moderately aware high school student in 1966. On the other hand, one may also be amazed to hear the octogenarian powerhouse suddenly launch into a criticism of US unilateralism. Curiously, that aside seemed to resonate more positively with American than foreign critics.
A skeptical review in Le Monde accused Morris of demonstrating too much sympathy for the devil. More than providing the satanic former secretary with an all-to-human face however, The Fog of War offers additional evidence that the road to hell—or at least, the way to Dogville—is paved with good intentions.
Opening as it did in many American cities on the same December weekend as The Return of the King, pundits might have been pardoned for subtitling Morris’s movie, “Robert McNamara and the Ring of Power”—particularly as the wrinkled and bony former Secretary of Defense appeared as a sort of animated, Gollumized husk of his younger self. Although clearly and profoundly corrupted by power, McNamara was the only senior American official to ever admit to an error under the coercion of his own conscience alone. In their year-end meetings, the various US critics’ conclaves saw more than a few votes for Best Actor cast in favor of an elderly neophyte. McNamara’s bad teeth and liver-spots notwithstanding, the beauty of The Fog of War is entirely skin deep. McNamara concedes that mistakes were made but when asked why he didn’t speak out against the war, he can only take refuge in his anguish: “I am not going to say any more than I have.” As the Frodologists of the ’60s might have put it, the former secretary carried the Ring of Power to the rim of Mount Doom, but refused to throw it in.
In another sort of Vietnam flashback, on August 27, five months into the Iraq War, the Pentagon held the first of several informational screenings of The Battle of Algiers. As the Pentagon flier put it: “Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafés. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar?” The last half of The Battle of Algiers illustrates the flier’s hook: “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas.” French reaction is personified by the newly arrived Col. Mathieu who accepts the mission of demolishing the revolutionary FLN. “There are 80,000 Arabs in the casbah‚” he tells his men. “Are they all against us? We know they are not. In reality, it is only a small minority that dominates with terror and violence. This minority is our adversary and we must isolate and destroy it.” How familiar that must have sounded!
Mathieu’s campaign is successful but—as he, more than anyone else in the movie, realizes—history belongs to the FLN. At one point he turns on a press conference full of hostile French journalists and forces them to clarify their own privileged positions. “I would now like to ask you a question: Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer ‘yes,’ then you must accept all the necessary consequences.” A montage of Algerians subject to torture follows. This, one imagines, was the key moment of the Pentagon’s Battle of Algiers. To succeed, the American occupation must consign such abuses to the Ba’athist past—indeed, the rationale for the invasion of Iraq long ago shifted from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction to his dungeons of horror. But didn’t the invasion itself demonstrate that, in the war against terrorism, all means are available?
NEW YORK, JULY 2, 2003
“The future has not been written …” the young narrator solemnly muses at the beginning of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. That’s true enough—although in the pre-sold universe of summer entertainment, the box-office brawn of this Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle is as close to a given as the laws of gravity.
If it’s Terminator time, there must be a Republican president running for re-election. Appearing unheralded on the eve of the 1984 election, the original Arnold Schwarzenegger robot opera, directed by then unknown James Cameron and featuring the most compelling Frankenstein monster in fifty years, provided a dystopian alternative to the Reaganite “new morning.” Released as Bush I girded his loins in the summer of the New World Order 1991, Cameron’s vastly inflated, post–Desert Storm T2: Judgment Day resurrected the president’s fitness adviser as a kinder, gentler killer cyborg. (T2 was for a time the most expensive movie ever made; Cameron modestly described it as “the first action movie advocating world peace.”)
There are no term limits on sequels, and now, as the Bush II juggernaut gets ready to roll, der Arnold—once hailed by Time as “the most potent symbol” of Hollywood’s “worldwide dominance”—returns to save the world, or at least the designated world-savior, the now grown John Connor (Nick Stahl). Soreheads will note that this JC becomes humanity’s leader either by mistake or through a strategic deception—but so what? Cameron, meanwhile, has bequeathed the franchise to director Jonathan Mostow, author of the submarine thriller U-571 and evidently a man with far less baggage. Where Judgment Day exhibited the profligate sprawl of a military operation, the leaner, less grandiose Rise of the Machines has the feel of a single Hummer careening through an earthquake in downtown Burbank.
Dispatched once more on a mission from the future, the latest model of the Arnold android materializes in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Born naked and flexing into this world, he makes his now traditional foray to an unsuspecting human watering hole; in short order he denudes a snippy male stripper of his fetishistic glad rags to re-create his own ultra-butch image. Somewhat less paternal here than he was in T2, Schwarzenegger is in fine, which is to say humorously ponderous, form. His refurbished Terminator remains an unsocialized machine—if not without a certain professional pride. Referred to disparagingly as a “robot,” he’s quick to correct: “I’m a cybernetic organism.”
The first two Terminator movies projected a sort of muscle feminism in the person of Nautilized Linda Hamilton’s warrior woman. But this time around, despite Claire Danes’s intermittent facility with a variety of guns, there’s an undercurrent of chick bashing. Arnold’s antagonist, the ultra-sophisticated T-X (Kristanna Loken), is a robo-babe with a tailored leather jumpsuit and a bionic arm. Her default setting on permanent hissy fit, this svelte femmebot has an irresistible habit of cocking her head and glaring with impersonal curiosity at the victim she’s about to vaporize. What’s more, she can fry Arnold’s circuits.
Back in the mid ’80s, Terminator inspired an impressive degree of academic discourse—thanks to its tough-girl heroine, the convoluted, bizarrely oedipal time-travelling premise that had John Connor being fathered by his future best friend, and Arnold’s then new-minted status as Hollywood’s reigning action superstar, the blockbuster personified. As befits a third outing, Rise of the Machines offers little that is novel. All temporal mind-bending and kinky genealogy are subsumed in the comforting notion that our world is about to come under the malign control of a single, giant, self-aware computer program. Indeed, the program probably wrote the movie, which could be most efficiently described as a quasi-videogame featuring a pair of unkillable antagonists.
The opening joust’s mega-bumper-car ride makes for nearly as impressive a carnival of destruction as the great freeway battle in The Matrix Reloaded. The fighting, however, is much more hands-on. Responding to Mostow’s directorial joystick, the endlessly regenerating Terminator and Terminatrix alternately lift and slam, shove and hurl, toss and pound, crush and heave each other, in a clanky ballet mécanique that could easily be re-imagined as terminal foreplay.
Terminator 3 was still in movie theaters when a special election to recall California’s governor was announced on July 27. Schwarzenegger declared his candidacy on The Tonight Show on August 7—a different sort of “cybernetic organism”: part performer, part politician. In a sense, the president followed suit. The following piece, headlined “Lights, Camera, Exploitation,” was the cover story for the August 28 edition of the Village Voice.
NEW YORK, AUGUST 28, 2003
In the end, 9/11 turned out to be a made-for-TV movie, or rather, the basis for one—a shameless propaganda vehicle for our superstar president George W. Bush.
The upcoming Showtime feature DC 9/11: Time of Crisis is a signal advance
