President, Let Me Just Explain To My Colleagues That There Will Be Five Consecutive: Fill & Download for Free

Nolan As Auteur(Note that the discussion of Nolan’s films in this answer is spoiler-free at the level of plot (it does reveal structure). Like a Nolan film, it makes fine sense if you’re in the dark but even better sense if you’re in the know.)I believe that Christopher Nolan is immensely underrated by my fellow cinephiles. I think he’s the smartest and perhaps the most important contemporary director, very likely the only one who has added to the vocabulary of film meaning. There are many great directors who have shown us something new by taking existing film vocabulary and pushing it to dizzying and dazzling new extremes, e.g., Wong Kar-Wai in In the Mood for Love and Shane Carruth in Upstream Color, or, less obviously—because it’s done largely with the screenplay rather than the camera—Asgar Farhadi in A Separation (those are my choices for the three best films of the millennium, BTW). But Nolan is our most important innovator, and that’s why he’s underrated. Cinephiles are not looking for what he’s doing; it’s not part of how they judge films.An analogy: imagine that jazz guitar was once as popular as great cinema is, and that you took the best of Jimi Hendrix back in time and played it for a group of aficionados who regarded Django Reinhardt the way cinephiles regard Kubrick. They’d like the opening riff of “Purple Haze” because of its harmonic complexity, but “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” would leave them baffled. Hendrix isn’t doing anything they’re listening for: he’s not merely neglecting all the complex jazz scales, he’s concentrating on the pentatonic! Going from 12 notes to 7 and often just 5: that’s unsubtle and too on-the-nose. And he’s playing too few notes and holding each one too long!It’s not a perfect analogy, because I suspect that Hendrix could have done a pretty good job of playing like Reinhardt had he wanted, while Nolan doesn’t quite have the chops to make a Kubrickian film. But the key point is that he’s not trying. He’s doing something else entirely.What is he doing? In a nutshell, Nolan is the first film auteur to realize that plot twists and ambiguous plot puzzles can and should be more than entertainments. When we are forced to entirely reinterpret what has happened in a narrative (The Prestige), or puzzle out an ambiguous one (Memento, Inception), that process is not just a diversion, but a deep reflection of one of the most fundamental aspects of being human. That aspect has scarcely been addressed previously in narrative art of any sort, because it is fundamentally resistant to treatment within conventional story structures (the only prior exemplar that comes to my mind is the great genius of literary science fiction, Gene Wolfe). And Nolan has discovered that when you explore this in film, you also directly address the question of how films acquire meaning. My fellow cinephiles think he’s shallow. I think I can demonstrate that he’s profound.To do that, I have to first explain the nature of stories.(Yes, this is enormously long; but I hope that many will find it revelatory. The story-specific cognitive psychology here, BTW, is wholly original, but the central importance of stories to the brain and behavior is well established, and I’d be shocked if I haven’t largely re-invented previous work on them.)About StoriesOur brains organize all of our experience in two ways. First and most obviously, there is knowledge: who’s running for President, where I keep my car keys. But most of our experience is stored in the form of stories. A story is a meaningful sequence of causally related events. Any causal sequence where something unexpected happens is potentially meaningful, so the brain creates an emotional response to make it memorable; that’s the origin of humor. But funny stories are the exception. Most stories, ordinary stories, are tales of motivated human action.A potential story of this sort begins when the self or (in told stories) a character perceives a lack and as a result has a desire which leads to a goal (these are usually but not always conscious at the time) and maybe even a plan. (Some stories omit the lack, and are of special interest for that very reason. Think of the man who is happily married yet nevertheless becomes obsessed with the femme fatale.) Usually the desire ceases because it has been satisfied without any difficulty—in which case it proves not to have been the germ of a story after all. But if the desire ceases in any other way—if it is achieved after overcoming difficulties, or is thwarted and abandoned, or is realized to be inappropriate and maladaptive, and is hence supplanted by one that better addresses the lack—then we have a story. And when stories happen to us—or when we hear or read or see them, and find them relevant, consciously or otherwise—we remember them. We use them.Here’s a simple example. I perceive I’m thirsty (lack) and decide I want a Coke (desire), and decide to go downstairs and get one out of the fridge (goal / plan). If my Coke is there right on the shelf, then my desire has been satisfied without difficulty; this is not a story, and I won’t remember this specific sequence of events, which of course has happened many times already and will happen many more times.But suppose there’s no Coke in the fridge, even though I could swear that I saw one there this morning. And I become convinced that my roommate drank it, and I’m furious, and I’m about to go pound on his door and chew him out, when (because of previous stories I remember, about how bad I am at looking for things) I decide to look one more time in the fridge, and there it is, behind the milk. Which I put back myself this morning.Now, that’s a story. I’ll probably tell it to my roommate, where it becomes a story in his brain about how I’m getting better at not blaming him for things he didn’t do. And it’s now a story in both our brains about a host of other, more general things: how we need to recognize our own cognitive weaknesses, how we should not be too quick to blame others, how people can learn to do both of those things, and so on.It’s crucial to realize that the stories in our brains—which is to say, our memories—are not a record of what actually happened to us. They have been edited and turned into better, more useful stories. Extraneous information is trimmed, and events are rearranged to make causal relationships clearer.Most importantly, new stories often disagree with old ones, and so the brain is continually modifying all of our stories, from the brand-new to the very old, to eliminate contradictions. Our capacity to change the knowledge in our brains is severely limited, but the capacity to change our stories is limitless, and fundamental. We couldn’t follow a plot twist without it.Stories, Film, Geekdom, and The Plot TwistThe stories in our brains are connected to one another, in wonderful and complicated ways. And fiction and film have represented and explored that complexity very satisfyingly. Movies have an endless variety of plot styles and structures, and I believe that our different reactions to this diversity are reflections of the different ways our brains like or need to link our stories together. For instance, while I think it’s possible to learn to appreciate a movie without an over-arcing plot (this year’s great example is American Honey), whether you naturally get a movie like that depends on hard-wired brain traits. In this case, I theorize that people with high cognitive flexibility (a fundamental personality trait in my neurochemically-based Deep Six system) often leave their stories weakly linked, and relink them on the fly as needed, while people low on this trait need to link their stories strongly and permanently. So a succession of very loosely linked stories plays much better to the former brain than to the latter, because it more closely resembles the brain that is watching it.There is however, one type of story structure that has universal appeal. We may head off together to the Great Imaginary Repertory Cineplex, and you might choose to see Die Hard and I might choose to see The Turin Horse (whose first scene proper is four and a half minutes of a horse and carriage riding in the wind, and whose most memorable plot sequence concerns the eating of a potato), but afterwards we can go and see The Sting or The Usual Suspects together and agree that it was Way Cool. Everybody likes a good plot twist. And just about everybody enjoys the work of making new sense of everything they thought they already knew, once the twist is revealed. It’s fun to figure it out, for just about everyone.And this is remarkable. Most people take no special pleasure in hard thought; for them, thinking is how you figure out what to do. Only a minority find thinking to be inherently pleasurable, an end in itself rather than a means, something to do in your spare time instead of dancing, bowling, or skiing. We call them “geeks.”In my Deep Six system, this is the single most fundamental trait. The reason why it has gone unrecognized is that it’s the trait that most determines who our friends are and hence what sort of behavior in others we consider typical. It’s tough for geeks to see, but most people would find it astonishing that anyone would choose to spend their free time seeking out thought-provoking conversations about books and movies (e.g., at science fiction conventions), or reading and answering questions on Quora. They spend all their time at work thinking; the last thing they want to do in their free time is think some more.This trait has a surprisingly weak correlation to intelligence. Every geek can recall meeting a potential new friend who was clearly brilliant and who shared their values, and then being disappointed to discover that their taste in fiction or movies ran to mere entertainments, such as relatively formulaic mystery novels. Even people who are supremely good at hard thought don’t necessarily enjoy it.But the plot twist makes geeks out of all of us. Sorting it out is never work and always play. Why is that? Here’s where the much-maligned discipline of evolutionary psychology comes to the rescue, despite its notorious inability to make testable predictions.The Plot Twist: More Than Narrative VertigoIf we are hard-wired to find the expansion and reinterpretation of the stories in our brains unusually pleasurable, then this narrative reframing must have survival value. It’s thus a fundamental part of our mental apparatus, one that goes back to our days as hunter-gatherers.And this is because the most important stories in our brains, unlike told stories, are often or even usually incomplete. (Why did she leave me for another man? Ten years later, I still don’t fully understand.) We are continually discovering new information that fills in the gaps in these incomplete stories. Sometimes the new information is so surprising that it forces us to rewrite the story thoroughly, to reinterpret a great deal of information we thought we understood. (She left me for another woman.) That the plot twist is so universally liked—that we have evolved to enjoy doing that much thinking—tells us that this degree of narrative reframing is not uncommon, and has been a part of our lives for a very long time.Cinephiles have always regarded the plot twist as mere entertainment. The first time I saw Vertigo, my initial thought was that it was a very solid and satisfying Hitchcock film. Of course, there were 42 minutes left, and most of what I believed to be true was false. This supreme feat of narrative reframing still strikes me as the most remarkable thing about the film, just edging out the portrait of Scotty’s obsession, from which it cannot really be separated.And yet Vertigo has risen to the top of the cinephilic admiration pile almost solely on the strength of its character arc (and that arc’s thematic resonances). Almost no online criticism says anything about the twist, or the contribution of the deception to Scotty’s obsession. In most cases, everything they say about the film would be just as true if Madeline had been dead and Judy Barton had merely closely resembled her, just as Scotty initially believes. There is no realization that what Scotty has had to do, rethink everything he thought he believed about his life’s most meaningful events, is a version of what every one of us must do, only written (like much great narrative art) in boldface and capitals to drive home the point. Plot twists, like all the other important elements of great narrative art, remind us of something that defines our human lives. That’s why we like them so much.What We Know For Certain About AmbiguityThere is one aspect of the stories in our brains that is almost impossible to capture in a satisfying told story. The incomplete stories in our brains are not just sitting there, waiting until we stumble on information to make better sense of them. Their presence causes us distress, and to minimize that distress, we are motivated to actively seek out the missing information. We call this distress “lack of closure,” and it goes to the core of our beings. And it is the one thing that told stories almost never have.If we see a movie or read a book that leaves a fundamental plot question potentially answerable but nevertheless unanswered, we feel cheated. Told stories are satisfying precisely because they answer all the important questions, and because in real life that is so often not the case.When a told story leaves an important question unanswered, we call that ambiguity. Ambiguous endings are not uncommon in told stories, but the teller must eliminate all possible sources of resolution to the mystery. Many ambiguous stories are therefore about a character who takes a secret to the grave. But even that may not be enough.Imagine the double agent whose true loyalties may have been with the Americans or the Russians, and whose story therefore has two separate and conflicting interpretations. Of course, he’s jumped off a bridge. That’s an ending that can be very satisfying, because it mirrors all the stories in our brains that we have had to give up on, the ones we’ve stamped “I can never know,” the ones we’ve let go of emotionally. Finally admitting that there can never be closure is itself a form of closure. Sometimes it’s all we can manage.But now imagine that the double agent’s boss at the C.I.A. knows the truth. The storyteller has to kill him, too. If you simply, for instance, remove him to Nepal, the audience will absolutely expect the agent’s partner (or other P.O.V. character) to go to Nepal to find the answer. Of course, I’m joking somewhat; a good storyteller will construct a compelling reason that he can never go to Nepal, and why he cannot ask the agent’s wife the one question that might solve the riddle, and so on. When we need to let go of a desire to know, that letting go can be complex. The best ambiguous endings give us multiple paths to the answer. But what’s fundamental is that they must all be closed.(It’s important to distinguish an ambiguous ending from an open one, where the story simply stops and leaves things unresolved. Our entire lives are open stories. We have no hard-wiring to want to see what happens next, because it happens anyway. While the open ending doesn’t give us the closure of a finished story, it beautifully mirrors where we are in the ongoing stories of our lives. We don’t naturally like open endings, since the feeling of being there is fundamentally neutral, but it’s not difficult to learn to like them. And it’s easy to hide a form of ambiguity in an open ending, as in The Graduate. Thinking that things will go one way, and then realizing a moment later that they might go the other, is once again something we’re familiar with. We wait to find out.)Understanding Memento, Backwards and ForwardsAbove all, Memento is a portrait of the nature and purpose of memory. We use short-term memory, our ongoing story, to make sense of the world at the most basic level. But we are ordinarily oblivious to this. Leonard is acutely aware of it, and we learn this truth by experiencing the world as he does, living out each extended moment without the context that short-term memory provides.The resulting narrative structure is radically unconventional. Each scene is a mystery, because neither Leonard nor the audience fully understands what’s going on. Each scene also contains information that explains the chronologically later scene we have just seen, but only to the audience; Leonard remains unaware. This is actually the defining device of a suspense story, but it’s backwards. In suspense, the storyteller reveals something to the audience that the character doesn’t know, creating apprehension in the audience over what might happen to the character next. In Memento, the revelation of information unknown to the character creates understanding in the audience over what has already happened to the character. That many of these revelations are in the form of twists drives home the point: context is everything. Memory is everything. And of course, it creates a thrilling narrative.If that’s all that Memento did, it would still be a remarkable film. But at the end, it does the impossible. Teddy gives Leonard information which, if true, constitutes an immense twist for Leonard and the audience. However, Teddy is a liar who has clearly been manipulating Leonard for his own purposes. Which version of the story is true: the version Leonard has always believed, or the version Teddy now puts forth? The entire meaning of the story hinges on this question, right down to what we should think of Leonard. It’s completely ambiguous, but it is also completely answerable; if either character wanted to, they could do research and discover or confirm the truth. Neither wants to, however; one is deservedly sure of the truth, and the other is lying to themselves (Teddy explicitly says it’s Leonard, but the great irony is that it may well be himself.) They each believe what they want to believe.This answerable ambiguity ought to be anathema to audiences, but because it has been introduced by a twist, we don’t mind it, and many people love it. As much as answerable ambiguity bothers us, we love the twist even more. We dive into the narrative, and discover that Nolan has created the most complex and carefully, completely ambiguous narrative in the history of cinema. (It’s hard to imagine the complexity of the hidden backstory, with its multiple possible versions, until you attack it. I had seen the film ten times and thought I understood it fairly thoroughly, but I’m now sitting on 5000+ words of notes, almost all about angles and insights that hadn’t previously occurred to me, and I don’t think I’m close to finished.)The facts themselves rather strongly support Leonard’s version of the truth, so Nolan has inserted cinematic clues that argue the opposite. All of those clues can be explained away, but the explanation does not lie within the story, but in interpretations of cinematic technique. Leonard has a flash of memory that supports Teddy’s version of the story … but maybe that was not memory, but imagination. How do we tell the difference between them, while watching a film? It’s the point of view established by the director, isn’t it? So what’s your opinion about P.O.V. consistency? Other arguments come down to the use of cinematic plot conventions, or the nature of film editing—if the director fails to show us something, does that mean it didn’t happen?Memento About the TruthSo Memento is a deep lesson in the nature and reliability of memory, and its crucial role in forming identity. It’s a uniquely structured thriller whose continual twists underscore the human truth that we must often revise our own stories and revise or even reverse our character judgments. It’s a master class in film interpretation. Most importantly, by creating a story that is both ambiguous and acceptable to us, it demolishes the distinction between objective and subjective truth. The objective truth that we cherish so much is revealed to be an unattainable abstraction.Nolan is therefore adamant that the story has no “correct” solution; he admits that he strongly prefers one, but he has gone out of his way to keep it secret. (The annotated final shooting script that is a treasured bonus feature of the limited edition DVD includes numerous severe criticisms by his brother Jonathan—the note that Natalie hands Leonard is, according to Jonah, “Please rescue me from this script. Chris Nolan is a sick f*ck”—but in the final pages, all clues about interpreting the ending, by both brothers, have been redacted.) Even though Nolan is the author, his belief—his preference— has no more authority than ours.What might be most fascinating about Memento is that audiences, to Nolan’s surprise, were very quick to believe Teddy, even though the previous scene (the next chronologically) had established that he’s a rather profoundly amazing liar. The clues that Nolan inserted to balance the story, because Teddy’s version makes less sense when you think it through, are now widely taken as evidence that his version is the correct version. Nolan has discussed this in interviews, with seeming dismay; of course such a reading destroys the chief point of the movie. But that reaction itself reveals the depth and importance of Nolan’s argument, by showing just how strong our need is to cling to a single truth. As he later complained in a somewhat different context, “You don't really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.”The Prestige: The PledgeThere is no better source of insight into the psychology of film viewing than negative reviews of great movies. A quarter of the critics who saw The Prestige disliked it, and at least as many were guarded in their praise. In their reviews, three complaints occur again and again. The characters are hard to like, the film switches genre unexpectedly and unnecessarily, and the big twist is telegraphed and hence a letdown. The first two complaints are easy to understand, and point us at two of the movie’s great accomplishments. The third will lead us to a new insight into the plot twist.The characters are supposed to be somewhat hard to like on the first viewing. (They are, of course, not meant to be so hard to like as to destroy audience engagement, a complaint made by most of the dismissive critics but very few audience members. What went wrong here is interesting but off-topic; I’ll explain it in the comments if anyone is curious.) On subsequent viewings, once the twist is learned, one of the principles emerges as entirely sympathetic, to the point where the film’s notorious chill evaporates and the ending can move the viewer to tears. This is of course a boldface version of what happens in our own stories as they are reframed by later knowledge. The ex-wife who left us for no good apparent reason can become entirely sympathetic if we later learn of her gender confusion. (Those who know the nature of the twist will see a further boldface parallel to the way we perceive others and their fundamental character, one that may have no peer in narrative art of any kind.)The Prestige: The TurnThe film begins with a voice-over asking us, “Are you watching closely?” This is, of course, another of the movie’s great themes, how the acuity of our attention and perception shapes our view of reality. The film argues that we don’t, as a rule, watch closely enough; the less closely you watch, the easier it is to see what you want to see (wanting to be fooled is just a subset of this). Sarah is the one character in the film who ends up watching closely.Twenty-two minutes into the film, Michael Caine’s character makes a claim that, if true, clearly establishes the film as science fiction. He very clearly believes it to be true, so the only trapdoor out of the promised genre shift is if he’s mistaken for some reason. Many viewers seem to miss this entirely. It’s worth attending to, because the film will use science fiction not just as a plot device but to make another major thematic argument.The film’s surface argument is that no one wants to know how a magic trick works. Most viewers understand this as a metaphor for the way good storytelling works, and in fact Christopher Priest says that the parallel between stage and story magic was the germ of his novel. Any story where the audience is missing information employs an arsenal of techniques and tricks to hide not just the information, but the very fact that it’s missing. There is concealment, disguise, and misdirection, and each of these techniques will ordinarily fail if the audience becomes aware of its existence. The storyteller and the stage magician thus have the same task, but they are abetted by a contract with the audience. We want to be fooled.Is this true just of storytelling, however? On repeated viewings, it becomes increasingly clear that the movie is making the same argument (a much more important one) about science. We want to enjoy the surfaces of scientific innovations, the shiny toy aspect, but we do not want to look under the hood and consider the implications of the actual machinery. Angier must in the end willfully ignore the implications of science, and this is true even though he has been paradoxically led to science by an obsessive thirst for knowledge. One of the first issues the film raises about stage magic is that the magician must be willing to “get his hands dirty” in order to achieve greatness, must be able to live with the awful underpinnings of the tricks, the ones the audience never sees. The film suggests that everyone who uses science is doing the same thing; Angier is just our boldface version of this universal reality.[The last six paragraphs of this section are expanded from the original three.]But amazingly, neither storytelling nor science is magic’s chief metaphoric target. The overriding metaphor of The Prestige is so non-obvious that I didn’t stumble on it until I wrote the original version of this section, and its primacy and jaw-dropping brilliance didn’t hit me until I saw the film twice in succession with it in mind.It’s often noted that Angier is a mediocre magician but a consummate showman, while Borden is the opposite. That’s an easy distinction to grasp, so it’s surprising that when looked at (almost certainly too) closely, it stops making sense. A magic trick is already all show. There are two discrete levels of show at work in a magic act, one overt and one covert.What we choose to show others of ourselves, the self we present, is not at all what we believe ourselves to be, our true self. But is our true self also a show? Is it a magic trick? Cognitive neuroscience says “yes”. Daniel Dennett has described the self as a narrative center of gravity [1]. An engineer uses the center of gravity of an object in certain calculations, and it produces perfect results, yet by doing so they can ignore all of the complexities and detail of the actual weight distribution. In the same way, we construct a “self” from all of the stories about ourselves in our brains, and it allows us to function effectively and yet, like the center of gravity, it doesn’t actually exist.So like Memento, The Prestige is an exploration of the nature of personal identity. Angier can also ask himself who he really is, and while this seems on a first viewing to be plot driven, and on later viewings to be merely one of the screenplay’s myriad examples of mirroring and doubling, it is ultimately thematically central.Watching the film from the beginning with the notion that it uses magic as a metaphor for the fundamentally artificial and constructed self is an absolutely revelatory experience. Like all of the best deeply hidden things, it seems ubiquitous and necessary once recognized. Borden shows a magic trick to a young boy, and then reveals its secret. His advice? “Never. Show. Anyone. They’ll beg you and flatter you for the secret—but as soon as you give it up you’ll be nothing to them. Understand? Nothing. The secret impresses no one—the trick you use it for is everything.”The prop used in the magic trick is a coin with heads on both sides. This has obvious meaning to Borden, and we get that on a second viewing. But it has an entirely different meaning in the film’s metaphoric structure. There’s no other side to show.The Prestige: The PrestigeAnd at last we come to the last common complaint of the dismissive critics. Liking this movie seems highly dependent on being fooled by the big twist. (I’m referring here to the twist in Borden’s story. The final reveal in Angier’s story is not actually a twist, as it reveals information that is easy to extrapolate—in fact, it continues a scene that was cut away from earlier—and that has not been contradicted in any way. It doesn’t cause any narrative reframing; it simply fills in a blank for those who hadn’t yet thought things through.) I think that perhaps one viewer in five figures it out, and some or many of those are disappointed and feel let down. They wanted something more extraordinary. (Does that complaint sound familiar?)What makes this rather astounding is that the film plays exceptionally well once you know the twist. Like many twist films, it invites a second viewing (Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers’ “You want to see it again the second it’s over” appears on the DVD and Blu-Ray covers), and it literally doesn’t begin to fully make sense until you see it twice. Critics don’t have time to see films twice, but audiences do, and that’s why The Prestige, roughly the 100th best film of the year based on its reviews, vaulted immediately into the IMDB Top 250 of all time, placing 88th a couple of years after its release. It’s now 49th (44th excluding films more recent), and that rise in the rankings essentially never happens. (Since writing that a year or two ago, it’s passed three more films that were ahead of it. And since writing that; it’s gone up to 46th, and 40th excluding newer films. The six films more recent with a higher rating include three by Nolan himself and the two films directly ahead in the rankings, which combined have just 2.2% more votes. The sixth film, the only non-Nolan film in the last fourteen years that has a chance to end up higher in the rankings? Parasite.) Some films can maintain their IMDB ranking as their audience expands beyond those most interested in it, but most suffer a decline (in the same time frame, Pan’s Labyrinth went from 51 to 130). I originally proposed here that people are seeing the film a second or third time and upping their ratings, in order to offset the lower rankings from newcomers; I’m now quite sure of that.Twist movies exist on a continuum defined by what might well be the two greatest: The Prestige at one end and The Sixth Sense at the other. Almost nobody figures out The Sixth Sense. Harlan Ellison was so distraught that he’d been fooled that he called up his colleague Connie Willis to verify that she’d missed it, too (Connie tells this story, so it actually did happen; Harlan is notorious for turning the stories in his brain into way better stories). There aren’t any obvious clues, and there’s just one initially puzzling scene that the twist explains. Less than a handful of other scenes make different sense on a second viewing. The film has been designed to fool you, and part of that design is to minimize the amount of time it needs to work at doing so.Although the twist deepens some of the film’s emotions, it adds no thematic depth. The film is still about what it was about. That story, by the way, is hugely underrated; one of the reasons the twist is so effective is that it’s revealed after a devastating emotional scene between Cole and his mother, one so good it seems to be film’s very satisfying ending. And then, there’s a twist, the point of which is almost entirely … there’s a twist.In contrast, The Prestige is full of clues that are obvious in retrospect, which is why it’s relatively easy to figure out. There are 17 sequences (some constituting several consecutive scenes) that make different sense on a repeat viewing, where they thoroughly change the film’s meaning. This appears to be a fundamental tradeoff in the twist structure: the more important the twist is to the film’s meaning, the easier it will be to get.One might think that a viewer who had figured out the twist before the end would begin to view the movie as if they had seen it already, and take the typical delight in the double layers of meaning (e.g., Olivia’s response to Borden in the restaurant), and begin to grasp the thematic implications that the twist was designed to explore. It seems, however, that most are still assuming that the twist will be an end in itself, as with The Sixth Sense. They don’t want to think, they want … well, by now you know what they want. As with Memento, folks who don’t get the ending are making its point.Beginning to Parse InceptionBy now, I hope it’s clear that Nolan is an auteur worth attending to. I expected each of the discussion of the individual films here to be three paragraphs long, but the more I explained about them, the more I found to explain. Let’s see if I can actually keep my take on Inception to less than an essay in itself. (You, the audience, can glance ahead and see to what extent I’ve succeeded, but I, the character, am still in the dark. While that’s the structure of suspense, it’s also the structure of comic apprehension.)Memento is an example of what I call objective ambiguity, where there are two different readings of what actually happened. But there is a long tradition in narrative art (going back at least to Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw”) of subjective ambiguity, where the question is whether something happened at all, or was just in the mind of a character. Usually the character is aware of the ambiguity themselves; occasionally the ambiguity is entirely in the audience’s mind. A great recent example of the latter is The Babadook, which reads equally well as actual horror or psychotic hallucination.Inception does for subjective ambiguity what Memento did for its objective twin. Is Dom asleep and dreaming throughout the film, or does the surface of the film represent an objective reality? As with Memento, the evidence for both readings is remarkably dense, and perfectly balanced. Even more so than with Memento, which side you come down on ultimately depends on what you make of film technique.The chief argument against the film’s surface reality being real is that it’s full of barely credible plot points. Such plot points, however, routinely populate big blockbuster films (like The Dark Knight); we accept them out of convention, because we want to be entertained. In other words, if what you wanted out of Nolan was the third film in his thematic trilogy about identity and meaning in film, it’s right there: just believe that Dom is asleep the whole time, and is in denial of this awful truth. If you wanted a blockbuster followup to the first two films of his Batman trilogy, it’s right there: just regard the surface of the film as really happening.What makes this work is that the film draws a brilliant parallel between films and dreaming. The film points out that dreams are edited the way films are. Critics have noted that the team that Dom assembles for his caper can be mapped to the team a director hires to make a film. Most interestingly, it turns out that the credulity of dreams, where we fail to question the most absurd things, is, at the level of neurochemistry a boldface version of the willing suspension of disbelief that we experience automatically when we watch a film. Both involve elevated levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. That’s a topic for its own essay, no?An Ending (Without a Twist!)Cinephiles are correctly consumed with the question of how a film’s technique gives it meaning. They are focused almost entirely on the things that only film can do.But at this point in film history, no one’s going to invent a new way of moving the camera or editing a film. The only unexplored avenues for technique are strictly technological; it’s no accident that Martin Scorsese has made what many regard as the best-ever use of 3D in film, or that Ang Lee has just tried (and by early reports failed) to top him.There’s only one dimension along which film can continue to grow, and that’s the storytelling itself, the pure content rather than the technique. (That in the hands of a master the technique can become one with the content will, thankfully, never cease to astound, amaze, delight, and move us). The complexities of film technique are large, but the complexities of story dwarf it. There’s room left to explore there.It’s perfectly understandable that many cinephiles not only dismiss Nolan but regard him as the death knell for cinephilia. His technique is excellent but not extraordinary; he is a master craftsman rather than an artist. He has made his mark by the complexity of his stories, something that written fiction does as well as film does. And yet he is wildly popular. I mentioned previously that there were five films that have been released subsequently to The Prestige that rank ahead of it at IMDB; Nolan directed three. That Nolan is the author of four of the six best-loved films of the last decade might fill any cinephile with despair. Is that all great films are, now, better stories?But Nolan alone is pushing film in a new direction, and he alone is exploring deep human truths that have barely been explored even in fiction. And while he is neither inventing nor mastering film technique, he is making us think about it as few directors ever have. Paradoxically, his films are intensely cinematic after all.Think. And watch closely. (Yes, that’s backwards!)[1] This is the lucky chapter 13 of Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991), lucky for Dennett because the remainder of the book is a contender for the least correct body of argument in the history of human thought. It can be read as a separate essay if you ignore everything in the chapter about the relationship of the self to consciousness.

Q. Which Secretary of State Office has the highest Google reviews rating in the US?A. Not a Google reviews rating.The Harry S. Truman Building located at 2201 C Street, NW in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It is the headquarters of the United States Department of State.The Ten Best Secretaries Of State (to 1981)Best US Secretaries of State (ranker.com)The post-Cold War secretaries of state, rankedWas Hillary Clinton a Good Secretary of State? (Polotico.com)Rescuing George Shultz, the Best Secretary of State You’ve Never Heard OfThe Ten Best Secretaries Of State… The EditorsDecember 1981 Volume 33 Issue 1When the first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, took office in 1790, his entire staff consisted of just six people, including himself and a part-time translator. The current Secretary presides over almost fifteen thousand employees scattered around the globe. During the intervening years, of course, the challenges facing Jefferson’s successors have changed dramatically as the infant republic has grown into a world power.David L. Porter, associate professor of history at William Penn College in Oskaloosa, Iowa sent questionnaires to fifty of the nation’s leading diplomatic historians, asking each to nominate his candidates for the ten best—and five worst- Secretaries of State. All fifty-six secretaries from Jefferson to Edmund Muskie were eligible. Each nominee was to be assessed solely on his record in that office. Among the suggested criteria: success in defining and achieving his diplomatic goals; political and moral leadership he exerted on foreign affairs; impact of his actions on the course of American history. More than half the historians responded.1. John Quincy Adams, who served (1817-25) under President James Monroe, was the first choice of over 80 per cent of the respondents. Stern, cerebral, conscientious, and articulate, he negotiated the acquisition of Florida from Spain in 1819 and collaborated with the President in formulating the Monroe Doctrine.John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States.2. William H. Seward served (1861-69) Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. He helped keep France and Britain from recognizing the Confederacy during the Civil War, persuaded France to withdraw her troops from Mexico after that war ended, and successfully engineered the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.William H. Seward, 24th United States Secretary of State3. Hamilton Fish served (1869-77) President Ulysses S. Grant. Calm, judicious, and untainted by the corruption that permeated the Grant administration, he helped settle the thorny Alabama Claims controversy with Britain in 1871, directed negotiations that settled American claims against Spain, and signed a commercial reciprocity treaty with Hawaii in 1875, helping to pave the way for later annexation.Hamilton Fish, 26th United States Secretary of State4. Charles Evans Hughes served (1921-25) Presidents Harding and Coolidge. He presided over the Washington Conference for Limitation of Armament (1921-22) that froze for a decade naval armament among the United States, Britain, and France, and he brought about the 1922 Nine Power Treaty, which called upon its signatories to maintain an Open Door policy toward China and respect her independence.Charles Evans Hughes,11th Chief Justice of the United States, 44th United States Secretary of State5. George Marshall served (1947-49) President Harry Truman. The first professional soldier ever to become Secretary—and the man who held the post for the shortest time among the top ten—he helped establish the postwar policy of containment. He promulgated the Truman Doctrine that provided military aid for Greece and Turkey, developed the Marshall Plan for rebuilding postwar Europe, and helped foster the Organization of American States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.George Marshall, 50th United States Secretary of State, 3rd United States Secretary of Defense6. Dean Acheson, Marshall’s successor, also served (1949-53) President Truman. He helped create NATO, brought West Germany into the European defense system, and implemented a policy of armed intervention in Korea.Dean Acheson, 51st United States Secretary of State7. Henry Kissinger, our only foreign-born Secretary of State, served (1973-77) under Presidents Nixon and Ford. After four enormously influential years as Nixon’s special adviser on national security affairs, he sought, as Secretary, to relax tensions and promote trade with China and the Soviet Union and pioneered the art of “shuttle diplomacy,” traveling 560,000 miles in search of peace.Henry Kissinger, 56th United States Secretary of State8. Daniel Webster, one of only two Secretaries of State to hold non-consecutive terms, served under three Presidents: William Henry Harrison and John Tyler (1841-43) and Millard Fillmore (1850-52). He negotiated the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, averting war with Britain over Maine’s boundary, and asserted America’s right to recognize republican Hungary and other popular governments in Europe.Daniel Webster, 14th and 19th United States Secretary of State9. Thomas Jefferson served (1790-93) President George Washington. As our first Secretary of State he established a host of diplomatic and administrative precedents and, when war broke out between France and Britain in 1793, subsumed his own sympathy for the French Revolution to successfully administer a policy of strict neutrality.Thomas Jefferson, 3rd president of the United States, 2nd vice president of the United States, 1st United States Secretary of State10. John Hay (1898-1905) Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt. An expansionist, he urged annexation of the Philippines, called for an Open Door policy toward China, helped prevent partition of that country after the Boxer Rebellion, and negotiated the 1903 treaty with Panama granting the Canal Zone to the United States.John Hay, 37th United States Secretary of StateHoliday Room US State DepartmentBest US Secretaries of State (ranker.com)Left out Alexander Haig (1971–1982), George P. Shultz (1982–1989), James Baker (1989–1992), Lawrence Eagleburger (1992–1993),Warren Christopher (1993–1997), Madeleine Albright (1997–2001), Colin Powell (2001–2005), Condoleezza Rice (2005–2009), Hillary Clinton (2009–2013), John Kerry (2013–2016), and Rex Tillerson (2016-present).The post-Cold War secretaries of state, rankedFrom left, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton attend the reception before the groundbreaking ceremony for the U.S. Diplomacy Center at the State Department in Washington in 2014. (Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency)Daniel W. Drezner July 27, 2016Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.In considering foreign policy, the external environment matters a lot. So does the degree of interest and control that a president exercises over American foreign policy. To use an example, James Baker is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest secretaries of state of all time. His diplomacy helped ensure a peaceful end to the Cold War and a unified, multilateral coalition for the first Gulf War. But Baker had the wind at his back: a fading Soviet Union and a president who was keenly interested and engaged in international relations. Baker deserves credit, but not all the credit, if you know what I mean.So, with that in mind, here’s my ranking, from worst to first, of the six post-Cold War secretaries of state. I will preface this by saying that Baker towers over this lot, but I’m not including him in the post-Cold War set. Indeed, the Cold War secretaries of state (George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk and George P. Shultz) are on average of a much higher caliber than the ones discussed below.6) Warren Christopher. The “Cars 2” of the post-1992 secretaries of state, “Chris” got a bad beat. His president did not care a flying fig about foreign policy for at least the first two years of his presidency, and Christopher felt constrained by that fact. Nonetheless, Christopher’s preternatural caution generally let bad situations (Somalia, Bosnia) deteriorate on his watch. There isn’t a single account of the Bill Clinton administration’s foreign policy record in which Christopher comes out looking good — and that includes his own memoirs. Given the favorable geopolitical situation the United States inherited when he took office, it’s a lackluster performance.Warren Christopher, 63rd United States Secretary of State5) Colin Powell. Powell was badly hamstrung by the lack of trust between him and President George W. Bush. Bush overruled Powell on diplomacy with North Korea in March 2001, and things went downhill from there. Powell’s constant bureaucratic battles with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld proved problematic for his tenure, as it kept him in Washington when he needed to try to make America’s case to allies and partners. The biggest mistakes of Bush’s first term were not Powell’s, but he failed to stop most of these catastrophes, and his performance did little to compensate for them.Colin Powell, 65th United States Secretary of State4) John Kerry. This ranking is probably unfair — he still has six months left, and history will offer a better perspective. Kerry gets major points for the Iran deal, a significant feat of diplomacy that was more him than President Obama. The Paris climate change agreement is also significant. The problem comes with trying to list things after that. It is to Kerry’s credit that he has invested in tough tasks, like Iran or an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. It is to Kerry’s debit that some of those investments did not pay off. The opportunity cost of them is Kerry looking flat-footed and underinvested in other trouble-spots, such as Eastern Europe.John Kerry, 68th United States Secretary of State, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee3) Madeleine Albright. The first female secretary of state, Albright benefited greatly from a president who was more comfortable and more engaged in international relations than he was in his first term. But Albright was also willing to take more risks than Christopher, a trait that paid off in the case of Kosovo. The biggest criticism of Albright would be her absence from the most significant foreign policy crisis of Clinton’s second term — the Asian financial crisis.Madeleine Albright, 64th United States Secretary of State2) Condoleezza Rice. Well, this will be the second-most controversial ranking. Rice’s disastrous tenure as national security adviser will color most people’s perceptions of her time at Foggy Bottom. The parlous state of American foreign affairs in January 2009 will also lead many to pooh-pooh Rice’s performance as secretary of state. But it requires some willful amnesia to forget the situation that Rice inherited when she took the job, and the skillful ways in which she was able to outmaneuver Rumsfeld and Cheney. Her close relationship with the president allowed Rice to pivot American foreign policy away from the excesses of Bush’s first term to something akin to competency in her second term. It was a thankless task, and Rice’s legacy will always be tarnished by her NSC stint. Nevertheless, she did a good job in a tough time.Condoleezza Rice, 66th United States Secretary of State1) Hillary Clinton. Here’s the dirty little secret of trying to evaluate Clinton’s record as secretary of state: The Obama White House centralized foreign policy control almost as much as Richard Nixon. Which means that it’s tough to credit or blame Clinton for what happened during her four years in office. Nonetheless, she played a significant role in restoring America’s standing abroad. She was nimble in handling some thorny diplomatic kerfuffles with China (Google “Wang Lijun” or “Chen Guangcheng” to see what I mean). She helped put together formidable economic sanctions against Iran. Even on Libya, Clinton deserves credit for her ability to get NATO, the Arab League and the U.N. Security Council to endorse action; the post-Libya fiasco has less to do with Clinton and more to do with her boss. And one can argue that the Paris climate change accord only happened because of Clinton and Obama’s actions in Copenhagen.In a decade, this ranking might change, particularly for Kerry. And ranking Clinton as the best of the lot means saying that she was the best of a mediocre group, all of whom would fall below the Cold War list of names mentioned above. But it is interesting to note that the ladies on this list outperformed the men.Hillary Clinton, 67th United States Secretary of State, United States Senatorfrom New YorkWas Hillary Clinton a Good Secretary of State? (Polotico.com)Not so long ago, Hillary Clinton was being lauded as an exemplary secretary of state. After four years and nearly a million miles logged as America’s top diplomat, she stepped down to a torrent of praise. “The most consequential secretary of state since Dean Acheson,” enthused Google’s Eric Schmidt. “Stellar,” pronounced Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson. Even Republican Sen. John McCain, while criticizing her response to the killing of U.S. officials in Benghazi, went out of his way to compliment her “ outstanding” State Department tenure.That was then.When the Atlantic published an admiring 10,000-word profile of Secretary of State John Kerry the other day, the surprise was not so much that the author, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Rohde, found himself impressed by the headlong diplomatic forays of the peripatetic Kerry, but the downbeat assessment of Kerry’s much more reserved predecessor. The headline? “How John Kerry Could End Up Outdoing Hillary Clinton.” A few days later, the New York Times chimed in with an article on the “tough comparisons with Kerry” Clinton is now facing, summing up the debate as one over whether she was anything more than a “pantsuit-wearing globe-trotter” in her years as secretary.All of which yields the question: Was Hillary Clinton in fact a good secretary of state, and will her record as a diplomat matter if, as expected, she runs for president in 2016?As Bill Clinton might have said, it depends on what the meaning of good is. Certainly, even many of her most ardent defenders recognize Hillary Clinton had no signal accomplishment at the State Department to her name, no indelible peace sealed with her handshake, no war averted, no nuclear crisis defused. There are few Eric Schmidts out there still willing to make the case for her as an enormously consequential figure in the history of Foggy Bottom.Where the debate tends to rage is over why that is so, especially now that Kerry is taking on diplomatic challenges that Clinton either couldn’t or wouldn’t—from negotiating a potentially historic nuclear deal with Iran to seeking a revived Mideast peace process—and political rivals in both parties return to thinking of Clinton in the hypercharged American political context and not so much as the tireless, Blackberry-wielding face of global glad-handing.I asked an array of smart foreign policy thinkers in both parties to weigh in, and they pretty much all agreed that Clinton was both more cautious and more constrained than Kerry. Their argument is over whether and to what extent that was a consequence of Clinton herself, the limits placed on her by a suspicious and eager-to-make-its-mark first-term White House, or simply it being a very different moment in world politics.Here’s Aaron David Miller, who negotiated Middle East peace for five presidents and is now a scholar at the Wilson Center, making the case for cautious Clinton: “Hillary was risk-averse; Kerry isn’t. He’s risk-ready.” Of course, Miller argues, 2016 politics “explains partly why she didn’t own a single issue of consequence.” The other reason is President Obama himself, “the most controlling foreign policy president since Nixon.” Miller’s bottom line: “She was a fine sec state but not consequential.” As for 2016, “It won’t hurt her other than the Republican obsession with Benghazi, but it won’t help her that much either.”An array of foreign policy thinkers all agree that Clinton was a more cautious and more constrained secretary of state than Kerry. | ReutersWhat does that Republican take look like? For sure, there will be a focus on Benghazi, where the GOP has questioned whether Clinton and other administration officials were activist enough—and truthful enough—about responding to the attack in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, that led to the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other American personnel; a case summed up by the American Enterprise’s Institute’s Danielle Pletka as “unwillingness to take risks, unwillingness to lead, willingness to stab a lot of people in the back. And dead people.” Pletka’s broader view of Clinton’s record is a harsher version of what I hear from many Democrats: “the Washington consensus,” Pletka says, “is that she was enormously ineffective … [though] no one was quite sure whether she was ineffective because she wanted to avoid controversy or because she wasn’t trusted by the president to do anything.”Not quite so harsh is David Gordon, who ran the State Department’s storied policy-planning shop under George W. Bush. He calls Clinton “good not great” in the job, agrees that her “great weakness was avoiding serious diplomacy,” gives her plaudits for outlining the strategic “pivot” to Asia whose future is now uncertain, and attributes much to “her future political considerations”:It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for Clinton, the SecState role was substantially about positioning her to run for president, especially in terms of looking ‘tough’ on some of the big issues: Iran sanctions, reassuring Asian allies. … Not taking on the big diplomatic challenges made that toughness easier to maintain even as she devoted so much of her actual time in office to ‘soft’ issues like education, women’s empowerment, etc.As for the Democrats, Clinton’s advocates tend to come in several camps, which can be broadly summed up as The Timing Just Wasn’t Right group; the Blame the White Housers; and the Asia Pivot Was a Really Big Deal crowd (“her major accomplishment,” the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon told me, and “too often underappreciated”).Howard Berman, a strong Clinton backer who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee during her tenure, offered me a great example of the first line of reasoning: You don’t pick your moments, but deal with the world as you find it. “I don’t believe Secretary Clinton was constrained by future political considerations,” he wrote to me. “Let’s look at the issues Kerry is working on and it is clear that Clinton, for rather obvious reasons, couldn’t have replicated what he has done because those issues weren’t ripe then. … It’s about a different time.”Blaming the White House, of course, is a common theme in any critique of a foreign policy record, and that’s especially so when it comes to the question of Clinton’s dealings with the White House of the president she ran against in 2008. Throughout her tenure as secretary of state, Washington wondered over the extent of Clinton’s actual influence in foreign policy decision-making (“she’s really the principal implementer,” Obama adviser Denis McDonough told me, when I asked about the division of labor between Obama’s White House and Clinton’s State Department for a Foreign Policy article last year). And it was by all accounts Obama himself who was reluctant to take on some of the challenges, like Middle East peace talks or a more activist stance toward the civil war unfolding in Syria, that Clinton is now dinged for avoiding.That was the argument from Dennis Ross, and he is certainly well positioned to know: Ross worked as the top White House aide on Iran and the Middle East on Obama’s National Security Council before leaving last year. The new conventional wisdom on Politically Cautious Hillary is “misguided,” he says. “She was operating in a different world and with an administration at a different place.” And those White House realities very much shaped what she could and couldn’t do. To start, Ross notes, Clinton was “in a place where she felt the need to prove her loyalty to the president and demonstrate she was a member of the team,” and besides, Obama himself was very personally engaged in his various diplomatic initiatives. By later in Obama’s first term, deciding what to do about dumping America’s longtime ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt (she was wary) and whether to intervene more actively in Syria (she pushed to do so) became “issues where I think she was not in the same place as the president and was thus less able to shape what we did.”Timing, fate and the White House may have all conspired in it, but the truth is that Hillary Clinton never did find a way to turn Foggy Bottom into her ticket to history.Steve Sestanovich, a professor at Columbia University and veteran of Bill Clinton’s State Department, thinks the blame lies in part with another White House—George W. Bush’s. Hillary Clinton, Sestanovich concedes, “ was reluctant to over-invest in high-visibility initiatives that didn’t have much chance of success.” But, he says, that’s because “the top priority of the president—and hers too—was to deal with inherited difficulties and wind them down,” whether the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or restoring luster to an American global reputation tarred by the aggressive decade-long prosecution of its “war on terror.” Sestanovich adds: “It’s true that her record as secretary included few accomplishments if you mean by that peace agreements solving some big problem. If you measure her tenure by success in rebuilding America’s power position, it looks a lot better. She wasn’t just foisting better cookstoves on African women.”In some ways, though, that is exactly the argument I encountered from her most passionate defender among those I surveyed. Anne-Marie Slaughter, Clinton’s first policy-planning chief at the State Department and now head of the New America Foundation, is still an unwavering believer in the cookstoves and all of Clinton’s other untraditional causes, many of which focused on global advocacy for women and girls. “I continue to think that people will look back and see that she was the first secretary of state really to grasp the ways global politics and hence foreign policy have changed in the 21st century,” Slaughter says.Her case for Clinton, in fact, is explicitly about politics—and Clinton’s willingness to integrate them into the traditionally stodgy, big man-to-big man diplomacy long favored at the State Department (and arguably now being resurrected by Kerry). “Foreign policy has always been the furthest thing from retail politics; she brought them much closer together and institutionalized as much of her approach as possible in the very bones of the State Department. … Hillary took diplomacy directly to the people in ways that cannot produce a treaty or negotiated agreement, but that are essential to advancing America’s interests over the longer term,” Slaughter argues. “What she should be remembered for in a 2016 campaign is proving that she could represent the American people day in and day out in the long, hard slog of regular politics, in between the rare shining moments of success. She was and is beloved around the world, as an inspiration, as an example of an America in which a woman could run for president, nearly win her party’s primary, lose with grace and then prove that adversaries can work together for the sake of their country.”***Near the end of her tenure, I traveled with Clinton to China in the midst of what turned out to be a frenetic several days of negotiations over the fate of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who had taken refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing at exactly the moment Clinton was arriving for a summit. In the end, Clinton walked away with a deal that allowed Chen to fly to the United States a few weeks later. It was, I wrote at the time, “the most intense high-stakes diplomacy of her tenure as secretary of state.”“Can this really be true? Was the Chen negotiation as good as it will get for Clinton?” asked Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. “I fear the answer is yes.” At the time, he dinged Clinton for not finding “a way to get more done in her role as the president’s diplomatic emissary, broker, and fixer.” And never mind all the hundreds of thousands of miles logged, the endless “townterviews” and back-stage arm-twisting—it remains a pretty fair critique. Timing, fate and the White House may have all conspired in it, but the truth is that Hillary Clinton never did find a way to turn Foggy Bottom into her ticket to history.And perhaps that’s exactly the reason why American politicians tend to become secretary of state after they’ve run for president and lost; it just might be a better consolation prize than it is steppingstone to higher office.Susan B. Glasser is editor of Politico Magazine.Rescuing George Shultz, the Best Secretary of State You’ve Never Heard OfBY WILL INBODENWhat if America had a remarkably effective secretary of state, yet almost 95 percent of international relations professors didn’t know it?That may sound like the lead-in to a bad joke, or an academic perversion of the “what if a tree falls in a forest but no one hears it” puzzle — and I wish that’s all it were. But instead it is a depressing revelation from a new survey of 1,615 international relations (IR) scholars from 1,375 American colleges and universities. The annual Ivory Tower survey of the Teaching, Research, and International Politics (TRIP) project, in partnership with Foreign Policy, is a comprehensive and useful assessment of the views of American IR scholars on a range of topics in the field, including the leading programs, the most influential scholars, and the most serious problems facing the world. (I was one of the 1,615 respondents).One of the survey questions is “Who was the most effective U.S. Secretary of State of the last 50 years?” Henry Kissinger handily took the top spot, with 32.21 percent. This is a plausible but debatable choice, especially since Kissinger was arguably more effective during his time as National Security Advisor than as secretary of state. Kissinger didn’t take over at Foggy Bottom until September 1973, after many notable achievements such as the opening to China, the Paris Peace Accords, and the SALT negotiations. I suspect that part of the reason for Kissinger’s runaway win stems from his high visibility and prolific writing in the almost 40 years since he left office, which can be mentally conflated with an assessment of his time as secretary of State. And the survey answer that has generated some headlines is that poor John Kerry finished dead last with only 0.31 percent (yes, you read that decimal point right). While I agree that thus far Kerry has been ineffective, it strikes me as unfair and methodologically unsound to have included him in the survey because his time in office is ongoing and we don’t yet know how effective he will be in his remaining two years.But the stunning — and appalling — result is that only 5.65 percent picked George Shultz, ranking him barely ahead of Dean Rusk, and far behind Madeline Albright (8.7 percent), Hillary Clinton (8.7 percent), and “I Don’t Know” (18.32 percent — itself a troubling figure when you consider that the respondents are scholars who study this stuff for a living, yet almost one fifth of them can’t render a verdict on secretaries of state).*Shultz’s relatively low ranking is baffling. Many foreign policy practitioners and diplomatic historians regard Shultz in the same pantheon as Acheson and Marshall, a giant in the annals of 20th century American diplomacy whose seven years at Foggy Bottom played an indispensable role in negotiating a peaceful end to the Cold War. Foreign Service Officers (FSO) who served under Shultz almost uniformly believe him to be the greatest secretary of state of the last 50 years. During my time working at the State Department, a standard question I would ask almost every senior FSO I worked with is “who is the best secretary you ever worked under,” and invariably the answer would be George Shultz – regardless of whether the FSO was a Democrat or Republican. Shultz’s broad acclaim among those who worked for him and those who have studied him comes from his rare ability to master two vital yet often conflicting tasks: the management of the department and the conduct of statecraft. Some secretaries excel at the former (e.g., Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton), others excel at the latter (e.g., Henry Kissinger and James Baker), but Shultz is singular in having excelled at both. [Disclosure: Shultz is one of five current or former cabinet secretaries on the Statecraft Board of Reference for the Clements Center at the University of Texas, where I serve as Executive Director.]Now I imagine that some of my academic colleagues reading this who filled out the TRIP survey and didn’t pick Shultz are thinking “Enough whining, Inboden — I picked [insert another secretary of state name here] because in my expertise I think he/she is just better than Shultz.” While each of these individual choices may have their justifications, taken together Shultz’s paltry ranking seems to reveal a “collective ignorance” problem in academia. In the aggregate, IR scholars just don’t seem capable of rendering credible judgments on what makes an effective secretary of state.So how is it that policy professionals and diplomatic historians hold Shultz in such high regard, yet IR scholars — who are overwhelmingly political scientists — would be so unaware of Shultz’s excellence?I don’t have a definitive answer, but would speculate there are three possible reasons, perhaps overlapping. The first is that younger IR scholars are not being taught diplomatic history in graduate school. It is commonplace now for political science doctoral students to take numerous math and statistics classes, but not a single class on American diplomatic history or the Cold War. With this lack of historical awareness, someone like George Shultz appears as distant and unknown as Robert Lansing, and he can’t fit into a regression analysis of a large n data set (for a thoughtful reflection on this malady, see this essay by Frank Gavin). The second reason I suspect is ideological bias against the Reagan administration. Older IR scholars may have taken history classes in graduate school, and having lived through the Reagan years know who Shultz is, but they are overwhelmingly left of center and probably share academia’s general disdain for the Reagan administration. (Though as I noted here, some scholars are beginning to assess Reagan’s national security legacy much more positively. And this particular survey result doesn’t evince an anti-Republican bias, since the top two names are Kissinger and Baker — probably illustrating the large cohort of realists among IR scholars). The third possible reason, perhaps represented by the 18.32 percent of “I Don’t Knows,” is that IR theory emphasizes structural factors over individual leadership and policymaking. In this view, secretaries of state matter little in the shadow of the tectonic plates of the international system.But for those scholars who believe that individual leaders do matter — and I am one of them — Shultz’s remarkable statecraft deserves a closer look, and a higher ranking.*Yes, I was one of the 5.65 percent who picked Shultz.”