The 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora! concerns the bombing of Pearl Harbour. A United States/Japanese co-production, the film has gained a following among cinephiles for several reasons. Unusually, it used multiple directors --  American Richard Fleischer and Japanese Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda – to tell the story from opposing military perspectives. It has a host of well-known actors from both countries, but a complete lack of interest in developing character or a protagonist-centred narrative. It won an Academy Award for special effects – in the days before CGI this meant large scale model ships, real aircraft, and generous use of pyrotechnics. Famously, one action sequence required a radio-controlled P-40 aircraft to be destroyed as it proceeded along the runway. The propeller sheared off as filming commenced and the P-40 veered into several parked planes causing a rolling explosion. The actors portraying aircrew on the ground scampered for their lives, making for great cinema.

​

The spectacle of the film can obscure what it is really about – the handling of information. The US had broken the Japanese codes, had contact with a Japanese submarine and even had radar signs of approaching aircraft. At each stage, the information is blocked, either by lamentably tardy bureaucracy, pig-headed demands for confirmation or cumbersome technology. In the most frustrating typewriter scene in cinema history, Akira Kume as the real-life embassy official Katsuzo Okumura, pecks slowly at the keys transcribing the declaration of Japanese intentions. So slow is his typing, that the message arrives 55 minutes after the bombing begins (in real life, the 14 part Japanese message to the United States government contained no hints of military action).

​

On the American side, information is consistently delayed, misinterpreted, or dismissed. This raises the question – how is information visualized in movies and for what purpose? In modern cinema, we are used to seeing streams of digital data on screen, or sketches on a blackboard or a map tracing a character’s journey. These can be used for exposition – superimposed maps, for example, used in Indiana Jones films provide travel details. A blackboard is used in Apollo 13 (1995) to show the difficulties in returning from the moon. In films such as Minority Report (2002), the futuristic projection of information provides atmosphere and a sense of all-encompassing surveillance, rather than exposition.

​

In Tora! Tora! Tora! information is conveyed through paper messages – characters are hastily writing or typing messages of the greatest urgency. And then comes what seems to be a key moment in the movie, or perhaps ‘key moments’ would be a better description. The paper is shoved into a leather briefcase or satchel and the lock is snapped shut. This scenario is repeated at least a dozen times in the film, so that this otherwise quotidian action comes to have something of a hypnotic force.

​

We might note how this idea of the briefcase as a ‘black hole’ for information sits in opposition to other cultural representations of the briefcase. Most obviously, the briefcase has operated as a McGuffin – an object that drives the plot but has no particular significance in itself. The films Ronin (1998) and Pulp Fiction (1994) feature a much sought after briefcase, the contents of which are never disclosed. In Tora! Tora! Tora! no one is in search of the briefcase – caught in a dense and hierarchical bureaucracy, its contents cannot even be passed on to higher figures.

​

At the time in which Tora! Tora! Tora! is set, 1941, traditional masculinity is firmly in place. The leather briefcase is part of the maintenance of masculinity as the workplace becomes increasingly office-bound and bureaucratic. One can be a man, even if your role is to be a message boy carrying documents, as long as the documents are encased in your leather satchel. And the long, repeated shots of briefcases being opened, snapped shut, hurriedly carried to waiting car and so on, might be a way of asserting that masculinity can be maintained even in a fussy bureaucracy. But of course this view runs head on into the main thrust of the film – that there is a catastrophic failure to pass on information. Or, men are just lousy at office work.

​

Given that information is at the centre of the film, it is worth placing it into perspective. The collection of facts in a retrievable form has its origin in the ‘father’ of information science Paul Otlet, whose repository of information was stored on 15 million index cards in 1934. Both he and his American spiritual successor, Vannevar Bush, imagined endless facts being stored on microfilm, accessed and cross-referenced by way of what we would now call ‘links.’ Bush’s own work emphasised the military applicability of information collection and organisation. Robert MacNamara carried his hyper-rational philosophy from the Ford Motor Company straight to the jungles of Vietnam, with famously disastrous results. Tora! Tora! Tora! was made in 1970, by which time the catastrophic results of the Vietnam war were beginning to be obvious, though it was not until the late 1970s that MacNamara’s obsession with statistics was criticised in detail. The body count and other indices of military success MacNamara fetishized, were often data of dubious quality. Information can be biased, partial, misused, misleading. Its very collection imposes an agenda, forming the reality it purports to represent.

​

The US military has plenty of data points in Tora! Tora! Tora! but they cannot be assimilated due to cumbersome modes of communication and a deeply hierarchical mode of operation. But when information is conveyed directly, such as the submarine contact, it is not interpreted correctly. Information in modernity carries connotations of irreducible fact that either erase or reduce the role of reading and interpretation, and the play of meaning within context and ambiguity. But information is a process of interpretation and, in a world where ‘big data’ is collected and instrumentalised, Tora! Tora! Tora! demonstrates the possibility of possessing, but not understanding, information.