The Torturous Routine
errol morris reenacts abu ghraib
During a roundtable interview with Errol Morris, a journalist compliments the director’s new movie, Standard Operating Procedure, a documentary about the 2003 military scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison:
“I just want to say, those re-enactments were so real. It was just like Iraq!”
“How would you know?” Morris shoots back. “Have you ever been there?” The director looks beleaguered rather than shocked by the man’s question—misunderstandings about his re-enactments are nothing new.
In 1988, Errol Morris shot The Thin Blue Line, a documentary about a 1976 roadside shooting in Dallas, Texas that left a police officer dead. The documentary contained several historical re-enactments, casting doubt on the testimonies of various witnesses that had led to the wrongful conviction of a man named Randall Adams. These visual representations of the evidence Morris had gathered rewrote the conventional wisdom surrounding the case, ultimately helping Adams to get out of prison.
But the re-enactments of the crime often bewildered the public, blurring the line between documentary and fiction. One reporter from the Dallas Morning News asked Morris how he had coincidentally managed to be on the road the night of the shooting. The director recalls the occasion on his New York Times blog.
“The film was released in 1988,” Morris writes. “The crime occurred in 1976. Was this reporter suggesting that I had been out on the roadway with a 35-mm film crew the night of the murder, and just happened to be at the right place, at the right time to film the crime—over a decade earlier?”
This confusion haunts the director’s latest effort. Although Standard Operating Procedure won the Jury Grand Prix Silver Bear (essentially second place) at the Berlin Film Festival, journalists and critics in Germany weren’t entirely happy with Morris’ efforts. They said they liked everything but the re-enactments.
Standard Operating Procedure is a documentary about two things: the infamous photographs of prisoner abuse taken at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and the people who took and appeared in them.
The documentary, however, says virtually nothing about the Bush administration’s policies, or the machinations of Donald Rumsfeld and his cronies, or the War on Terror. The details of the Abu Ghraib scandal itself have already been covered exhaustively in print (Salon’s “Abu Ghraib Files”) and in film (The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, Taxi To the Dark Side).
What distinguishes the film is its meditations on photography—Do photographs tell the truth? What do the Abu Ghraib photographs say about America? What do they say about human nature?—and its extensive interviews with the seven “bad apple” soldiers at Abu Ghraib who were convicted of crimes in the wake of the scandal.
The re-enactments—slick, slow-motion sequences—are lavish, highly stylized, and set to a pulsing Danny Elfman score. They depict the torture prisoners endured at the hands of American military intelligence officers in closed, camera-free rooms. The re-enactments elicit a visceral reaction, but so do the actual pictures taken at Abu Ghraib: there are prisoners chained to beds wearing nothing but a pair of women’s underwear over their faces, prisoners on leashes, or soaked in their own urine. One infamous picture shows a dead man in an ice-filled body bag, with an American soldier smiling and flashing a thumbs-up over the corpse. Why do we need dramatic retellings of these crimes when we already have vivid proof of so many other abuses and engaging, fascinating interviews with the “bad apples?”
Sabrina Harman is one of the soldiers who became a convicted felon. She is the soldier who was captured on film flashing the thumbs-up over the man in the body bag, and her testimony shows the frightening ambivalence the soldiers at Abu Ghraib faced.
“I just wanted to document everything I saw. That was the reason I took photos,” Harman says in a recent New Yorker article. The article is an excerpt from a soon-to-be-published book, also called Standard Operating Procedure, co-written by Morris and Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch. She and other soldiers were told the man had died of a heart attack, but when Harman looked closely she noticed the man’s various cuts and bruises. “It was to prove to pretty much anybody who looked at this guy,” Harman says, that “this guy did not die of a heart attack.”
How does Harman’s description of herself as outraged photographer jibe with her smiling thumps-up? She claims that her pose was a habit—the thumbs-up is just what she does when someone takes a picture. In one sense, the photographic evidence bears this out: there are many pictures of Harman, in a variety of situations, sporting an identical pose.
One of Standard Operating Procedure’s themes is that in photography, context is king. The meaning of an image changes if you put a few words beneath it or another photo next to it, and in this context makes the audience feel more sympathetic to Harman. But what does it mean that a maimed corpse was an ordinary enough occurrence to warrant a common photo-op? It must say something about the nightmarish conditions at Abu Ghraib.
Standard Operating Procedure uses these soldiers, and the photographs they took and posed in, as a fruitful way to talk about war, power, humiliation, obedience, and perception. It isn’t clear what the dramatic re-enactments are supposed to add to the discussion. According to Morris, the interviews and the re-enactments should be seen in parallel, for all interviews are themselves “re-enacted verbal accounts.” True, but let’s not forget that the spoken re-enactments here are created by people who were actually at Abu Ghraib, and Morris’ were created by a film crew in a studio.
In The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris uses re-enactments to challenge scanty evidence that had landed a man in prison. But in Standard Operating Procedure the re-enactments are little more than stylized representations of what the soldiers at Abu Ghraib have already said. None of their testimony about the torture at Abu Ghraib is being challenged or overturned, nor should it. The way Standard Operating Procedure distills the soldiers’ testimony and the wealth of photographic evidence is thoroughly horrifying. It is enough. \\\