devastating. Devastating in a you really need to see this movie sort of way. Don't expect to walk out in anyway uplifted though. Quite frankly its painful. It's about Robert McNamara, btw, the man in a large part responsible for the Vietnam War. Mostly its voice over but, from time to time we see him awkwardly framed in camera, and its his eyes that bring the pain back home. This man is still living with the mistakes he and a tiny group of men (and yes I believe they were all male) unleashed upon the people of both Vietnam and America. It's a painful lesson he has quite come to grips with, but its one we all probably should be learning, as individuals, a nation and a world. The villain of the film is quite a Deleuzian one, statistics. A man (and the camera) pours over sheets upon sheet of data. The math speak... Bombs drop. Soldiers die. Civilians die. Nearly 40 years later, McNamara's descendent Donald Rumsfeld calls out for more metrics in the "war" on terror. Time perhaps to reread War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Posted by Abe at December 22, 2003 02:06 PM | TrackBack
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