STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE: ERROL MORRIS TAKES ON ABU GHRAIB
September 15th 2009 06:04
Abu Ghraib gets the Errol Morris treatment in Standard Operating Procedure.
Ever since his 1988 film, The Thin Blue Line, documentary maker Errol Morris has seemingly been concerned with the hazy nature of the truth. Morris is obsessed with how one individual’s interpretation of a set of events can differ so wildly from another’s.
It's something he highlighted in The Thin Blue Line, weighing up the contrariness of the information given by key witnesses. But Morris didn’t chastise these people for their often shambolic renderings of past events; he simply sat back, like a scientist looking at a glass-jarred specimen, encouraging them to speak and noting the informational oddities that came tumbling out.
More recently, Morris took a similar approach to Fog of War, his documentary regarding the political life and times of Robert McNamara. Morris would pick at McNamara about his motivations, continually asking the former Secretary of Defense to reweigh his attitudes and logic concerning past events.
The nature of the truth is once again on the table for Morris with his new documentary, Standard Operating Procedure. Focussing on the infamous atrocities committed by American soldiers in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Morris digs through the mountains of bizarre photographic evidence in an attempt to both tell a story and provide a valuable fresh context.
Standard Operating Procedure should provide immediate comfort for anyone familiar with Morris’ techniques of storytelling. There are a lot of precisely filmed talking heads, courtesy of Morris’ Interrotron, which allows the interviewee to look directly into camera as they converse seemingly face-to-face with the filmmaker, and there’s also an urgent score, this time supplied by Danny Elfman rather than Philip Glass.
There’s also a lot of dramatic recreation. In Standard Operating Procedure, however, the technique’s used not to highlight the facts but to convey the emotion. It’s a technique Morris has developed in recent years and when viewed back-to-back is remarkably different to the carefully constructed recreations of The Thin Blue Line.
What’s certainly amazing about the film is the noteworthiness of certain talking heads. It’s quite unnerving to be staring into the face of Lyndie England (courtesy of the Interrotron), the most infamous of the Abu Ghraib personnel. It was the photo of England holding a crawling prisoner by a leash that most shocked the world, and on camera she’s instantly recognisable despite a permanently cocked head that gives her a perpetually vague defensiveness.
Sabrina Harman is also easy to identify from the photos. In Morris’s film she seems incredibly young, and her countenance suggests a nervous animal, too used to having her truth-telling pitched back in her face.
England and Harman are just two of a number of MPs interviewed, and it’s clear Morris is sympathetic with these young former soldiers, most of them barely more than kids.
But as amazing as it is to have access to these infamous subjects, it also highlights the fact that Morris and his collaborators failed to find anyone further up the food chain. The film goes to great lengths to explain what most viewers already know – that these people were scapegoats – and yet none of their superiors are brought before the camera to explain themselves.
The one exception is Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was ultimately relieved of command and demoted after the affair. But on camera Karpinski is angry: she was a scapegoat also, put to the sword for something she essentially knew nothing about.
This imbalance highlights what is wrong with Standard Operating Procedure. With their stories the former MPs aren’t telling us anything we don’t already know. The fact they were scapegoats acting upon orders became clear in the months immediately following the photographs being made public.
The dramatic recreations are full of style in Standard Operating Procedure.
The film fares better when talking to the independent contractors and Army intelligence operators charged with investigating the affair. The contractors provide some important overall context on the war, while the intelligence services’ lead investigator explains how he pieced together the evidence from three digital cameras used by soldiers to capture the goings-on inside Abu Ghraib. This sequence is particularly fascinating, the film cleverly sifting through the mountain of visual evidence, organising in a few minutes what took investigators months and months to make straight.
These procedural elements leaven an otherwise often flat documentary, and manage to tie in nicely with Morris’s strong assertion that the MPs were indeed obeying orders from above and not simply going through the motions of another Stanford Prison Experiment. Perhaps if Standard Operating Procedure had focussed more on this procedural element of the affair it would have been a greater success as a documentary. As it is, however, it’s a half-hearted film, full of interesting elements, but never really tying them together to create a compelling story.
Check out the trailer for Standard Operating Procedure below:
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Mountain Fog
Comment by David O'Connell
20/20 Filmsight
Screen Fanatic
Elfman's score is amazing and new ground for him, even if he's clearly been asked to channel Glass with his first real foray into minimalism here.
Comment by Matt Shea
Re: Elfman's score. I slapped a hand on my head when I read he had done the music, but it's pretty good and illustrates his versatility. Not quite Glass, though!