The atrocity exhibition: Standard Operating Procedure finds Errol Morris immersed in the labyrinth of awful images

With its unprecedented access to key participants in the crimes committed against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, its multitude of images of violence and humiliation both real and staged, and, maybe most of all, its prodding of one hell of an ugly scar on America’s visage, Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, first released last spring, hasn’t proved to be the feel good movie of the year. It is however among the most vital: confrontational, grotesque, divisive, fascinating, smart, beautifully crafted and—here’s the catch—more generative of questions than answers.

Elegiacally scored by Danny Elfman and vividly shot by Robert Chappell and frequent Scorsese collaborator Robert Richardson, S.O.P. alternates between the wide view and the uncomfortably intimate, between the familiar evidence and the unseen, sometimes contradictory details, between the state and the individual, with all roads leading back to a handful of hours a few years ago during which some largely un-remembered men were at the mercy of a handful of US officers taking the objectification of the ostensible enemy to a diabolically juvenile extreme. I can’t quite believe it, but I actually went to see Morris’ “non-fiction horror film” twice in a single week when it had its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs. Yet I still feel there is much to learn from it.

The case file opens with letters sent home to a spouse, speaking fearfully about the escalation of aberrant behaviour at the prison, about the poker face required to go along with things. These letters are from Sabrina Harman, the “thumbs-up” girl, whose pixie-smiling poker face graces a great many of the most appalling images. Soon after we begin to hear of a romance from one of Sabrina’s colleagues, who talks about how love makes you blind, especially when you’re only 20, a woman in this man’s army, and the man you’re in love with is a charismatic superior. This testimony comes from Lynndie England, that slight, demonic-looking girl holding a leash, a hooded, beaten prisoner on the other end of it. If she’s not one of the real culprits, than who is?

It is expected that political documentaries utilize journalistic sources in building their visual narrative, and there is some of that here, but S.O.P. is a movie about snapshots, hundreds of them, taken by numerous cameras, mostly by those who would gain the least from their existence: the criminals. In S.O.P. no single image remains trustworthy—what we don’t see often contradicts our assumptions about what we do—but there is embedded in this project a hunch that some sort of truth might be found in the collected photos as a whole.

While Morris, who finally won an Oscar for The Fog of War a few years back, is certainly among the world’s most prominent documentary filmmakers, his characteristic mise en scène—the lovingly aestheticized reenactments, the talking heads which seem less interrogated than given an open mic, the highly selective inclusion and paced delivery of context—continues to be debated for its moral scrutiny. It is of course these very aspects of Morris’ work, both the approach and the debates it incites, that make his work so deeply engaging. Filmmakers like Werner Herzog may push journalistic/objectivist norms even farther, but it’s Morris who applies these techniques not to marginal figures but subjects as volatile as American war crimes and the death penalty.

David Edelstein’s very good review of S.O.P. for New York Magazine ends with these questions: “Special Agent Brent Pack, who analyzed the photos and sent many of Morris’s subjects to military prison, says, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ Okay, maybe. But which words? Whose words?” To which I could only reply, “Exactly!” Though it’s considered over and over throughout S.O.P., Morris’ core thesis about the relationship between accountability and evidence is in an odd way overshadowed by the monstrous events investigated here. Hardly used as a tool for deception, Morris’ particular approach very much emphasizes the slipperiness of images, the fathomless layers of subjectivity and spin inherit in any act of photographic or cinematographic documentation—not to mention the ways in which such images are thereafter delivered, re-framed and viewed by an audience.

Morris, who was once a private investigator, has made the process of investigation itself a dominant theme in his work, and his recent essays for The New York Times on what truths can be gleaned from the extant photographs from the Crimean War has placed him in a small group of major intellectuals, Susan Sontag among them, who’ve made the dissection of photographs crucial to their body of ideas. In this sense he is a sort of poet of doubt, drawn toward subjects that might otherwise seem easy to gloss over. With Abu Ghraib he has perhaps found his ultimate subject, a catastrophe made more labyrinthine instead of less so for the proliferation of data surrounding it, and the best sort of proof that our age of seemingly infinite images and all-seeing technology is not to be mistaken for one of greater knowledge or certainty.

A close shave: Sweeney Todd

Drops of blood intermingle with soot-coloured rain falling over a cozily computerized Victorian London in the opening moments of the latest product from director Tim Burton’s well-oiled brand of overly art directed middlebrow Goth. 

Soon the camera will fly through narrow streets of cartoon grime, an homage to Dickensian squalour minus any details that convey genuine disease or discomfort. Little critters will crawl in and out of cute-looking meat pies made by a fetching, boobilicious widow with beguiling wide eyes and carefully arranged rat’s nest hair. All of this is photographed in a manner characterized by odd contradictions, the images at once garish and drab, fussed over and neglected-looking. I guess this is what happens when Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is plucked from the shadowy magic of the theatre and juiced with a multi-million dollar movie budget: though shifted into an ostensibly more realistic, less artificial format, this morbid tale has become strangely bloodless.

Which isn’t to say that the movie isn’t ever any fun. Sondheim’s acclaimed musical concerns the a vengeful barber who assumes a habit of slitting the stubbled throats of Londoners while his pie baking companion feeds the ground-up remains to an unwittingly cannibalistic public. With such a grisly premise to usher through the adaptation process, perhaps it should come as no surprise that the story has lost much of its truly chilling resonance on its way to the big screen. Robbed of their darker attributes, a number of key scenes feel flat and overlong even though the story’s been compressed and many songs eliminated or trimmed down. Yet there are however a number of smaller pleasures to be found here that will likely delight holiday audiences.

The emphasis on creaking gears, springs, trap doors and other machinery in the barber’s busy little slaughterhouse makes for an enjoyably sly commentary on the tandem progress of efficiency and dehumanization in the post-industrial world. Once they get into the swing of things, Sweeney (Johnny Depp, once again with scissors in hand, sporting Burton’s obligatory pallor and a flamboyant grey streak to rival Susan Sontag) and Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter, fashioned as a corseted Souixsie Souix) enjoy the fluidity of a well-maintained assembly line, with fresh victims sliding directly from the barber’s chair and down a hole into the dank basement where they are swiftly churned into hamburger and baked in the ever-roaring furnace. The whimsical flopping of corpses upon contact with the earthen floor is among the movie’s most striking visual gags.

Despite the general lack of strong voices to deliver Sondheim’s wildly intricate melodies –Depp in particular has trouble getting across Sweeney’s fiendish glee with his sour face and limited singing abilities, though his Bowie-esque quaver is kind of endearing– several members of the talented cast give amusing performances. As always, Bonham Carter, Burton’s all-too-devoted spouse, provides many of the highlights. She comes closest to balancing the necessary abstract or theatrical quality of the source material with the more intimate emotional nuances one can conjure for the movie cameras, and it helps that Lovett’s longing for Sweeney gives her some strong subtext to play with. Sacha Baron Cohen, playing a deliciously foppish counterfeit Italian and rival for Sweeney’s business, mustachioed and marvelously pretentious, also provides some nice moments, going for broke in his brief comic cameo and his blue satin pants.

Anyway, I can keep combing through my memories of Sweeney Todd for more nice things to say about it, but the bottom line is that the whole thing is just surprisingly forgettable, even as you’re watching it. There seems to be no desire to implicate the viewer in the building violence, no drive to forge a deeper investment in the deliciously grotesque underpinnings in Sondheim’s tale, only a superficial interest in its nifty vestiges. Burton, who if you ask me has yet to better Ed Wood, has apparently been dreaming of this project for the last 20 years or so. That’s an awfully long time to go without ever asking yourself what the thing is really all about.

The Poet Hangs On: Margaret Atwood's The Door

It is very difficult to disassociate Margaret Atwood from Canada, at least for Canadians. Her distinctive voice—low, wry, at times a parody of liturgical, never burdened with excess inflection, though sometimes burdened by an excess of irony—functions as a sort of collective conscience, a running commentary on our nebulous sensibility. For those Canadians who still consider the role of writers in our cultural life important, those for whom literary conceits possess meaning beyond the invented worlds for which they were devised, Atwood has ascended to assume the role of our national Oracle.

Atwood turns 68 this month. It has been more than a decade since her last collection of poetry appeared, a decade in which she seems to have fully cemented her stature as a novelist of the highest order. When you read her new poetry collection The Door (McClelland & Stewart, $22.99), you’re inevitably led to question the significance of poetry in an era so seemingly disinterested in it, in the life of a writer who these days has become so famous for doing other kinds of writing, a prolific yet scrupulous writer who has arguably reached an age when writers start getting more particular about how they plan to spend the rest of their career.

Poetry, alternately rendered as something both fragile and immense, is the overt subject of several poems in The Door. In “The Poets Hang On,” Atwood considers the obsolescence of poets, virtual panhandlers who “have that irritating look / of those who know more than we do,” yet have “forgotten how to tell us / how sublime we are.” In the opening lines of “Possible Activities” she regards literary habit with the tone of one annoyed by another who “could sit on your chair and pick over language / as if it were a bowl of peas.” In “Poetry Reading” she endures a poetic performance long enough to finally surrender to it, allowing herself to be moved while recognizing that “there’s a cold craft to it, as with beadwork / or gutting a mackerel.”

These pieces, to say the least, don’t take their relevance for granted. The poems about poetry set the others in relief, engaging a process through which the reader can see this diverse collection as cohesive, a clear, unhurried train of thought, of artistic and even moral logic rivers its way through. We see the “point” of this activity, and don’t need to ask ourselves why the talented Ms Atwood isn’t doing “more important things.” Poetry in The Door, not unlike the prose work in Atwood’s recent volume The Tent, is facilitating a dialogue between Atwood’s most personal reflections and her reflections on her country and the world and the tumult in which they collaborate. Yes, the tone overall slips from the wistfulness of memories fading, to the playful otherness of animals and children, to mortality, apocalypse and, slightly more optimistically, the mystery of our collective future.

The strikingly morbid poem “War Photo” makes a nice appendix to Susan Sontag’s final book Regarding the Pain of Others, finding beauty and solace and finally saying a kind of prayer for a nameless dead victim of some atrocity. I especially liked the unambiguously themed “Weather.” Like “Dutiful,” “Weather” tries to figure out how guilty one should feel about issues clearly greater than any individual action. Climate change is conveyed with awe and alienation, with unease toward our culpability in the climate’s new layer of threat to human life. Weather is “blind and deaf and stupendous,” Atwood writes, “and has no mind of its own ... 

       Or does it? What if it does? 

       Suppose you were to pray to it, 

      what would you say?”

I don’t know if it’s because I always hear Atwood’s actual voice when I read her poetry, but hers strikes me always as a voice of authority. (Even when that voice comes across as too arch, which it rarely does here.) In “The Poet Has Come Back ...” Atwood implies that the poet’s authority can be maintained so long as the poet remains outsider and outlaw. In “Another Visit to the Oracle” this authority is summoned up in humorous and tremendous language that surveys the most frightful blind corners of modern life and carves out some role for the writer in it, ending with a summation that’s memorably piercing and unafraid to take up the torch of the great seer.

      “I’ll tell your story – 

      your story that was once so graceful 

      but now it is dark. 

      That’s what I do: 

      I tell dark stories 

      before and after they come true.”