“Poop Cruise” and the Hidden Machines of Modernity

The deck of the Carnival Triumph before the nightmare began

Sometime in the small hours odds February 10th, 2013, a diesel generator on board the Carnival cruise ship Triumph caught fire. The incident caused no casualties, and the ship remained intact. But the fire consumed several power conduits, disabling main power and propulsion. Nearly 3000 passengers and over 1100 crew were adrift on the Gulf of Mexico.

Netflix has perfected a content creation system wherein they produce “documentaries” with a combination of existing footage and new interviews. This works in documentaries like Turning Point: the Bomb and the Cold War, where most interview subjects are historians, diplomats, and social scientists. You need specialists prepared to go beyond the obvious. That's what makes Trainwreck: Poop Cruise such a missed opportunity.

When central power failed, the Triumph's kitchen had to discard tons of perishable food, and the ship's interior became unbearably hot. But when passengers contacted loved ones on shore, another fact captured the public's attention. Without power, the ship's plumbing quickly failed. Within hours, the companionways became choked with human feces. Without anywhere to drain, the sewage clung to everyone's feet.

Director James Ross interviews several passengers and crew: a Bachelorette party, a father and daughter, a young bachelor meeting his future father-in-law for the first time. The ship's tour director and head chef. In direct narrative, these survivors describe the sensory overload of the shit-choked interior, while on deck, passengers descended into Gomorrah-like levels of disinhibition.

But at only fifty-five minutes, the documentary doesn't have room to explore beyond this surface level. Yes, being trapped in a confined space with limited food but flowing rivers of poop, sounds like a trip through the depths of squalor. But without further analysis, it becomes superficial, the sensory revulsion of anyone who's used a week-old Porta-John. We don't get much insight into how it happened, or what it can teach us.

Early on, one bachelorette party member talks about the ship resembling a skyscraper. This shouldn't go unremarkable. Smarter critics than me have observed that cruise ships produce more pollution than many cities: diesel fumes, plastic and paper waste, food packaging, and especially sewage. Solid waste gets held for disposal on-shore, but the sewage gets discharged into the ocean.

The Carnival Triumph after staterooms became too hot and smelly for human habitation

Cruise companies keep their ships glamorous and fun through an elaborate network of human and mechanical systems. The Triumph's crew complement of over a thousand included mechanics and technicians, cooks and hospitality staff, maintenance workers, and others the passengers never see. That's besides the enormous machines, which consume fuel enough to make your leafy-green Prius look paltry by comparison.

Thousands of workers and hundreds of machines means ships have countless moving parts, all prepared to break. Companies have to prepare for every eventuality, and have supplies for repair ready early, because, as the Triumph's crew discovered, resupply may be days away. The investment in human skills will also be substantial.

Extending the analogy between cruise ships and cities, the technological capacity to house and employ so many people in such proximity is astonishing. Urban designer Jeff Speck contends that cities are environmentally sound because close quarters means less energy expended in transportation and climate control. I won't disagree with Speck, as he isn't wrong. But cities require more energy to get food in, and sewage out.

Humans change the environment wherever we go. Unlike other animals, humans don't instinctively slot ourselves into our ecosystem; scholars dispute whether humans have instincts at all. We must constantly make choices about our food, shelter, and entertainment. Technology has created the illusion that we don't have to make some of those decisions anymore, but that's a phantom. We actually just don't have to see our decisions anymore.

Because it's a closed environment, the Triumph amplifies it when our choices become visible again. If sewage systems in Manhattan or Chicago collapsed, it might take weeks before residents noticed, not the hours needed on cruise ships. But sewage processes haven't advanced meaningfully since Joseph Bazalgette pioneered urban sewers in the 19th century. Researchers suffer from the “poop taboo,” making sewage research a dead-end enterprise.

Perhaps director James Ross expected audiences to draw these conclusions without being prompted. But I only caught it because I've read about urban design. When I've tried discussing the “poop taboo” with friends, they've gagged and silenced me. Creating the Triumph's sensory immersion without discussing what it means for us, lets us continue ignoring the parallels with the human environment. But as the Triumph's passengers discovered, failure to plan for disaster, doesn't prevent disaster from happening.

Those Who Don’t Learn From History

Vladimir Putin and friends, in a still from Netflix’s
Turning Point: the Bomb and the Cold War

College-educated progressives might have a natural tendency to sneer at the 2024 Netflix docuseries Turning Point: the Bomb and the Cold War. The entire series has a ponderous, intensely self-serious tone, backed by a Philip Glass-inspired soundtrack that emphasizes the series’ intended Great Deeds of Great Men themes. Letting political insiders like Robert Gates and Condoleeza Rice narrate history risks letting the guilty write their own exoneration.

So sure, there’s a knee-jerk desire to impose a Noam Chomskian interpretation of the series as pro-American propaganda. Yet series creator Brian Knappenberger doesn’t let America off lightly either. Knappenberger’s sources are preponderantly American, yet many willingly doubt America’s official story spotlighting the country’s culpability in constant geopolitical escalation. American policy provides the precedents now bearing fruit in places like Ukraine.

I don’t mention Ukraine lightly. Each of the nine episodes begins with a teaser relating to Russia’s 2022 Ukraine invasion, casting that event in light of Vladimir Putin’s Cold War history. Though Knappenberger avoids anything as high-handed as a thesis statement, his comparisons of current events with Twentieth Century history emphasizes that there’s an arc of continuity which we ignore only at our peril. Sadly, ignorance is something we certainly have.

Despite the series’ title, Knappenberger doesn’t get into the Manhattan Project until episode 2, or the Cold War until Episode 3. His account begins during World War II, when the Allied Powers combined to fight global fascism, but only reluctantly. The “enemy of my enemy” arrangement forced Roosevelt and Stalin to sit down together, despite openly opposing one another politically. Both leaders exposed one united face to the world, while plotting separately in private.

Knappenberger’s style demonstrates influence from legendary documentarian Errol Morris. Like Morris, Knappenberger centers interview subjects largely front-and-center, narrating heir interpretation of events to an interviewer just slightly off-camera. Despite the dramatic importance of the subjects’ narrative (underscored by the soundtrack), they remain largely static. Visual drama comes from the intercutting of archival footage of historical events as they actually happened.

Early episodes involve mostly scholars and historians. As events like the Potsdam Conference, the Trinity test, or Hiroshima largely pass from living memory, we’re left with experts’ interpretations. Not that we’ve entirely forgotten these events. Knappenberger interviews two Hiroshima survivors, reminding us that history isn’t a collection of numbers and heuristics; it’s the combined story of what actually happened to real, living people.

The closer Knappenberger brings us to the present, the more he involves those who participated. Sure, he asks military and academic historians to interpret, say, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. But he also interviews a Spanish-speaking participant who banked everything on American support, then got captured in Cuba. The horror etched on that survivor’s face speaks volumes to history’s human impact, and America’s opportunistic betrayal of its international allies.

Beginning around 1980, Knappenberger relegates historians and scholars to a supporting role. The narrative kicks over to those who participated in, and often caused, history. Archival footage of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev intercuts with interview subjects, including Defense Secretaries, global journalists, and Gorbachev’s official English-language interpreter. Taken together, we receive a working view of how the late Cold War unfolded.

It's possible to raise objections to Knappenberger’s historical lens. He accepts the notion of history as the Great Doings of Great Men—and we indeed mean men, as only in the last twenty years do women drive the story, except as wives or survivors. Knappenberger sees history as happening mainly inside the corridors of power. He includes archival footage of, say, the demolition of the Berlin Wall or the Orange Revolution, but only overlaid with scholars’ and politicians’ exegesis.

Nevertheless, it’s impossible to escape Knappenberger’s final resolution. He wants us to understand that current events don’t exist in a vacuum; specifically, Putin chose war in Ukraine to reverse massive humiliations which the Cold War forced on Russia. The series’ final two episodes deep-dive into Putin personally, and how he views history through the humiliations which collapse of the Soviet Union forced on his people. Putin’s Ukraine invasion makes sense in that context.

In the final ten minutes, Knappenberger finally allows interview subjects to spell out his intended lesson: Putin’s military adventures aren’t unprecedented. America’s continued post-Cold War interventions in other nations provide political justification for Putin’s invasions in Ukraine, Georgia, and elsewhere. History didn’t happen only in the past, and contra conservative dogma, history didn’t end. Only when we know history, and use it proactively, can we prevent the disasters continuing around us.

Law & Justice in the Other New York

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 49
Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, Brother’s Keeper

Sometime in the small hours of June 7th, 1990, poor dirt farmer William Ward died in his bed. He was 64 years old and had been in failing health for some time. Police initially accepted this as just something that happens. But a hotshot medical examiner soon found slight irregularities in William’s remains and proclaimed foul play. Police quickly arrested William’s youngest surviving brother, Delbert, charging him with “mercy killing.”

Documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky built their career around following people that the media world gawks at without bothering to understand. They created a trilogy of documentaries surrounding the West Memphis Three, the poster children for the 1980s Satanic Panic. They also worked extensively with the rock band Metallica. After Sinofsky’s passing, Berlinger directed Netflix’s highly controversial Jeffrey Dahmer biopic, continuing his love of spectacle.

Berlinger and Sinofsky were attracted to William Ward’s murder, and Delbert’s trial, not because of events themselves, but because of the media circus surrounding them. The four Ward brothers farmed their ancestral patch outside Munnsville, a central New York village that (to judge by this film) has few residents younger than forty. The Wards themselves had lived their entire lives on the farm, with electricity but no running water.

Our filmmakers struggle to let the Ward brothers tell their own stories. Problem is, the Ward brothers aren’t very helpful. While Berlinger and Sinofsky’s interview subjects mostly interact well with the camera and explain themselves in measured tones, Delbert Ward and his brothers, Lyman and Roscoe, are visibly uncomfortable. The documentarians have to leave their questions in the edit, because the Ward brothers consistently give uncomfortable one-word answers.

Much media speculation around the Ward murder, as recounted in this documentary, centers on the Wards’ simple lifestyles. Slick-suited downstate journalists loved to interview the brothers, and their neighbors, keeping them centered on camera so the world could hear their regional accents and see their paucity of teeth. None of the brothers ever married; though they seem amiable with Munnsville women, there’s little evidence any has ever had a relationship.

By contrast, Berlinger and Sinofsky aim their cameras at the journalists and their polished crews. While urbane news crews in fashionable late-eighties businesswear get multiple takes to perfect their location shoots, they let Delbert Ward ramble incoherently, and broadcast the first take. Berlinger and Sinofsky show the contrast between supercilious journalists, and the way Munnsville’s people close ranks to protect Delbert Ward, whom they consider a neighbor.

Delbert Ward (right) and his attorney, as they hear the verdict

Unfortunately, Munnsville’s attitude toward the Wards proves as patronizing as the city slickers. Several Munnsville residents give on-camera interviews, but fumble through their cliched, condescending narratives of “neighbors” they clearly don’t know well. Several Munnsville residents spin fictional justifications of why Delbert couldn’t possibly be guilty, or why he is, but it’s secretly okay. Many describe the Ward brothers as simple-minded, rusticating, and possibly mentally disabled.

That last characterization proves prescient when Delbert’s defense attorney deploys it in his opening argument. Ralph Cognetti literally claims Delbert couldn’t have murdered William because he’s too simple-minded—the same argument the nameless defense attorney uses in Ernest J. Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying. Delbert’s attorney, his neighbors, and distant supporters defend him using the same accusation the state uses: these are just hill people, with all the stereotypes.

New York state police based their entire argument on two facts: William’s body had petechial hemorrhaging, and Delbert signed a confession. (They also claim they found semen on William’s corpse, a lurid detail presumably used to bait the media, since it’s never pursued further.) The problem with Delbert’s signed confession is, by his own admission, Delbert can barely read. His entire understanding of justice comes from watching Matlock.

Berlinger and Sinofsky follow the Ward brothers and their Munnsville neighbors through the months preceding the trial, and the trial itself. Their depiction of a murder trial is chilling. Stripped of Dick Wolf’s beloved melodrama, the process appears degrading and spiteful. Lyman Ward handles cross-examination so poorly, I briefly thought he’d died on the stand. It’s enough to make one wonder whether trials are about justice at all.

It spoils nothing to admit: Delbert is acquitted, but not exonerated. This movie isn’t about the outcome anyway. It’s about the conflict between outsiders and the community, the way downstate police and prosecutors (and their media allies) hunted for a murderer before proving a murder actually happened, while the working-class community closed ranks to defend their own. The product is chilling, an indictment of the justice system itself.

Creedence Clearwater: Burnin’ Hard and Burnin’ Out

Bob Smeaton (director), Travelin’ Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival Live at the Royal Albert Hall

Promo photo taken during Creedence Clearwater’s only European tour

Fans of the rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival often discuss them in awe-filled, nearly reverential terms. I should know, I’m one of them. They burned fast and hard, producing five albums in 1969 and 1970, working under singer-songwriter John Fogerty’s iron-fisted rule. But they burned out equally quickly: by early 1971, John’s brother Tom Fogerty quit the band, and they barely limped across the finish line a year later.

This documentary depicts CCR’s April 1970 performance at London’s Royal Albert Hall. That concert, though, runs barely 45 minutes, too short to constitute a feature-length performance. So to flesh out the performance, the film is bookended with a documentary, more a hagiography, narrated by Jeff Bridges. This recounting presents CCR as “the biggest band in the world,” presented as literal heirs to the Beatles, who disbanded weeks before this concert.

Reviewing something like this, we’re split between two forces. The concert itself is solid, fast-moving, and entertaining, a breathless display of CCR’s aggressively American musical ethos in an iconic British venue. The documentary is… something else. It was clearly written in an attempt to recapture the experience of being a CCR fan in Spring of 1970, and blithely ignores much of what we now know was happening behind the scenes.

Bridges’ linking narration, written by John Harris, starts with the band’s origins in El Cerrito, California. Anchored by kids who’d known each other since middle school, the band, initially known as the Blue Velvets, consciously rejected British Invasion influences and played blues-rock based on Buddy Guy and Leadbelly. Snippets of seldom-heard 45s sound anachronistic for the middle 1960s, granting insight into John Fogerty’s early anti-rock influences.

As engaging as this chronicle is, though, fans can’t ignore that by 1970, fault lines were already developing. We know this, but the documentary apparently doesn’t. Tom Fogerty in particular appears disconnected from the band, stone-faced and out of sync even while singing classics like “Bad Moon Rising” and “Proud Mary.” Worse, the narration is uncritical of Fantasy Records, with whom CCR notoriously had one of rock’s most lopsided contracts.

Therefore we know, but the documentary apparently doesn’t, that the seeds of breakup already existed. Like the Beatles’ Get Back, which shows the band playing live on a London rooftop years after they’d already disbanded, the documentary depicts the illusions of the moment, not the historical scope. CCR appears only in archive footage, film shot and curated in 1970 by Fantasy Records’ PR department to sell albums, not depict reality.

A still from the performance video

After the throat-clearing, the film transitions to the concert itself. Here’s the part we actually wanted. CCR plays with a musical alacrity most acts only capture briefly: old enough to know their instruments and play with passion bordering on violence, but young enough to withstand the hot lights and screaming crowds. They play (most of) their classics for an audience to whom this music is still new and dangerous.

The 52-year-old footage shows signs of the times. Camera operators keep trying to capture band members, especially John Fogerty, in tight face holds, a common maneuver in 1970, substantially undercut by Fogerty’s refusal to stand still. John’s brother Tom plays rhythm on a big white arch-top guitar, but mostly stands still, frequently overshadowed by the amp stacks. Camera operators mostly ignore him, which is unfortunate.

I saw John Fogerty perform live in 1997, by which time “John Fogerty” had become a stage character as much as an individual. Like Mark Twain, Fogerty wore his persona consciously, with his affected semi-New Orleans accent and nostalgic ramblings. That Fogerty isn’t on display here. This Fogerty is soft-spoken but hard-rocking, aggressively belting hits with almost no stage banter. He appreciates the audience without courting them.

This is a period piece. The footage, though digitally restored, is aged, and the sound reflects 1970 amplifier technology. But I appreciate one aspect: unlike The Band’s The Last Waltz or the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter, this film doesn’t interrupt the concert. CCR plays straight through, without self-conscious cinematic intrusion. One suspects this might be what it felt like to see them playing at their peak.

In the final moments, Bridges’ narration calls CCR “the biggest band in the world.” But ten months later, they were already disbanding. Fans will watch this performance with a fatalism that the documentary tries to avoid. Notably, no band members were involved with this documentary; it’s a product of the money machine, not art. But it’s also a tight, muscular performance of a band whose work really mattered.

Deep Canyon Blues and the 12-String Revolution

L-R: Regina Spektor, Jakob Dylan, Beck, and Cat Power
rehearse their arrangement in Echo in the Canyon

Andrew Slater (director), Echo in the Canyon

In 1965, as America struggled to handle the British Invasion, an answering sound emerged from the margins of Los Angeles. Though the Beach Boys pioneered the West Coast Sound, the real movement began when Roger McGuinn, a disaffected folkie, quit Greenwich Village and moved west. Back then, young artists could still afford to starve in La-La Land. Many of them found their way to the same place, an incubator of ambition and innovation: Laurel Canyon.

Fifty years later, several Los Angeles recording professionals organized a concert and accompanying cover album to memorialize Laurel Canyon’s impact on musical history. This documentary, with son-of-the-times Jakob Dylan interviewing several of Laurel Canyon’s surviving veterans, lingered in post-production purgatory for years, but it creates an atmosphere to help audiences, jaded on a half-century of intervening history, understand just how momentous these few years really were.

It’s hard to define the Laurel Canyon sound. It was characterized, in part, by complex, layered arrangements, poetic lyrics sometimes derived directly from East Coast folk music, and dense multi-part vocal harmonies. This documentary quickly chucks any attempt to define the sound, preferring instead to identify its most influential proponents. There are fleeting references to the Monkees, Joni Mitchell, and Frank Zappa, but the greatest screen time goes to four acts: the Byrds, the Mamas & the Papas, the Beach Boys, and Buffalo Springfield.

Young Dylan interviews a cast of thousands to reconstruct the culture and climate of 1965. Luminaries like Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds, Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield, the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, recount what they brought into the Canyon scene. Eric Clapton, John Sebastian, Graham Nash, and Ringo Starr recount what they brought out of it. Their recollections are hectic and sometimes contradictory, but brimming with classic rock spirit.

It’s important to note, nobody onscreen purports to reveal the only true account. David Crosby admits his youthful arrogance made him pugnacious, and he frequently didn’t get along with other Canyon artists. McGuinn and Stills are remarkably forthcoming about the quantity of drugs they consumed, something they were cagier about previously. Phillips describes how band members frequently became so isolated from the outside world that their perceptions became distorted, their memories unreliable.

Between these interviews, we get music. Vintage TV performances and rare studio footage depict original artists performing their most important tracks. But the emphasis lies on younger artists recreating the music. Jakob Dylan is joined, alternately in studio and on the Olympic Theatre stage, by luminaries like Regina Spektor, Cat Power, Fiona Apple, and Beck. These recordings and concert performances don’t just mimic the classics, they recreate how new, dangerous, and exciting the hits felt.

The Echo in the Canyon house band performs before footage of the Byrds

Taken together, the mingling of interviews and concert performance resembles Scorsese’s The Last Waltz. Like Robbie Robertson in that documentary, these vintage artists are desperate to curate how survivors remember their influence after they go. (The gushing fan tributes include, heart-wrenchingly, Tom Petty’s last onscreen interview. He visibly has trouble moving.) And like The Band’s concert segments, these artists don’t let age stand between them and providing the most muscular performances possible.

Upon release, this documentary received warm reviews, and enjoys an overwhelmingly positive Rotten Tomatoes score. Within months, though, critics began reassessing their opinions. Some began fault-finding, criticizing Jakob Dylan for not exercising more journalistic rigor in his interviews. Others complained about the Laurel Canyon artists omitted from the roster: Joni Mitchell gets a single fleeting mention, while Jim Morrison, Linda Ronstadt, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band never get mentioned at all.

These nitpicks, however, are pretty unfair. Considering that the documentary was organized to support the concert, the included bands were probably just the ones from whom they could get performance rights. Track selection probably also reflects who they could secure for on-camera interviews: the surviving Doors are notoriously media-shy, and the Dirt Band seldom plays their early Laurel Canyon songs anymore. What some critics see as “a missed opportunity,” probably stems from simple logistical limits.

My opinion, though, is biased. These bands, particularly the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, are the acts who sprung me from a conservative youth dominated by slick, chart-friendly music. Even though these bands dissolved before I was born, their lyrical and instrumental complexity opened new vistas for me. Then, like everybody else, I got accustomed to them and forgot. This documentary doesn’t just recount what the original acts sounded like. It reminds me how innovative, even revolutionary, their music once sounded.

Listening Lessons

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 39
Bob Hurst, The Listeners

Headquarters Counseling Center, in Lawrence, Kansas, exists to provide help for those who have nowhere else to turn. It has no Freudian couch, no billing department, no aged white men dispensing sage guidance. It’s staffed entirely by volunteers, mostly undergraduates, who make themselves available at difficult and inconvenient hours, the hours when desperate people are most likely to descend into self-destruction. And it provides something people walking in darkness often need: someone to simply listen.

Documentary filmmaker Bob Hurst took his camera into a training course for counseling volunteers, to discover what makes a good suicide prevention specialist. If I admire anything about his technique, it’s probably his willingness to avoid coming to pat conclusions. These young volunteers don’t have neatly prepared answers for life’s contentious questions; the course simply provides them skills necessary to listen impartially. Which, despite what you might expect, proves to be a highly contentious skill.

First, the counselors must practice the task of keeping silent during somebody else’s trials. Counselors in movies and novels often dispense gnomic wisdom exactly when characters, enduring the Dark Night of the Soul, need it most. Not these counselors. We watch as experienced trainers, some with the highest degrees available in their fields, teach their wide-eyed young students how to say as little as possible, add nothing to the conversation, letting the callers just speak.

(After writing this essay, a Headquarters volunteer contacted me, asking for clarification. When I say they “add nothing to the conversation,” this is inaccurate. Rather, they add as little as possible, always remaining careful to ensure callers tell their own stories without interference.)

Many of the world’s great religions, including Christianity and Buddhism, teach the importance of refraining from judging others: we don’t understand another person’s plights, and cannot be truly fair. How many of us, though, are able to actually do that? Our unthinking response to difficult or morally fraught situations is usually to sort people into worthy and deprived categories, which often reflect “similarity to me.” These students struggle learning how to reserve and avoid judging.

Officially, Headquarters is part of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (NSPL), a network of local and regional call-in centers where ordinary people many quite poor, phone in when facing the desire to abandon life. This gives Headquarters a potentially nationwide reach. However, the NSPL’s member centers maintain focus on their regions, starting from the assumption that local people understand local needs. This means that Headquarters’ callers mainly live within a short drive of their building.

Much counseling, especially crisis counseling like Headquarters does, starts with the assumption that callers want to live. They wouldn’t call a suicide prevention hotline unless they believed life still had some meaning, however tenuous. Therefore the counseling process mainly involves letting callers tell their own stories, tease out the hidden aspects of their own lives, and rediscover why life retains some substance. The process is often counterintuitive, and often requires the counselors not giving advice.

Popular nonfiction filmmakers like Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock might’ve felt compelled to creatively edit this story, creating central characters and a through-line. Not Bob Hurst. Though he sometimes interviews experienced counselors, who talk almost into the camera, and lets several trainees introduce themselves, there’s no linking narration or other storytelling quality. (He does have to insert a title card at one point.) Hurst prefers to let us witness events unfold, forcing us to listen.

In practice, this means something isn’t constantly “happening.” For instance, we witness trainees grappling with the official Headquarters script, which often defies common sense; the trainees desperately want to insert advice or correct mistaken ideas. Conventional storytelling technique says one of two things should happen: either a senior trainer should concisely explain the trainees’ mistakes, or the trainees should have a lightbulb moment. Neither simple solution occurs. The trainees just struggle until they understand it.

Pointedly, this struggle corresponds with the battles callers go through. (For confidentiality reasons, we don’t get to witness an active client call.) The callers, trainees, and audience want compact aphorisms which resolve moments of slow conflict. Reality doesn’t make such a good narrative, unfortunately. Instead, as the counselors listen to callers, and callers listen to the truths which linger, unacknowledged, inside themselves, we viewers listen to our own struggles, realizing we bear our own answers.

We, like Headquarters’ volunteers and callers, need to listen. We learn how to reserve judgement, exist in the present, and avoid the temptations of concise answers. This documentary doesn’t provide a happy ending or “useful” moral. Instead, running slightly over one hour, it encourages us to participate in a movement from one place to another. That movement isn’t always easy or engaging. But it takes us where we need to go, which is outside ourselves.

Robert McNamara's Very Long Afterlife

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 37
Errol Morris, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara

President-elect John Kennedy tapped Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense mere months after he’d become the first Ford Motor Company CEO unrelated to the Ford family. McNamara’s experiences in World War II qualified him as America’s leading civilian authority on military matters, but McNamara admits, his business successes really attracted JFK’s attention. His attitudes as a corporate bean-counter originated in the Pacific Theatre, and carried over into Vietnam.

Documentarian Errol Morris pioneered an interview technique in which subjects speak directly into the camera, Morris himself is mostly silent, and he permits his subjects to keep speaking until they reveal something true and awful about themselves. McNamara, eighty-five years old when Morris interviewed him, proves well-suited for Morris’ technique. In post-production, Morris supplements McNamara’s interviews with advanced graphics, rare archive footage, and a stirring Philip Glass soundtrack.

McNamara unfolds his story thematically, rather than sequentially. In his telling, the story begins not with Vietnam, nor his years spent fighting in the Pacific, but with the Cuban Missile Crisis. These thirteen days define his memories of government service, because they demonstrate the give-and-take necessary, and also because they demonstrate that the most rational actors will behave in ways that seemingly defy reason. War, McNamara discovers, turns sane people irrational.

From there, he unfolds his life backward and forward. He briefly touches on his early life, and his Harvard teaching career, before diving headlong into World War II. There he served under General Curtis LeMay, one of history’s most effective commanders. LeMay taught McNamara important lessons about efficiency, about computing relevant data to achieve desirable outcomes for his side. Despite his tough-talking rugged reputation, LeMay was an early technocrat.

But LeMay, with his officers’ complicity, also pioneered techniques of Total War which targeted civilian populations. McNamara confesses to organizing a bombing sortie over Japan that, he says, killed over 100,000 civilians in one night. “Were you aware this was going to happen?” Morris asks. McNamara replies: “Well I was, I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it.” He continues: “He [LeMay], and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.”

Only after this lengthy preamble does McNamara graduate to the conflict everyone associates with his leadership: Vietnam. He describes a conflict premised on false ideas, political saber-rattling, and useless patriotic fervor. President Johnson justified the advance bombing of North Vietnam in recompense for an attack which, McNamara reveals, later proved never to have happened. “Believing and seeing,” McNamara says sanctimoniously, “are both often wrong.”

Errol Morris (left) and Robert McNamara

In interviewing McNamara, Morris reveals a man riven by incompatible desires. McNamara wants to take accounting of his life’s accomplishments, good and ill; yet he repeatedly kicks responsibility for his greatest failures up the chain of command. He believes in efficiency, data, and accountability, yet also distrusts rationality and evidence. He desires to be completely honest, yet stands behind the importance of lies told forty years earlier.

Throughout his tenure, McNamara describes conflicts inside the administration. He and President Johnson had very different visions of how to prosecute the war. Curtis LeMay, by this time Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believed in completely wiping out any resistance, and advocated nuclear annihilation of any opposition. McNamara hated this idea, believing that you can learn from mistakes in conventional war, but not nuclear war.

Occasionally, McNamara displays humility enough to recognize the times he believes his own propaganda. Besides admitting his war-criminal behavior in Japan, he also describes meetings in the 1990s with Fidel Castro and members of the North Vietnamese government, when he discovered his opponents believed almost the opposite of what the war information machine insisted. Rather than realize what he didn’t know, McNamara often accepted his own agitprop, with catastrophic consequences.

Working together, Morris and McNamara distill his experiences, conflicts, and doubts into eleven portable lessons. (They actually found twenty-one, but needed to cut for time; if you watch the DVD, the other ten are buried in special features.) Taken together, these lessons display a worldview that appears optimistic for the long term— McNamara sometimes sounds remarkably dove-ish— but bleakly fatalistic about the present.

Recorded in 2003, when America was getting into its biggest overseas conflict since Vietnam, Morris clearly intended this movie to comment on subjects outside itself. It certainly does that. Like the best literature, it ultimately isn’t about its nominal subject, it’s about us, the audience. It’s about what we accept and tolerate, and what we consider finally intolerable. And what, like McNamara, we’re willing to paper over.

The Force That Was Jimi Hendrix

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 29
Joe Boyd, John Head, & Gary Weis (directors), Jimi Hendrix

It’s difficult to believe, given his outsized influence in multiple musical genres, that Jimi Hendrix’s mainstream success lasted only four years. He went from the blustering rebel smashing his guitar at Monterey Pop, to a solemn icon playing with quiet intensity at the Winterland Ballroom, to an early grave, faster than some artists today produce their second album. He left behind a lifetime’s output, and he changed lives along the way.

Filmmakers Boyd, Head, and Weis began creating this rocumentary shortly after Hendrix’s abrupt passing. They bring together both original and vintage interviews with concert footage to eulogize an artist whose passing was still recent. The fresh hurt on many interviewees’ faces is palpable. But the music Hendrix created remains fresh and powerful; the licks from tracks like “Machine Gun” and “Purple Haze” still influence musicians today.

This documentary begins with the assumption you know who Jimi Hendrix is. It launches with concert footage of Hendrix deliberately overwhelming his speaker stacks, getting the well-modulated pop and whine that made his guitar work groundbreaking. (Hendrix didn’t invent feedback, Ike Turner did, but Hendrix exploited feedback’s popularity for everything it’s worth.) Then, when you’re good and rocked out, it launches into serious journalism mode.

Interview subjects include people who knew Hendrix personally, before his early fame, and also musicians, mostly British, who felt his impact on their careers. Little Richard, in whose band Hendrix paid dues; Pete Townshend, who viewed Hendrix as a rival at Monterey; Eric Clapton, who started off seeing Hendrix as somebody who stole his licks, then became an ardent admirer. Hendrix clearly changed every life he touched.

But though it’d be easy and cost-effective to interview well-known musicians, these filmmakers throw the net wider. They interview people Hendrix knew and worked with, people who loved him before he became famous, people who guided his musical sound as he guided theirs. Childhood friends, Army platoon mates, influential DJs, old lovers, bandmates. Diverse voices combine to tell Hendrix’s story in ways he, being absent, cannot.

Jimi Hendrix sets fire to his already-smashed guitar at Monterey Pop (click to enlarge)

Al Hendrix, Jimi’s father, provides important context for Jimi’s struggling childhood. He discusses how Jimi, a desperately shy child, found identity through playing guitar; if ordered to clean his room, young Jimi would strum his broom, Al says. But Al, a notorious alcoholic with a temper, also struggles through his narration, his words audibly slurring. It’s difficult not to wonder how reliable a narrator poor Al actually is.

Our filmmakers match their interviews with well-chosen concert footage. When Pete Townshend talks about his battle with Hendrix over playing order at Monterey Pop, the camera jumps directly to Hendrix’s legendary performance, where he played “Wild Thing,” culminating in smashing his guitar. Early girlfriend Fayne Pridgeon talks about almost getting evicted behind Jimi playing Bob Dylan at full volume, leading into “Like a Rolling Stone” at the Isle of Wight.

And what concert footage! Hendrix remains famous for early, high-energy recordings like “Wild Thing,” but that represents one fraction of his output. His performance of “Machine Gun” at Winterland, in which he mostly stands still and plays with understated gravity, is downright entrancing. And a vintage jam where he plays “Hear My Train a’Coming,” a concert staple he never recorded to his satisfaction, on an enormous acoustic twelve-string, brings chills.

Ironically, Hendrix himself probably wouldn’t have approved this eulogy. Archival interviews show his disdain for Q&A repartee. Doing panel with Dick Cavett, he subverts every question Cavett asks, leaving the interviewer stumped. Another anonymous off-camera interviewer questions whether smashing his guitar is a “gimmick”; Hendrix disparages the idea of gimmicks altogether, and says destroying a guitar is neither better nor worse than destroying a Vietnamese village with napalm.

This film substantially reflects its time. Released in late 1973, just months after Operation Homecoming basically ended the cultural moment we call the 1960s, its ethic was already outdated upon debut. Interviews with Buddy Miles, Noel Redding, and multimedia pioneers Arthur and Albert Allen, bespeak a street-fighting attitude that probably made sense one year earlier. Various attempts at hippie-era pop philosophy reflect how the Woodstock era was already dying.

Yet it also reflects how much Hendrix himself breathed life into that period. Some of his live performances and interviews included here were recorded mere weeks before his sudden passing in 1970. Though Hendrix’s survival wouldn’t have prevented the 1960s ending, it’s tempting to wonder exactly how culture might have changed. But, like a supernova, the light of Hendrix’s burning continues shining long after the source itself has burned out.