Standard Operating Procedure
Directed by Errol Morris
Fabrication has become the standard operating procedure for non-fiction (formerly known as documentary) filmmakers. Surely, it has something to do with the inherent diversions of television, the decline of journalistic ethics (the evaporating line between honest reporting and protecting media self-interest) and the bizarre delight audiences now take in the mockumentary genre. Doc directors more interested in “personal filmmaking” than in reporting undisclosed truths, fancy themselves camera-wielding versions of New Journalists. Filmmaker Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line) poses as Norman Mailer to Michael Moore’s Tom Wolfe—and the celebrity media, of course, ignores the fact that Robert Flaherty, Frederick Wiseman and Joris Ivens already raised the standards.
Political posturing is the real subject of Morris’ newest film, Standard Operating Procedure—not the shocking 2003 expose of prisoner-abuse photos taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. That disgrace of the U.S. military mission is merely Morris’ pretext. Instead of coming straight at the controversy, which embarrassed the joint chiefs of staff and the Bush administration and launched another round of self-righteous punditry, Morris first goes after what old-time newspaper editors used to call “human interest stories.” His candid interviews with court-martialed soldiers and several officers appalled at the misconduct (especially regarding those military bureaucrats who weren’t chastised) should rightly be called “profiles.” Working with cinematographer Robert Richardson, who just finished backlighting the Rolling Stones for Martin Scorsese, Morris frames each GI in key light, against textured backgrounds. Lynndie England, the short, dark-haired soldier made infamous in the photo where she smiles while holding an Iraqi prisoner by a leash, can’t help gritting her teeth while explaining her actions and her betrayal by a male soldier (Granar) who put her up to the antics. Morris reveals English’s asymmetrical features; her odd (yet very human) self-deprecating defensiveness recalls the comedian Alex Boorstein. Fashion and character photographer Richard Avedon couldn’t have made a stronger iconographic point about a non-heroic subject’s individuality.
This magazine-style profile has the good effect of sideswiping anyone anxious to gloat about the perfidies of the Iraq War. Morris clearly wants to exculpate the convicted soldiers—young Americans who acted out of childishness, fear and bad judgment perhaps more than sadism. They reveal that being stationed in Abu Ghraib was hellish. The former site of Saddam Hussein’s own abattoir carried a bad vibe, plus the prison was constantly bombarded by insurgent attacks. “When you get here you have to consider yourself dead then you can do all the shit you have to do” is the first testimony Morris presents.
It is this “human interest” quality, posing the G.I.s to look like people you shop among or walk by on the street, that separates Morris from Michael Moore—who likes to ambush and ridicule his subjects. In Morris’ most confounding moments England discusses her romantic feminine weakness; Juval Davis explains how an American TV network cropped an old photo of him grimacing as he jumped hurdles on his high school track team just to demonize him as one of the Abu Ghraib torturers. This common-soldier approach can be richer than anything in Charles Ferguson’s parade of talking heads in No End in Sight where the bureaucratic chain of finger-pointers appealed to film critics’ class biases. That’s standard operating procedure for the Iraq War doc.
But Morris goes disastrously wrong when he embellishes his character studies with big-budget CGI and music-laden effects. Richardson contributes ghoulish lighting tricks to amp-up the charnal-house atmosphere (paralleling the top-down order to “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib as Iraq’s the interrogation center). Danny Elfman’s music whips up fright, underscoring an otherwise unclear sequence of a prisoner who died before/during/after interrogation. (Finally, it’s Elfman’s chance to score Sweeney Todd.) These New Journalism tricks are cinematic equivalents of literary mannerisms creeping into reportage. Two problems with this: mockumentary-era audiences can’t tell when they’re being manipulated and mockumentary-era filmmakers don’t realize that this is sensationalizing and excessive.
Morris likes to tweak liberal expectations, as in his Robert McNamara/Vietnam doc The Fog of War. He goads outrage over Abu Ghraib but also wants to entertain it—conflating liberal self-righteousness with his own artistic cupidity. This comes out in his weird use of G.I. Sabrina Harmon’s letters (which, unjustifiably, we see being written in close-up, schoolgirl script). Harmon, unlike England, offers smart-ass P.O.V. She’s the censorious G.I., complicit in taking photographs but also accusatory. “I had to laugh, so I took more pictures...to prove the U.S. is not what they think.” Her written descriptions of prison conditions (“These ants could carry the family dog while giving you the finger; the ants laughed at me and kept going”) suggest a hip blogger. She’s even snarky about a dead detainee: “He’s already been defrosting for 24 hours. He started to melt and he started to smell.” These descriptions cloud facts of criminality and confuse the fact of facts. Through such editorializing, Morris destroys the integrity of his documentary.
It is the attempt to complicate the non-fiction film that makes Standard Operating Procedure practically useless and largely infuriating. Morris exploits the G.I.'s photographs that recorded the mistreatment of the prisoners as the basis for a lengthy, Sontag-like digression on digital technology. An angry government contractor says “The pics spoke a thousand words, but unless you know day or time, you don’t know the story they were telling,” which leads to an F/X sequence lining up data and image content from the soldiers’ Mercury Peripheral and Sony Cybershot camera. (Is this a commercial?) Morris looks for what forensics call “Mega Data”—information inside information—but simply showing the simultaneity of the photographs is redundant. It still leaves us with Rashomon, or worse, Redacted II.
The few times Morris plays Grand Inquisitor and lets us hear him interrogating the soldiers, it adds little: “Did any of this seem weird?” That’s a 60 Minutes question, as if Morris couldn’t distinguish between inexperience and goofing off. He never draws a connection between the culture of fraternity hazing and military-macho horseplay—especially under conditions of stress. Instead, he errantly links to Guantanamo Bay detainees as if the situations were exactly the same. (Does this aim to be more than a documentarian mean that Morris wants to be a facile accuser like Michael Winterbottom?) What indeed seems strange is how Morris shifts from humanism into rhetorical clichés: Someone unhelpfully describes “a war zone where rules got fuzzy.” And throughout, Morris goes to enormous, unimaginative effort to re-stage what should objectively be considered an atrocity.
When Morris intentionally muddles actual Abu Ghraib photos and videos with re-enactments, Standard Operating Procedure becomes inexcusable. Richardson’s halation and chiaroscuro obscure some images (especially an iris-like peek at the hazing). Morris makes composites, adding dissolves and animated graphics (including ghostly apparitions). The growling of military dogs is amplified to sound like Leo the Lion. A re-enactment shows a fugitive Saddam Hussein cracking and cooking an egg. A totally fake close-up glamorizes viscous blood dripping from a prisoner’s nose. And a torture discussion is illustrated with pretty, slo-mo images of blasts from a shower spigot: Ah, the beauty of water-boarding!
Maybe the worst sequence of all has Morris rifling through the Abu Ghraib photos, then labeling them with a graphic as CRIMINAL ACT or S.O.P. He’s literally rubber-stamping liberal anger on events too shameful to be glib about. Despite the pity Morris elicits for the convicted soldiers, it’s hard to tell if these cheese-eater testimonies come from guilt or self-defense. Former colonel Janis Karpinski’s summation, “The fear of the truth silences people,” is condescending. Like the rest of corporate media, Morris hides the fact that fear of being found out and fear of guilt is what silences truth—or he dresses it up in posturing F/X and silly music. Standard Operating Procedure is a documentary debacle.
Directed by Errol Morris
Fabrication has become the standard operating procedure for non-fiction (formerly known as documentary) filmmakers. Surely, it has something to do with the inherent diversions of television, the decline of journalistic ethics (the evaporating line between honest reporting and protecting media self-interest) and the bizarre delight audiences now take in the mockumentary genre. Doc directors more interested in “personal filmmaking” than in reporting undisclosed truths, fancy themselves camera-wielding versions of New Journalists. Filmmaker Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line) poses as Norman Mailer to Michael Moore’s Tom Wolfe—and the celebrity media, of course, ignores the fact that Robert Flaherty, Frederick Wiseman and Joris Ivens already raised the standards.
Political posturing is the real subject of Morris’ newest film, Standard Operating Procedure—not the shocking 2003 expose of prisoner-abuse photos taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. That disgrace of the U.S. military mission is merely Morris’ pretext. Instead of coming straight at the controversy, which embarrassed the joint chiefs of staff and the Bush administration and launched another round of self-righteous punditry, Morris first goes after what old-time newspaper editors used to call “human interest stories.” His candid interviews with court-martialed soldiers and several officers appalled at the misconduct (especially regarding those military bureaucrats who weren’t chastised) should rightly be called “profiles.” Working with cinematographer Robert Richardson, who just finished backlighting the Rolling Stones for Martin Scorsese, Morris frames each GI in key light, against textured backgrounds. Lynndie England, the short, dark-haired soldier made infamous in the photo where she smiles while holding an Iraqi prisoner by a leash, can’t help gritting her teeth while explaining her actions and her betrayal by a male soldier (Granar) who put her up to the antics. Morris reveals English’s asymmetrical features; her odd (yet very human) self-deprecating defensiveness recalls the comedian Alex Boorstein. Fashion and character photographer Richard Avedon couldn’t have made a stronger iconographic point about a non-heroic subject’s individuality.
This magazine-style profile has the good effect of sideswiping anyone anxious to gloat about the perfidies of the Iraq War. Morris clearly wants to exculpate the convicted soldiers—young Americans who acted out of childishness, fear and bad judgment perhaps more than sadism. They reveal that being stationed in Abu Ghraib was hellish. The former site of Saddam Hussein’s own abattoir carried a bad vibe, plus the prison was constantly bombarded by insurgent attacks. “When you get here you have to consider yourself dead then you can do all the shit you have to do” is the first testimony Morris presents.
It is this “human interest” quality, posing the G.I.s to look like people you shop among or walk by on the street, that separates Morris from Michael Moore—who likes to ambush and ridicule his subjects. In Morris’ most confounding moments England discusses her romantic feminine weakness; Juval Davis explains how an American TV network cropped an old photo of him grimacing as he jumped hurdles on his high school track team just to demonize him as one of the Abu Ghraib torturers. This common-soldier approach can be richer than anything in Charles Ferguson’s parade of talking heads in No End in Sight where the bureaucratic chain of finger-pointers appealed to film critics’ class biases. That’s standard operating procedure for the Iraq War doc.
But Morris goes disastrously wrong when he embellishes his character studies with big-budget CGI and music-laden effects. Richardson contributes ghoulish lighting tricks to amp-up the charnal-house atmosphere (paralleling the top-down order to “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib as Iraq’s the interrogation center). Danny Elfman’s music whips up fright, underscoring an otherwise unclear sequence of a prisoner who died before/during/after interrogation. (Finally, it’s Elfman’s chance to score Sweeney Todd.) These New Journalism tricks are cinematic equivalents of literary mannerisms creeping into reportage. Two problems with this: mockumentary-era audiences can’t tell when they’re being manipulated and mockumentary-era filmmakers don’t realize that this is sensationalizing and excessive.
Morris likes to tweak liberal expectations, as in his Robert McNamara/Vietnam doc The Fog of War. He goads outrage over Abu Ghraib but also wants to entertain it—conflating liberal self-righteousness with his own artistic cupidity. This comes out in his weird use of G.I. Sabrina Harmon’s letters (which, unjustifiably, we see being written in close-up, schoolgirl script). Harmon, unlike England, offers smart-ass P.O.V. She’s the censorious G.I., complicit in taking photographs but also accusatory. “I had to laugh, so I took more pictures...to prove the U.S. is not what they think.” Her written descriptions of prison conditions (“These ants could carry the family dog while giving you the finger; the ants laughed at me and kept going”) suggest a hip blogger. She’s even snarky about a dead detainee: “He’s already been defrosting for 24 hours. He started to melt and he started to smell.” These descriptions cloud facts of criminality and confuse the fact of facts. Through such editorializing, Morris destroys the integrity of his documentary.
It is the attempt to complicate the non-fiction film that makes Standard Operating Procedure practically useless and largely infuriating. Morris exploits the G.I.'s photographs that recorded the mistreatment of the prisoners as the basis for a lengthy, Sontag-like digression on digital technology. An angry government contractor says “The pics spoke a thousand words, but unless you know day or time, you don’t know the story they were telling,” which leads to an F/X sequence lining up data and image content from the soldiers’ Mercury Peripheral and Sony Cybershot camera. (Is this a commercial?) Morris looks for what forensics call “Mega Data”—information inside information—but simply showing the simultaneity of the photographs is redundant. It still leaves us with Rashomon, or worse, Redacted II.
The few times Morris plays Grand Inquisitor and lets us hear him interrogating the soldiers, it adds little: “Did any of this seem weird?” That’s a 60 Minutes question, as if Morris couldn’t distinguish between inexperience and goofing off. He never draws a connection between the culture of fraternity hazing and military-macho horseplay—especially under conditions of stress. Instead, he errantly links to Guantanamo Bay detainees as if the situations were exactly the same. (Does this aim to be more than a documentarian mean that Morris wants to be a facile accuser like Michael Winterbottom?) What indeed seems strange is how Morris shifts from humanism into rhetorical clichés: Someone unhelpfully describes “a war zone where rules got fuzzy.” And throughout, Morris goes to enormous, unimaginative effort to re-stage what should objectively be considered an atrocity.
When Morris intentionally muddles actual Abu Ghraib photos and videos with re-enactments, Standard Operating Procedure becomes inexcusable. Richardson’s halation and chiaroscuro obscure some images (especially an iris-like peek at the hazing). Morris makes composites, adding dissolves and animated graphics (including ghostly apparitions). The growling of military dogs is amplified to sound like Leo the Lion. A re-enactment shows a fugitive Saddam Hussein cracking and cooking an egg. A totally fake close-up glamorizes viscous blood dripping from a prisoner’s nose. And a torture discussion is illustrated with pretty, slo-mo images of blasts from a shower spigot: Ah, the beauty of water-boarding!
Maybe the worst sequence of all has Morris rifling through the Abu Ghraib photos, then labeling them with a graphic as CRIMINAL ACT or S.O.P. He’s literally rubber-stamping liberal anger on events too shameful to be glib about. Despite the pity Morris elicits for the convicted soldiers, it’s hard to tell if these cheese-eater testimonies come from guilt or self-defense. Former colonel Janis Karpinski’s summation, “The fear of the truth silences people,” is condescending. Like the rest of corporate media, Morris hides the fact that fear of being found out and fear of guilt is what silences truth—or he dresses it up in posturing F/X and silly music. Standard Operating Procedure is a documentary debacle.
