The moment happened all at once, in a flash like lightning or Zen satori. It was Friday night, I was down about a dollar as Read dealt another hand of seven card no-peek, and the conversation naturally turned to pharmaceutical ads, particularly who in their right mind actually asks their doctor "if Spatasol is right for them." I had spent my sunny February day walking the neighborhood looking at fences, foyers, eaves with icicles, and I was able to say with complete confidence: "I don't watch TV anymore. I just watch movies." I knew then my media diet was working. Weep no more, gentle reader, for I am a paragon of media health.
Mind you, I'm no saint. I've been watching a heavy lot of movies and my news intake is through the roof, but I'm proud to say that my media metabolism is just short of hummingbird, and it more than compensates for the sumo-esque consumption. I kid you not. Even compared to my two year media fast in the middle of college, I've never felt media healthier in my media life.
For example, let me tell you about two movies ago. I knew that Claude Lanzmann's most famous work, the 10 hour documentary Shoah, the definitive chronicle of the Holocaust, should have been ample proof of his meticulous nature, but I didn't realize how painstaking the passion of a Frenchman could become until I saw this complementary documentary, Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 p.m.. I saw it for free, so I'm sure that saying anything even slightly negative would fill me with wells of guilt and I'll spare myself the trouble.
If I was watching this movie and there weren't any subtitles I would imagine it to be about Polish fairy tales: stories of bears and witches and lands of magic candy. But actually, Sobibor… is the story of the one and only successful concentration camp uprising, where a group of Soviet POW's killed their Nazi captors and escaped certain death. The tale, told by a Polish camp survivor, is straight up Hogan's Heros/Great Escape, as told by your charming old-world grandfather. The interview takes place in a polyester house in 1970's Poland, and Lanzmann alternates B-roll footage of modern day Eastern Europe
Nutritional Equivalent:
Polish Sausage
with close-cropped shots of the narrator's sideburned face, his blankly receptive expression giving way almost to jubilance whenever he started telling his story. He'd light up and say, waving his arms over his head to illustrate the gesture:
"I took my axe and hit him a final time. It came down right on his teeth, and there was a spark where it made contact. I can still see it; that kind of thing you never forget."
The Fog of War
As open as the rebellious Pole was in Sobibor…, former Secretary of Defense and ex-World Bank President Robert McNamara was equally guarded. Watching him retell his side of the story, trying desperately to justify his part in such a wide range of destruction, from WWII bombing to the Vietnam conflict, I felt like I was getting a sales pitch at a Tupperware party.
In fact, the most revealing part of the movie was when McNamara revealed his method for not revealing anything.
It happens about halfway through the film, somewhere near Lesson #5, where he describes his golden rule: "Don't answer the question asked, answer the question you wish they'd have asked. I've followed this one simple rule my whole life, and it's worked wonders," he says.
Even though he's offscreen I could see Erroll Morris's frustration explode at this moment, and any critic of this film should try and understand that Morris's position is close to that of a White House correspondent before Donald Rumsfeld. From time to time Morris would shout out questions, knowing full well that he wasn't going to get a revealing answer from his media-savvy subject, a 50 year veteran of camera attrition.
Morris' interview provides a stark contrast with Michael Moore's interview of Charton Heston at the very end of his Oscar-winning documentary, Bowling for Columbine. In that film, Moore literally accuses Heston, who has Alzheimer's Disease, of "murdering" a young girl before walking away from the interview, a moment that left a bad taste in my mouth when I saw it. At the time it pissed me off because I felt it undid much of the movie's work, and dulled the ethical impact particularly for what should have been Moore's target audience, the mall-going middle ground crowd. But on the other hand Moore's theatrics made me wish that Erroll Morris had more aggressivly interrogated his subject, who had much more going on upstairs and could have handled a bit of the third degree. I suspect that McNamara exercised no small degree of editorial control over the film's final cut.
Instead, Morris's criticism came, not in direct questions, but in the inclusion of the historical footage interspersed between the interview
Nutritional Equivalent:
"Polish Sausage"
scenes. When McNamara describes his mixed feeling about the Vietnam War, and then the footage jumps to a Vietnam PR visit where McNamara is smiling and waving onboard an Army patrol boat, the juxtaposition is a bit jarring. To conclude: If you're looking for something blunt, go to your local anvil museum. I still say, given the historical magnitude of its subject, The Fog of War is well worth the trip down memory lane and to the movie theater.
