Throughout The Fog of War, Robert S. McNamara's gaze is an enigma inscribed in the heart of twentieth-century power. What Errol Morris orchestrates is not an interview, but an autopsy of the soul, a séance in which the ghost of Reason itself is evoked, that Enlightenment Reason that believed it could measure, quantify, and ultimately dominate the chaos of history. Through the Interrotron, Morris's diabolical invention that allows the subject to look simultaneously at the interviewer and the camera, McNamara does not speak to us: he stares at us. And in that direct gaze, almost a violation of the viewer's intimacy, the drama of a man who is both Oedipus and the Sphinx unfolds, the man who solved the riddles of war logistics but remained blind to his own catastrophic hubris.

The film presents itself, with an almost didactic elegance, as a succession of eleven lessons drawn from the life of its protagonist. But this structure, which could appear as an attempt at self-absolution, a testamentary manual, is constantly sabotaged by Morris's aesthetic apparatus. Philip Glass's hypnotic and cyclical score does not sound like a commentary, but like the inexorable hum of the bureaucratic machine, a metronome marking the rhythm of production, whether of Ford cars or corpses. The archive footage—B-29 bombers swarming like metal insects, graphs superimposed on burning cities, anonymous faces of a distant enemy—creates a piercing dissonance with McNamara's almost professorial calm. It is the visual language of Hannah Arendt's “banality of evil,” transposed into a blood-curdling cinematic formalism. The horror is not in the scream, but in the spreadsheet.

McNamara is the tragic hero of the technocratic era. A Prometheus who stole not fire from the gods, but statistics. His career, from rising star at Harvard Business School to demiurge of the Ford Motor Company to Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, is the parable of efficiency as the supreme value. In a chilling passage, he recalls how he applied data analysis to maximize the lethality of the incendiary bombing of Tokyo, achieving a destructive efficiency greater than that of Hiroshima. There is no complacency in his voice, but neither is there remorse; there is the cold satisfaction of a problem solved. It is here that the film transcends historical documentary to become a philosophical work. It forces us to question the deadly nature of rationality devoid of empathy, an intelligence that, like Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, falls in love with its own logic to the point of contemplating annihilation. The Fog of War is the dark and terribly real twin of Dr. Strangelove. Where Kubrick used satire to expose the absurdity of mutually assured destruction, Morris uses close-ups to reveal the human face, composed and tormented, of that same absurdity.

The deepest parallel, however, is not with Kubrick, but perhaps with Kurosawa. The Fog of War is a Rashomon with a single witness. We are trapped in his version of events, in his attempt to order the chaos of the past through a coherent narrative. But the truth, like the fog of the title, is intangible. When he talks about the Cuban Missile Crisis, he describes a world on the brink of disaster, saved by a thin thread of rationality and luck. Yet even there, his lesson is ambiguous: “Rationality will not save us.” Is this a confession or an alibi? Morris, a master of cinematic maieutics, offers no answers. He lets McNamara's contradictions hang in the air: the man who admits to having acted like a war criminal for the bombing of Japan is the same man who later oversaw the carnage in Vietnam. The architect of America's most unpopular war is the same man who whispers, his voice cracking, that a leader's primary duty is to keep his nation out of war.

Vietnam is the heart of darkness in the film, the point of collapse of McNamara's logic. The “domino theory” becomes his White Whale, an abstract obsession pursued with a calculated fury that drags an entire nation into the abyss. The film masterfully shows how the fog of war is not just a lack of information on the battlefield, but an existential and cognitive condition. It is the fog that envelops the minds of those who believe that a culture can be reduced to a variable in an equation, that the will of a people can be broken by a calculation of “body count.” It is the fog that separates the War Room in Washington, with its maps and telephones, from the humid and impenetrable jungle where the certainties of statistics dissolve into mud and blood.

In this, Morris's work proves to be deeply meta-textual. The film is not just about McNamara; it is constructed like McNamara's mind. It is precise, structured, analytical on the surface, but underneath it seethes with unspoken doubts, repressed traumas, a pain that manifests itself only in a tremor of the voice, in a pause that is too long. The final scene is emblematic. After two hours of confession-lesson, McNamara is on the verge of breaking down. Tears seem to well up as he contemplates the enormity of the decisions he has made. But they do not fall. He withdraws, composes himself, and returns to being the manager of his own torment. The film does not grant him catharsis, and by denying it to him, it denies it to us as well. There is no easy condemnation or cheap absolution. We are left with the image of a man who looked into the abyss of history armed only with a slide rule, and who will spend eternity recalculating his mistakes, without ever fully admitting them. The Fog of War is not a piece of history. It is a timeless cultural artifact, a ruthless and compassionate portrait of the homo faber of the 20th century, lost in the fog he himself helped to create. A masterpiece whose viewing is not simply recommended, but necessary.