There have been literally dozens of documentaries made about the war in Iraq, and almost without exception they’ve been rather famously ignored by a filmgoing populace seemingly too ground down by a combination of their own economic anxieties and generalized, numbed depression or despair to care about a cinematic rehashing of what they now overwhelmingly judge as a from-day-one fuck-up.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris, though, is mad as hell, and thinks others should be too. “I would often say when I was making this movie that I don’t know, really, whether Americans care about torture. I care about it,” he says, stressing the personal pronoun and leaning back in his chair, “but I don’t know whether most people care, in the sense that they tell themselves, ‘Well, it’s an implacable foe, a ruthless enemy, and you have to do what you have to do to win the war.'”
Among other works, Morris is the director behind The Thin Blue Line, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and, perhaps most eerily timely and insightfully, 2003’s The Fog of War, which used former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his decision-making in the waging of the Vietnam War as a prism through which to assay the missteps of American military aggression and intervention. His latest film — the “this movie” referenced above — is entitled Standard Operating Procedure. It’s about a series of photographs at Abu Ghraib prison that changed the world, changed the nature of the Iraq war and changed America’s image of itself, or at least dragged into the light of day the yawning gulf between a nation’s soaring rhetoric and its actions. A hundred years from now, these photographs in all likelihood will define the war in Iraq, in particular three iconic photographs taken by soldiers in the 372nd MP Company — soldier Lynndie England posing with a prisoner on a leash, a hooded man standing on a box with wires attached to his fingers, and a pyramid of naked prisoners.
In his perspicacious new film, Morris shows how the photographs served as both an exposé and a cover-up — the former because the photographs offered everyday Americans a glimpse of the horror of what was happening at Abu Ghraib, but the latter because they seduced people into thinking what they saw was an aberration limited to a few rouge soldiers working the night-shift. “The photographs became politicized immediately — the left would say one thing, the right would say something else,” Morris says. “And it very, very quickly devolved into an argument about rogue soldiers versus administration policy, without anyone ever really bothering to investigate the circumstances under which the photographs were taken. It became political football.”
“I wanted to make a movie about… the kind of bizarre misdirection created by the photographs,” Morris continues. “There are lots of other movies to make [and] other stories to tell, including those that involve the higher-ups. I think there’s so much anger and frustration about the war that [people] want some kind of superhero to come out of the wings and nail (former Secretary of Defense Donald) Rumsfeld to the wall, and if I haven’t done it they’re just pissed off, like, ‘That’s the job, guy! Why are you fucking around with a bunch of pictures?’ And it’s because I’m actually fascinated by those pictures, and photography, and I’m fascinated by the fact that there are things in front of our eyes that we can’t see. The scary thing about pictures to me is that they can be used to reveal and to hide. They can [both] make you think you know things that you don’t know, and they can certainly show you things that you cannot have seen otherwise.”
While it’s built chiefly around unblinking interviews with the actual subjects at the center of the controversy, Standard Operating Procedure, like most of Morris’ other films, also includes exacting reenactments. Because of this, and also because it’s in part about the inherent ambiguity of still photography — which after all captures only one moment in time, and in subjective fashion — it only stands to reason that the documentary arrives on the heels of Nonfiction, a 100-page book of photographs taken by Nubar Alexanian on the sets of Standard Operating Procedure and other Morris films.
The photographer, who has a relationship with Morris spanning more than 15 years, says he got a feeling early on that this project was different in substantive ways. “Errol created an exact duplicate of the cell block of Abu Ghraib. So all of us working on the set were in Abu Ghraib prison, and [yet] we were not,” says Alexanian. “Standard Operating Procedure is a movie about a subject we all know something about, that the press thinks it’s covered. But what Errol Morris has is the truth.” For a longer question-and-answer interview with Morris, click here.