Standard Operating Procedure

[May 21st, 2008]

Throughout Errol Morris’ virtuoso career as a documentarian, he has been perfecting the mechanics of asking one simple question: What do you have to say for yourself? This process began in earnest with 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, in which he cajoled a Texas man into an onscreen murder confession, and culminated in the invention of the Interrotron, a camera with mirrors positioned so that every Morris subject was forced to look the filmmaker—and the audience—squarely in the eye. The machine’s name was telling: Whether it was an obscure Holocaust denier in Mr. Death or Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, each of Morris’ targets was faced not with an interview so much as an inquisition, a confrontation of the sins he badly wished to conceal.

Which begins to explain why the revelation that Morris paid some of the subjects of Standard Operating Procedure feels like a small but crucial betrayal. It isn’t that Morris has violated some sacrosanct principle of documentary filmmaking, but that he has softened what has always felt like a refreshingly adversarial relationship with the people he profiled. And these new interviewees—Lynndie England and her fellow U.S. military personnel who committed the crimes at Abu Ghraib—have as much explaining to do as anyone who has sat in front of Morris’ camera. The psychological and physical torture they committed—a combination of sanctioned barbarity and infantile hazing—was a national disgrace. So for Morris to compensate them for their time immediately raises the stakes of his journalism: If he gave these people money, then he’d better give them hell.

Instead, he lets them off the hook. Trading some Sontag-lite musings on the limited nature of images for a real investigation of what’s behind them, he hints ominously (and vaguely) at a coverup. “I just thought it was a bunch of schmuck MPs acting like idiots,” opines an officer. “I don’t think so anymore.” But whatever else may be true of U.S. soldiers forcing Iraqi prisoners to masturbate while they take photographs and give thumbs-up signs, the one certainty is that it involves a bunch of schmuck MPs acting like idiots. Morris clearly thinks higher-ups gave the go-ahead, but unlike Alex Gibney’s far superior Taxi to the Dark Side, this movie doesn’t confront those authorities. Instead Morris, when not ornately re-enacting scenes from inside the prison with ghostly shadows and Cujo-like attack dogs, credits the testimony of the soldiers on the scene, who claim the mess was somebody else’s fault.

The result is that Standard Operating Procedure doesn’t just suffer in comparison to Taxi to the Dark Side. It suffers in comparison to common sense. Errol Morris, not having managed to press government officials on their ostensible complicity, is left portraying Lynndie England and her ilk as the victims of a coverup. It doesn’t wash. Lynndie England isn’t a victim. She’s a mouth-breathing West Virginia redneck with a mean streak, a slow-witted bully who doesn’t feel the slightest remorse for her crimes. Her sagely philosophical take on Abu Ghraib is that, all in all, she’s glad for her experience, since it ultimately resulted in the birth of her son. Well, isn’t that nice for her! Meanwhile, we in the audience have gained no more insight into what happened inside that prison than we had going in. Instead, we’ve been treated to the same war-is-hell blather and therapeutic twaddle we could have gotten if the Abu Ghraib soldiers had appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah doesn’t have an Interrotron, but she probably pays her guests better. R.