Tag: WWII

Foggy Winter.


If you can stand being bombarded by endless slo-mo shots of dropping ordnance set to a Phillip Glass pulse, The Fog of War, the new Errol Morris documentary about and extended interview with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, makes for an interesting evening out. Despite the heavy saturation on screen, there are no real historical bombshells dropped here — The movie doesn’t aim to muckrake a la The Trials of Henry Kissinger, and the picture you get of Vietnam-era McNamara is the same one you’d find in a book like Robert Schulzinger’s A Time for War: Publicly optimistic, McNamara seems deeply cognizant from early on that Vietnam will be a quagmire, but he — like LBJ and almost all of the foreign policy establishment — are too blinded by the fear of falling dominoes to consider withdrawal as a viable option. (McNamara does add fuel to the fire here that Kennedy wanted a full withdrawal by 1965. I guess if anyone would know, he would, but the books I’ve read don’t really bear this out.)

Nor do we ever seem to get under McNamara’s skin here — he remains intelligent and composed throughout, deflecting the tougher questions about Vietnam with a practiced ease. Still, McNamara, a surprisingly spry 86, does offer us some intriguing (and occasionally self-serving) reminiscences here about his experiences in the corridors of power, from his assessment that the Cuban Missile Crisis was defused mainly by simple, dumb luck to his thoughts on the morality of civilian fire-bombing, which he efficiency-maximized for Curtis LeMay during WWII.

As a documentary, The Fog of War sometimes gets clouded by its own cinematic devices — to take just one example, there’s a shot of dominoes across a map of Asia that is striking at first but fast becomes overused. And the continual Phillip Glass cascading over falling bombs and rushing people had me thinking of Koyaanisqatsi outtakes a lot of the time. In sum, the film works best when it’s simply an engaging monologue by an intelligent, evasive, and often frustrating Cold Warrior as he muses over a life perhaps not-so-well lived.

Consume and Progress.

Another wave of updates over at the Orals site:

Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939.
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.
Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State.
John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War.
Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America.
Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age.
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920.

Werewolves of Baghdad.

Slate correspondent Daniel Benjamin pokes holes in Condi and Rummy’s recent spurious comparisons between postwar Iraq and Germany. Yep, it’s more revisionist history emanating from Team Dubya. In related news, Jack Beatty laments Dubya’s lack of postwar vision, which now seems ever more constrained to lining the coffers of Halliburton.

Schindler’s Liszt.

Caught Roman Polanski’s The Pianist Wednesday night and quite liked it, although as you might expect it’s pretty grueling – I’m not sure if I’d watch it again anytime soon. The first half plays out as a well-done and unflinching (non-Spielbergized) look at life and death in the Warsaw ghetto. (Watching Adrien Brody step over the bodies of starved children on his way to work, I was briefly reminded again of how unbelievably unrealistic and offensive I found Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful.) As powerful as this first hour is, though, it can’t help but follow some of the conventions we’ve come to expect from films in the Holocaust genre – the Szpilmans keep saying things like, “Well at least we know this is as bad as it’s going to get,” while the audience knows full well it’s about to get much much worse. So, despite the unspeakable horrors on screen and the often-riveting performances throughout, we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The second half, however, is a different story. When through a combination of luck and timely aid Szpilman finally manages to escape the ghetto, the film enters (at least to me) novel territory and becomes a strangely riveting and unfamiliar survival story, wherein a deteriorating Adrien Brody, moving from apartment to apartment and constantly scrounging for food and warmth, tries to wait out the end of the conflict. This part of The Pianist moves at a strange, languid pace and feels very unfilmlike, until a twist at the end that, although it may be true, still brings us back onto the well-trod path of filmic convention.

I doubt The Pianist will win any major Oscars, not only so the Academy can dodge the Polanski child molester bullet but also because Adrien Brody, who is undoubtedly excellent, plays Szpilman so maddeningly remote. We spend a lot of time with Brody in this film, and never once do we get the sense that we know what’s going on in his head, which I suppose is part of the point. At any rate, I can’t see the Academy rewarding this kind of understatement over a scenery-chewing performance like that of Daniel Day-Lewis, who carries Gangs of New York over at the other acting extreme. Nevertheless, The Pianist is a film worth seeing, if you have the stamina for it.

100% Americanism, for better or worse.


Also on the history tip, I found this while preparing for my sections this morning on John Higham’s Strangers in the Land and nativism in the 1920’s: Red Scare: An Image Database…plenty of anti-foreign, anti-radical, and anti-union cartoons from the end of World War I. And, along the same lines, here’s an intriguing collection of WWI propaganda posters, such as this anti-German poster to the right. Very helpful in class, particularly as they will augur our reading of John Dower’s War Without Mercy later in the term.