Anwar’s pregnant wife Isabella (Reese Witherspoon) seeks the help of an old college friend, Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), who works for a Senator. His concise explanation of rendition flights, and their expanded use after 9/11, is another instance of characters expressing the film’s didacticism; after some contextualising material he tells Isabella that “the government has authorised the seizure and transfer of anyone they suspect of being involved in terrorism to secret prisons outside of the US.” However, Isabella’s response to this is revealing. “Alan,” she says, “Anwar is not a terrorist. There’s nothing extremist about him. He coaches Jeremy’s soccer team, for Christ’s sakes.” The characters proceed to establish that although Anwar never applied for US citizenship, he holds a valid green card, pays his taxes, and does not visit a mosque. This reveals a fundamental differential of suffering that the film does not challenge: what is shocking about Anwar’s treatment is not that the rendition programme exists, but that as a member of a grievable population Anwar has been made subject to it. Further, it is clear that the characteristics by which he is marked as grievable are also those by which he is marked as secular and Westernised. Like Reza Naiyeer in 24 and the Arab characters in Lost Command, Anwar is marked as trustworthy and comprehensible as human to the extent that he is not visibly Muslim.
However, the film exploits this ambivalence for dramatic effect. Part of the film’s dramatic impetus comes from establishing the biopolitical truth about Anwar, which is to say, whether he is or is not a terrorist, whether he is “really” a valid grievable American. We sympathise with Anwar through his friends, but we await confirmation of his grievability. Much narrative tension hinges on whether Anwar is guilty, on whether or not his torture will be legitimised by results. Consequently, the establishment of Anwar’s grievability becomes
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the territory for the film’s narrative impetus. The frame through which the film establishes Anwar’s grievability – an ethically suspect endeavour to begin with, as it relies on a differential of suffering wherein his torture will only be shocking if he is revealed to be grievable and if his torture is revealed to have no utilitarian justification – relies on the structure of interrogation to achieve its ends. As Elaine Scarry observes, torture “is itself a language, an objectification, an acting out”; torture attains much of its power through its performativity.60 Through forcing the prisoner to accept the torturer’s terms, the interrogation becomes a dramatic staging of the torturer’s power. “Even the confession,” asserts Lucia Folena, “is a mere echo of the question.”61
Remaining in this position of uncertainty with respect to Anwar’s innocence identifies an audience with those who are trying to establish Anwar’s biopolitical identity: the interrogators. The narrative conventions of the thriller story through which Rendition narrates torture rely on certain generic attributes, such as tension and closure. We, as an audience, wait for Anwar to answer – that is, to be broken by torture – before we establish that he is a grievable false positive. He answers the questions and we know him; through this, we rely on torture as the means of establishing the truth.
Freeman only identifies Anwar’s innocence after he fact-checks his confession and uncovers nothing: the confession is therefore central to the discovery of Anwar’s innocence. Anwar’s suffering body is reduced to what Folena calls “a mere text to be read by the hermeneutics of inquisition”, and consequently, torture’s ability to make the body confess its hidden political truth remains unquestioned.62 It is certain that Anwar’s suffering leads him to physically testify to the corrupt power of torture; however, it only does this through obeying the logic of torture, in which the tortured body is, in Folena’s words, “just a means of access to its own real meaning, and simultaneously an obstacle, an opaque diaphragm interposed between the interpreter and the full disclosure of that meaning”.63
Torture forces Anwar’s body to reveal the truth of his innocence.
In the closing movement of the film a young North African man who is caught agitating against the government has some information tortured out of him. This torture is presented to the audience as further evidence of the corruption of America’s North African ally and does not provide any kind of narrative satisfaction of the kind seen in 24; indeed we
60
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 27.
61 Lucia Folena, “Figures of Violence: Philologists, Witches, and Stalinistas”, in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. by Nancy Armstrong & Leonard Tennenhouse
(London/New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 228.
62 Folena, “Figures of Violence”, p. 228. 63 Folena, “Figures of Violence”, p. 228.
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do not directly witness the torture, merely three shots of a bloodsmeared youth tied to a chair as the information is passed on. However, it is the very brevity of this scene that is problematic, for two reasons. First, it shows that torture worked on a person who had something to reveal. Secondly, his torture is a small element within one of the film’s subplots, and is quickly dismissed as the film proceeds towards its narrative resolution. It is the moral irrelevance of the successful torture of “guilty” people that is most problematic. At the same time as it condemns the torture of the innocent Anwar, who is a member of a grievable population illegitimately made available to torture, the film instrumentalises the torture of a guilty, ungrievable Arab as a plot device.
In an interview, Gavin Hood claims that his use of a multi-threaded narrative structure was a way to “try and tap every argument in this debate from all sides, and then leave the audience with something to debate.”64 However, Anwar’s side of the story is not heard. The moral uncertainty and political doubt it causes for Freeman and the personal suffering and fear that it causes for Isabella are well-covered by the film, but it is a condition of the film’s narrative intrigue that the subject position of the victim of torture is left without content. The film encourages us to identify with Anwar’s story through Freeman, who is being emotionally and intellectually tested by witnessing Anwar’s torture, and through Isabella, who is searching for her lost husband. Casting is significant to this point. All of the white American characters are played by well-respected, high profile American stars; as Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg observes, it is often the case in Hollywood narratives of international conflict that “white Western protagonists with major star appeal provide a point of recognition and identification for white, Western viewers, thereby becoming the vehicle for these viewers’ identification” with the unpleasant historical events, and so it is in Rendition.65
There is also evidence that audiences are likely to respond more strongly to images of torture when they experience what Batson et al. call “identity-relevant personal anger”, which is to say, they are more likely to emotionally respond to the suffering of people of their own social or racial group.66 This may account for the extent to which Rendition focuses on the inner experience of its non-Arab characters.
By refusing the audience any access to Anwar’s interiority and by refusing to render an Egyptian Muslim as in any way clearly Muslim, the film falls into the trap of reducing
64 Douglas, “Oscar Winner Gavin Hood on Rendition”.
65 Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, “Splitting Difference: Global Identity Politics and the Representation of Torture
in the Counterhistorical Dramatic Film”, in Violence and American Cinema, ed. by J. David Slocum (New York & London: Routledge, 2001), p. 249.
66 See C. Daniel Batson, Mary C. Chao, Jeffery M. Givens, “Pursuing Moral Outrage: Anger at Torture”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45 (2009), pp. 155-160. See in particular the conclusions on p. 159.
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Anwar’s alterity to the familiar. There may be connections to his close friends, but there is no connection to the interiority of Anwar, and this is a serious ethical lacuna in the film’s narrative. As Badiou remarks, too often the Other is only acceptable to the extent that he resembles “us” – that is, difference is only valued to the extent to which it is not really difference.67 This is the case with Rendition. We rely on a utilitarian demonstration of the wrongness of torture that cannot be given any empirical or strategic value, rather than on any connection with Anwar, who remains opaque throughout. Empathy remains conditional on his guilt or innocence, which is not a robust challenge to any logic of grievability. Although
Rendition presents an anti-torture message, ultimately it fails to challenge the inner logics of
torture. Torture, Butler reminds us, has long been used as “a way to coercively produce the Arab subject and the Arab mind”, as a technique through which colonising powers come to both know and to produce the colonial subject.68 Through reproducing this mode of invasive enquiry, in which the audience are implicated, Rendition reproduces the logic of torture by reducing Anwar to a physical body from which answers can be torn with violence.
The final problem with the diegetic frame in which Rendition places torture consists in the closure of its narrative. In a redemptive gesture, Freeman frees Anwar and exposes the scandal of his capture to the press. By focusing on traditional forms of narrative resolution, such as seeing Anwar’s heterosexual family unit sentimentally reunited or allowing the young Freeman to challenge Senator Whitman’s abuse of authority, this closure defuses the political urgency of the issue. No details of the long-term psychological or political effects on Anwar are admitted into the narrative. No attention is paid to legal redress, either for Anwar personally or against the US government institutionally. No direct challenge is put to Fawal. By closing on a shot of Anwar embracing his newborn son, the film allows audiences a way out of any political complexity or moral complicity, seeming to suggest that releasing one prisoner and political exposure in the press is enough to solve the problem.
This politically fudged ending plays into a prominent political discourse in post-9/11 American culture. Michael Ignatieff, for example, argued that the way to remedy political abuse of authority such as that of the Bush Administration in the early years of the GWOT was to trust in the self-regulatory mechanisms of American institutions because “they at least create the possibility for correcting error.”69 This concept of adversarial review, in which
67 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. by Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2012
[2001]), p. 24. Emphasis in orginal.
68
Butler, Frames of War, p. 126.
69 Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
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“republican democracy would apply a political and ethical fix to rogue political administration”, insists that the checks and balances built into the system will automatically contain abuses of executive power.70 This discourse is problematic, however, because as Holloway observes, by allowing the Bush Doctrine to be “rhetorically contained within ideologies of adversarial review that positioned the Bush White House as a detour in authentic republican history,” a crisis posed by the abuse of presidential authority, such as extraordinary rendition, could be seen as “time-limited and self-correcting, and thus not really a crisis at all.”71
This discourse also fails, Holloway argues, to account for the fact that executive abuse of power was made possible by the same institutions that are invoked as the remedy; in seeing the post-9/11 excesses of the Bush Doctrine as “not an embodiment of living traditions in American political history or a product of the political system itself”, this discourse seeks to minimise the culpability of American democratic institutions in the production of such excesses.72 In much the same way, Rendition raises the problem of extraordinary rendition only to make it disappear. Although Senators are corrupt, there remain parts of the institution self-aware enough to challenge their abuse of authority and to correct their errors. Although it has a strong anti-torture message, the film ultimately operates in the past tense, seeming to claim that although extraordinary rendition was awful, audiences no longer have to worry about it because Americans can trust their self-correcting institutions.
To summarise, although Rendition is an ambitious film for Hood to have made in Hollywood, and despite its positive message about the uselessness of torture as an intelligence-gathering technique, Rendition equivocates on its anti-torture position and implicates the audience in the torturers’ quest to establish innocence or guilt without critiquing the interrogatory position into which this places them. Finally, it imposes closure on the issues, undercutting its radical potential by allowing the audience to leave the cinema feeling that the issues have been resolved.
70 Holloway, 9/11 and the War on Terror, p. 39. Ignatieff writes: “Liberal democracy has only endured because
its institutions are designed for handling morally hazardous forms of coercive power. It puts the question of how far government should go to the cross fire of adversarial review. Adversarial review procedures do not just pit one branch of government against one another. Within each branch there are, or should be, checks and balances, fire walls that guarantee the independence of institutions that perform intra-agency review. […] The ultimate safety in a democracy is that decisions filtered down through this long process stand less of a chance of being wrong than ones decided, once and for all, at the top.” Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil, pp. 10-11
71 Holloway, 9/11 and the War on Terror, p. 39. 72 Holloway, 9/11 and the War on Terror, p. 39.
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4.3: “Like One of Those Hitler Things Almost”: Standard Operating Procedure (2008)
Standard Operating Procedure is a non-fiction feature about the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal,
in which the Military Police (MPs) responsible both for the photographs and for the abuse they document provide interviews to camera. The thesis of the film is that whereas much media coverage and public discourse during the Abu Ghraib scandal portrayed the individual perpetrators as evil aberrations, the abuse was in fact the result of a collision of systemic factors – including an entire official infrastructure dedicated to committing and concealing torture – with the aggressive peccadilloes of certain personalities, and was not causally reducible to either. The triple visual register of the film – which interleaves interviews, archive materials, and glossy reconstructions – functions as a significant intervention in the post-9/11 torture debate through its problematisation and interrogation of such complex and politicised notions as reality, representation, authenticity, and truth-value. This section of this chapter reads three aspects of the film. Firstly, I argue that the film reveals the ways that the abuse was made possible both by a climate of urgency and by institutional structures that encouraged abuse; I again draw on my tripartite reading of the exception to make this argument, as the film also addresses the indeterminate legality and concentrationary spatiality of Abu Ghraib. Secondly, I argue that the film performs a sustained critique of the figure of the charismatic or demonic torturer, and that it allows a potentially compassionate gaze to be levelled at the participants in torture. Finally, I engage with the aesthetics of the film, and argue that its formal interrogation of evidence broadens the frame of intelligibility placed around torture.
4.3.1: Framing and Exceptionality
Summarising many non-fiction features addressing torture in the GWOT, Julia Lesage argues that torture documentaries
offer a path to mastery over a complex topic, even if it is only a provisional mastery that becomes more nuanced and revised the more we consider other facts and other voices on the subject. [...] the films are a valuable tool for any concerned viewer, especially activists, since the films place an emphasis on understanding and also draw
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attention to how we understand. That is, the films indicate how information about torture is repressed, mediated, and filtered before it ever gets to the public eye.73
This is particularly true of Standard Operating Procedure: the most significant element of the film is the way that it addresses the framing of the events now retrospectively summarised as the Abu Ghraib scandal. It broadens the field of intelligibility through which the events were originally comprehensible, with a critique specifically focused on the role of visual evidence in the construction of political narratives. As well as supplying trenchant critique of the exception by underlining the systemic and routine nature of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib, the film critiques the representational frames through which visual culture purports to give us access to torture. As Ian Baruma observes of the abuse photographs, “[t]he pictures don’t show the whole story. They may even conceal more than they reveal. [...] photographs which seem to tell one story actually turn out to hide a much bigger story.”74
Standard Operating
Procedure insists that the Abu Ghraib photographs did not show the entire story, but that
because their explicit and shocking nature tended to discourage further enquiry, they could function as a deflection from the systematic nature of abuses and the worse tortures occurring unphotographed. Through a series of aesthetic strategies – re-enactments, direct address, jump-cuts – Morris’ movie functions as what Scott Tobias calls an “ontology of the photograph”, a philosophical enquiry into the meaning of the representation of torture.75
Morris’ work foregrounds the ways that both the frame of the image and the discursive frame in which images are presented and contextualised determines their meaning; through this, the film foregrounds the ways in which images that seem unmediated are in fact heavily pre- interpreted. Brian Wallis observes that “the often-banal images” of Abu Ghraib suggest that “war is systematic cruelty enforced at the level of everyday torture, a reality that war photography tends to mask rather than reveal.”76 Morris’ film complicates this interpretation by showing that the discursive frame through which the Abu Ghraib abuse was mediated – that of a scandal – served to mask its real nature.
73 Julia Lesage, “Torture Documentaries”, Jump Cut 51 (2009). Emphasis in original.
74 Ian Buruma, “Ghosts”, The New York Review of Books (26/06/2008), available at
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/jun/26/ghosts/ pp. 1-2 (accessed 12/09/2010).
75 Scott Tobias, “Film Review: Standard Operating Procedure”, AV Club (24/4/2008), available at
http://www.avclub.com/articles/standard-operating-procedure,2983/ (accessed 12/09/2010).
76
Brian Wallis, “Exhibition Introduction: Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib”, (17/09/2004), available at http://museum.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/abu_ghraib/introduction.html (accessed 10/07/2009).
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In “Regarding the Torture of Others”, Sontag’s most penetrating question about Abu Ghraib was a question not about the photographs themselves but about the legal nature of the violence at the prison that they seemed to reveal.
The issue is not whether the torture was done by individuals (i.e., “not by everybody”) -- but whether it was systematic. Authorised.