The night before Sony Pictures Classics planned to open Errol Morris’ Abu Ghraib doc Standard Operating Procedure in two theaters the Tribeca Film Festival hosted a screening of the film, followed by a conversation between Morris and Jarhead author Anthony Swofford.
Beat to the festival circuit by over a year by Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (which debuted at Sundance 2007 and later screened on HBO), Morris’ two-hour dissection of the Iraqi prison schedule retreads a fair bit of ground that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the scandal closely and/or seen the previous film. But where Kennedy was primarily concerned with depicting the psychological climate that led to the abuses (of both detainees and power) and their photographic documentation, Morris is more concerned with revealing the discrepancy between what those iconic photographs seem to be documenting, and what the testimony of the indicted soldiers suggests is closer to the truth. “We looked at the photographs and thought we knew everything about Abu Ghraib,” Morris said after the screening. “We knew nothing.” Of course, Morris has made a living crafting subjective mediations of reality, and formally Standard Operating Procedure is an embodiment of the problematic relationship between representation and interpretation that underlies his thesis. High-contrast, hyper-shallow focus re-enactments (Morris prefers the word “illustrations”) compete for space with actual images from the prison, set in the middle of the screen so we can see their original framing. Low-res cell cam videos are are also left their original size, and in the case of the footage documenting the infamous “human pyramid,” the video appears as a flickering doorway taking up about a fifth of an otherwise black screen. Throughout, Morris uses the cinematic language of fantasy films––including a score by Danny Elfman, strategic CGI compositing and slow motion effects––in order to sell the feeling that we’re trapped in a nightmare, familiar in its photorealism and yet, in terms of what’s actually seen and what we read it to mean, surreal.
Morris is particularly concerned with how the information contained in individual photographs led to indictment of the soldiers involved––both in terms of criminal charges and in the court of public opinion––as well as the fact that if there wouldn’t have been a “scandal” as such if the photos hadn’t existed. An Army investigator charged with considering the images as evidence is given ample screen time, and his explanation of how and why some photographs were considered more damning than others is fascinating. The image of a hooded detainee with wires attached to his finger, though probably the most iconic image of the scandal on the whole, shows no sign of anything criminally untoward––in the investigation, it was classified as evidence of “S.O.P.”, or Standard Operating Procedure. Meanwhile, the image of Lynndie England pointing to a masturbating soldier seems to depict a coerced sexual act, and was thus considered evidence of a crime.
England is now just 25, but as Swofford noted, she’s come out of this ordeal (and three years in prison) looking “like she’s aged a decade” compared to the girl in that photograph. Though vilified in the media for her cheerful presence in many of the most damning photos from Abu Ghraib, England maintains that her crimes were spawned by passion. “I was blinded by being in love with a man,” England laments in the film––not sentimentally, but tough and resigned, like a Loretta Lynn song come to life.
Throughout, Morris contrasts photos taken by the soldiers of one another with their photos documenting their treatment of the detainees, and in several of the former, England is frozen in poses that would be nearly indistinguishable from photos compromising activity involving detainees…were she not young, white and female. When we see England hand cuffed in a sprawl on a cot, or squatting with her pants around her knees and a middle finger raised to the camera, knowing that these images were taken by her then-boyfriend Sargeant Charles Graner, we understand that she’s the middle link in a chain of humiliation. Every soldier who served time in relation to the scandal says they were just following orders from their commanding officer, but England, a love-struck 20 year old in way over her head in every respect, was taking orders from the man she was sleeping with. The infamous human pyramid of naked detainees? England says Graner referred to it as his “birthday present” to her.
This was before England found out she was pregnant and learned that Graner was also sleeping with Meghan Ambuhl, another female officer at the prison. Now serving a ten year prison sentence, Graner is currently married to Ambuhl, who appears in both Kennedy and Morris’ films. Mrs. Graner also appeared off to the side in the original image of England holding a leash attached to a detainee, but she had been cropped out by Graner by the time the image made it to the media.
If anything, this psycho-sexual drama is underplayed in Morris’ film. One could easily image a full feature on how the Graner/England/Ambul love triangle––and particularly Graner’s fetishistic impulse to obtain photographic evidence of the younger of his two girlfriends in situations of humiliation––was fueled by the stresses of the war and the prison and in turn snowballed into a serious black mark on America’s record of military professionalism. Morris sacrifices analysis of this and other provocative ideas naturally embedded in the story, in order to keep the focus on the way the story has been told through imagery. This analysis is often so wonkily specific that it can sometimes lose the forest for miniscule trees.
Nonetheless, Morris indicated after the screening that the sex and gender issues raised by England’s aspect of the story was at the forefront of his concern. “I’ve often seen this war as a war of sexual humiliation,” he said, “It’s no accident that American women were used to strip Iraqi males. To me, it’s no accident that Graner took his 90 pound girlfriend, who is 20 years old, and took THIS picture.” In the film, England takes responsibility for falling for the wrong man, but she also takes every opportunity to blame her complicity in the crimes on the coupling. Under Morris’ gaze, England isn’t a morally reprehensible bad apple, or even a woman who made bad choices based on romantic obsession, but a victim.
So is Sabrina Harman, a female soldier seen in another iconic Abu Ghraib image, giving the camera a thumbs up next to a corpse. Morris says that when he first saw that image, his knee-jerk reaction was to assume that Harmon “was a monster…maybe even responsible [for the death].” He later learned that Harmon was an aspiring forensic photographer, and that after taking a single photo of herself in front of the body of a detainee accidentally killed during an interrogation by a CIA agent when she was not present, she proceeded to take dozens of evidentiary-style photos of the corpse. Morris says he’s about to publish an entire essay on “Sabrina and the smile” on his New York Times blog, which will include an interview with “the greatest living expert on the smile.” I hope this essay gives greater consideration to why the budding forensic photographer saw fit to document herself as a gleeful tourist at the crime scene; Harman’s explanation that her thumb reflexively popped up because she “never knows what to do with my hands in pictures” didn’t quite do it for me.
Morris’ persistently insists, both within the film and in the conversation afterwards, that those who participated in the abuses and photographed them (and served time for their actions) are virtually without culpability compared to the higher-ups who, at best, created a culture of Geneva Convention indifference, and at worst, ordered torture and then pretended like they didn’t know it was happening when the photographs came to light. The idea that there would not have been an Abu Ghraib scandal had the photographs not made it to the media is one thing; the idea that the human beings who appear in those photographs are not responsible for their own actions is another. Such suggestions hold particularly little water when it comes to people like England and Harman, who continually prove themselves on screen to be tangled masses of impulse vs. intellect; to write their actions off as products of the frustrations of working in a male military culture is both condescending and too generous.
Standard Operation Procedure frustrates more than it enlightens, but to hear Morris tell it, that’s part of the plan. “It’s not a movie that can provide an answer to every question––far from it,” he said towards the end of last night’s chat. “It’s a movie that raises questions, and if I’ve done that, I’ve done my job.”
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