Along with Martin Scorsese, Errol Morris was granted an overdue Academy Award this past decade for a subpar work that will come to rest in the bottom tier of his oeuvre. Scorsese won his coveted Best Director Oscar in 2007 for the well-crafted genre exercise The Departed, while Morris, despite having been the greatest of American documentarians of the previous twenty years, received the 2004 Best Documentary statue for The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, a feature-length interview with the Vietnam War mastermind and former Defense Secretary that began life as an episode of the director's unfortunately short-lived cable program First Person. That film was celebrated and hyped by critics and audiences, due partly to the easily digestible truths it offered about the Vietnam War and that conflict's parallels to our current presence in Iraq. It is a remarkable interview to be sure, but as a film it lacks the imagination and depth of Morris’ 90s masterpieces such as Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
Of much grander historical and artistic import was 2008's Standard Operating Procedure, Morris' investigation of a United States military combating charges of having tortured Iraq War “detainees” at Abu Ghraib Prison in 2003. The film focuses primarily on the scapegoating of low-level MPs such as Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman by a Pentagon looking to distance itself from policies of sanctioned brutality and a media circus content to relay the Rumsfeldian theory of rogue servicemembers short-circuiting and violating their chain of command. Also probed exhaustively is what, exactly, the incident's famous photos, especially the one showing England holding a detainee by a dog leash, do and don't indicate about their subject. It's as much an analysis of institutional disavowal as it is an expose of the myriad contexts of a photographic series that horrified the world.
Standard Operating Procedure is a departure aesthetically from The Fog of War, which relied heavily on archival footage (as did the show from which it was developed) and a circular Philip Glass score. Instead, SOP uses the painstaking re-enactments that Morris has developed since The Thin Blue Line (1988) to illustrate the crimes themselves; he also evinces a burgeoning skill with computer effects, used here to present graphically the mind-boggling amount of photographic material that a CID agent sifted through while ascertaining the time-line for and extent of the abuse. Both films' interviews utilize Morris' ingenious Interrotron, which encourages interview subjects to look directly into the camera due to the lens' placement behind a video screen presenting the filmmakers' image -- it could be described as a teleprompter whose words are replaced by a live video feed of the interlocutor's face -- that renders a rattling intimacy between film and viewer (1). While the footage of McNamara peering directly at the audience while describing Armageddon revealed a chilling detachment, SOP's testimony of military police on the ground in Iraq is much more disarming, both morally and emotionally.
What the respective statuses of Fog and SOP (the former won awards during the pinnacle of public disenfranchisement with the war and grossed over $4M at the domestic box office; the latter fizzled out at less than $500,000 in ticket sales, failing to connect with a shame-fatigued public and disinterested critics) seem to indicate is that we are only comfortable with exploring truths about our foreign policy insofar as they can be held at a historical or allegorical remove: we may righteously import McNamara's lessons gleaned from Vietnam so long as we've had thirty years to mull them over and reach a politically correct, self-congratulatory consensus (2). SOP, however, came out either too early or too late: possibly too early for us to look the event squarely in the eye (it may take the next war or the next series of incriminating photographs before we can find the film useful) or too late in that it came on the heels of a clot of Iraq documentaries that were far more successful, noteworthy or less morally inflammatory in their pat celebrations of grunt bravery and condemnations of the war itself. (3)
SOP also jars loose what we’d come to accept about the events at Abu Ghraib, even upsetting the political left's antagonistic interpretations of the abuse. The film countermines the spoonfed dogma that a few bad apples had perpetrated the attacks and acknowledges an institutional basis for the cruelty, but it also describes the moral failings and self-pitying justifications of the servicemen and women that led to their being turned into criminals and pariahs. Both hawks and doves found Morris' conclusions difficult to swallow.
"It's important for the American people and the world to know that while these terrible acts were perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military, they were also brought to light by the honorable and responsible actions of other military personnel." - Donald Rumsfeld (4)
Emphasizing the role played by "a small number of U.S. military," effectively obscures the systemic nature of the torture, as well as the direct involvement of private contractors who had more or less instructed the military in interrogation techniques without binding themselves to its disciplinary procedures or rules of war. This is what cannot be teased out of the photographs. Throughout the film, phantom contractors and their CIA cohorts appear as faceless wraiths haunting the halls of Abu Ghraib, much as their presence in the infamous images of naked pyramids and hooded men masturbating is spectral and evasive.
Also disconcertingly obscured by Abu Ghraib: Media Event was our reliance on photography to determine truth, which has become an obsession of Morris' (his "Zoom" column at the New York Times' website is always fascinating [5]). We were outraged and horrified by the photos, but didn’t stop to think much about them, or what they don't contain. This is also the central conundrum of Michael Haneke’s brilliant Cache, another film, albeit fictional, about unfortunate, unintended record-keeping and its role in reconstructing events and unveiling motive. It was the photographs, rather than the events themselves, Morris argues with his film, that led to England becoming the public face of a crime in which her role was vital but inessential. Rumsfeld would resign two years after reports of the abuse began circulating but the phantom contractors fail to register in the public imagination; Lynndie England, on the other hand, was dishonorably discharged immediately and sentenced to three years in prison.
As a portrait, it’s haunting and vivid (Robert Richardson's slow motion cinematography underscores the horror) and damning. We will look at it in ten or fifteen years -- just as we've only now absorbed the lessons of the Vietnam and Cold Wars -- after we’ve begun torturing Iranian or North Korean POWs, and say that history is now repeating itself. We'll blame whoever is in the photographs, and forget the men -- the contractors and public servants -- behind the curtain. And while hindsight may be 20/20, what we won’t be able to say is that during the tragic fallout of Abu Ghraib we acknowledged fully its moral and historical implications in anything close to their proper dimensions; we focused instead on a series of grainy digital photographs and relied on them to tell us everything we needed to know. That’s a moral failing, but it has become, and may continue to be, standard operating procedure.
Notes:
1 - An interesting interview with Morris detailing the machine can be found here, while a diagram of its function can be found here.
2 - SOP's tally is still almost double the box office take for Taxi to the Dark Side, the Oscar-winning documentary released a year before SOP, but far far far less than any of Michael Moore's documentaries, let alone the average studio drama.
3 - The year before SOP's release, three of the five Academy Award nominees for Best Documentary were for films specifically about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: No End in Sight, Operating Homecoming and (the winner) Taxi to the Dark Side.
4 - A transcript of Rumsfeld's reaction to the publication of the photos (it cannot properly be called a response to the events themselves, which Rumsfeld himself is culpable) can be found here.
5 - A link to his "Zoom" series can be found here.
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