Film Review / TIM KRAUSE
Behind the Images From Abu Ghraib
Errol Morris
- Standard Operating Procedure, directed by Errol Morris
Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure is a documentary that focuses on the famous photographs showing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of their American captors at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, once the center of Saddam Hussein’s archipelago of state prisons, and now — thanks to a poorly-strategized invasion and occupation and the wonders of digital technology — a byword for American imperial hubris and cruelty, worldwide proof that the soi-disant protector of freedom and democracy is as brutal and stupid as any other tyranny. Or so it would seem. For the film, which functions on one level as an investigation into the Abu Ghraib photographs, has another, quite different, purpose, as well: that of metanarrative, of an epistemological inquiry into the truth of documentary evidence such as photographs and films, the vagaries of human motives and memories, and, finally, the difficulties of constructing and decoding narratives. Morris has stated repeatedly that for him the Abu Ghraib photographs are both “exposé and coverup,” and Standard Operating Procedure is in the end much more interested in the latter: at what photographs conceal (while ostensibly seeming to reveal), what they lie about, suggest, hint at, fabricate.
Much of the film will be familiar to Morris’s audience, especially viewers of his masterpiece, The Fog of War. Morris’s techniques in this film are the same as before: armed with his innovative Interrotron camera — a modified teleprompter that projects Morris’s face onto the front of the camera he’s filming with, giving his subjects a human face to speak to while at the same time focusing their gaze on the camera (and on the audience) — Morris undertook lengthy interviews with many of the low-ranking perpetrators who are featured in the Abu Ghraib photographs (and who were charged and imprisoned as a result). The amount of time Morris spends on interviews, sometimes as much as over 20 hours, gives him as a director a plethora of revealing moments and epiphanies; it also gives the interviews an intimacy and depth rarely seen in documentary cinema. The unabashed triumph of Standard Operating Procedure is therefore not its careful exposition of the chain of events at Abu Ghraib in the dark days of 2004 during which the prisoner abuse was committed — it does this well, albeit in rather workaday fashion — but its finally giving a voice to the perpetrators themselves, removing them from the 24-hour mediasphere and restoring to them their voices, thoughts, and minds. I was floored to see Lynndie England — the 21st century’s first postergirl for American depravity, she of the cigarettes and vacant smile and the omnipresent thumbs-up and the leashed, groveling prisoners — is actually (at least in front of Morris’ camera) a warm, forthright, even articulate human being, one who, while evincing little empathy for the Iraqi prisoners victimized by the Americans, is fully alive to the methodized insanity that is war, and who gives a compelling account of her misguided role in the middle of Iraq’s chaos. England was in love with Corporal Charles Graner — the ringleader of Abu Ghraib who is currently serving 10 years for his crimes, the longest sentence given to any of the convicted soldiers — and claims to have been swept up in the prisoner abuse as a way of proving her love for Graner and, perhaps more importantly, her fitness to serve. Other servicemembers — most notably Javal Davis, whose dry, understated irony eloquently underscores the absurdities of the prison, and Sabrina Harman, who photographed many of the crimes only to be herself featured in other photographs, and thus rendered culpable — speak out with similar conviction about their experiences at Abu Ghraib, putting an imperfect human face on events we thought we knew.
The film’s metacriticism of these narratives, and of the photographs themselves, is equally convincing, although far more disturbing. What to make, for example, of a short clip of Specialist Graner, the Mister Kurtz of our very own Heart of Darkness, playing gently with a starving kitten, his huge hand now forming a fake-menacing claw (an eloquent shadowplay of his very real cruelty), now cradling the tiny creature? Does Graner’s tenderness mitigate, if only in human terms, his crimes? What of Graner stripping down to swim in the waters of a canal, looking for all the world like any other beefy American on summer vacation? What of the Army’s criminal investigator Brent Pack, whose reconstruction of the timelines of the Abu Ghraib photographs is the film’s most thrillingly visual sequence, and whose dispassionate judgment about many of the shocking images is that they are neither war crimes nor atrocities but merely “standard operating procedure”? It’s Morris’s courageous choice as a filmmaker not to editorialize or explain away these moments, preferring instead to let their dialectic juxtapositions of cruelty and kindness, surrealism and normalcy, speak for themselves. But is this enough? I found it fascinating that, in a film ostensibly devoted to crime and punishment, not a single mention of the Geneva Conventions is made: certainly these are an important context for the Abu Ghraib photographs? Whatever murkiness and moral ambiguity scream from these images, the clarity of international law would have been a bracing tonic. And I even had the sense — despite Morris’s rigorous humanity in interviewing the soldier-criminals who perpetrated these acts with the knowledge and acquiescence, both implicit and explicit, of their superiors, and despite the all-American forthrightness and honesty of the soldiers themselves — that, unlike with American history as seen through Robert MacNamara’s story in The Fog of War, the Abu Ghraib photographs are lessened and diminished, not magnified and explicated, by these lengthy personal narratives of challenges met, trusts betrayed, and dreams shattered. Morris’s earlier film used MacNamara’s life story as a means of unraveling America’s 20th century imperial history, going back past Vietnam and World War II to craft a Virgilian narrative of destiny, sacrifice, and suffering; Standard Operating Procedure, in using the Abu Ghraib photographs to evoke the grainy mess of individual soldiers’ lives, somehow loses the background of the war, the vital frame of the narratives we’ve witnessed. The truths of human experience shine out — American human experience, that is: unfortunately, no Iraqis were interviewed for the film, a stunning, unexplained omission — the larger contexts of the war remain obscure. That this is Morris’s point, that truth is ultimately resistant to documentation and narration, is somehow not enough: suffering or dead prisoners are not cannonballs, and the Abu Ghraib photographs are not Roger Fenton’s famous war photographs that Morris has recently expertly decoded in the pages of The New York Times. With the experience of the Vietnam War some 30 years behind us, it would be a shocking crime far worse than the atrocities at Abu Ghraib if all we took from Iraq is that war is hell, the human heart is dark and bloody, and the good guys sometimes do bad things. Standard Operating Procedure, while attempting to push past these bromides, occasionally reinforces them: if we are to uncover the truth of Iraq, and prevent further atrocities of which Iraq seems the harbinger, we will need to see and think more clearly. (I trust that these issues are addressed at greater length in the book that Morris has coauthored with Philip Gourevitch as a companion piece to the film.) But while more is clearly needed, Morris has done a brilliant job of showing us the difficulties of the way ahead.
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