Tora! Tora! Tora!

Depsite its reputation as notoriously dull, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) is a fascinating movie, with one of the most interesting leads ever seen shot on film. The lead, naturally, is the Japanese military, portrayed at the very height of its strength in 1941. The primary events in the story surround the attack on Pearl Harbor, and as such it is, I suppose, a historical movie. Indeed, it is obsessed with factual accuracy, and, by and large, achieves it. The narrative, however, is a classical tragedy, of which we see merely the climax. In T!T!T!, the protagonist (let’s call him J.M) is portrayed as powerful, agile, and youthful, full of energy and ambition. However, unsurprisingly, J.M. is also filled with a youthful arrogance and, if I may, hubris. Perhaps worse, J.M. combines this arrogance with a deep suspicion and fear of his social betters, which derives (though this outside the narrative scope of T!T!T!) from his childhood reputation as both stupid and weak. Bullied through his childhood, now that J.M. has come into his own, he fears a recurrence, and forms an extremely clever plan to stop it. However, due in part to unfortunate circumstance, but primarily to the fact that J.M.’s plan was too intricate to really work, J.M.’s plan misfires, and ends by instigating precisely the aggression that J.M. so feared. The final lines of the movie portray both its tone and institutional focus, when Admiral Yamamoto, the leader of the attack, says, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” The actual statement on which this line is probably based is even more humanizing, attributing to the United States as a corporate entity actual emotions and actions: “A military man can scarcely pride himself on having 'smitten a sleeping enemy'; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten. I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack.”

It is not easy to portray the intricacies of an institution personality in film, and we should not therefore be surprised that many people, mistaking the people in the film for the primary characters, find the action dull and the interactions unmoving. This is much like arguing that Macbeth is boring, because the relationship between his liver and his large intestine is never really explored. The real characters here are national institutions, and it is their characters, their strengths and weaknesses, their hopes and fears, and not those of any of the individuals that compose them, that matter in T!T!T!. Seen from this perspective, T!T!T! is a compelling and fascinating character drama, and the very climax of a tragedy. Although attempts to portray aggregate characters are quite rare, they had something of a golden age in the late sixties through early seventies. The Andromeda Strain (1971) is an excellent example, and Dr. Strangelove (1964) and 2001 (1968) both contain elements of the genre.