I have no idea what to do with Josh Fox’s Memorial Day, a sporadically engaging––but far too simple-minded to be as troubling as it wants to be––hypothetical slice-of-life which exists to explain away Abu Ghraib via spring break. It seems to be consensus that this is, at the very least, the ballsiest film at this festival, although it certainly has fewer defenders than detractors. I found it to be alternately mesmerizing, infuriating, boring and eye-rollingly facile. I think it fails as a narrative film, even as it occasionally stuns as a work of pure cinema. And yet, I don’t think it’s dismissable outright.
Executive produced by Michael Stipe, Memorial is the brainchild of a New York theater rabblerouser named Josh Fox, and is loosely based on his “traveling, site-specific theatre event” Death of Nations 1: The Comfort and Safety Of Your Own Home. Dressed in all in black with standard-issue hipster-lectual glasses, Fox rocked a frustrating evasiveness at the Q & A following the film’s CineVegas premiere; when asked to unpack his intentions, Fox responded, “I don’t really do that.” He did admit to being a tourist to the world his film depicts. “I’m from New York,” the first-time filmmaker said more than once, ultimately invoking an old Spaulding Gray line about living “off the coast of America.”
The entire performance was off-putting: Fox seemed to set new standards for the indignant, coastal dweller seeking to condemn cultural forces with which he may have first or second hand experience, one minute expressing condescending horror at the kind of youthful debauchery that would be frat-like if those participating in it weren’t several social classes away from being able to go to the kind of college that even has frats, the next minute crediting his military adviser for helping him to understand that “war is fun.”
Still, the filmmaker’s annoyingly reductive sensibility (embodied by a line from the film’s synopsis: “war is a party and partying is a war”) can’t invalidate the power of some of what he’s put on screen. The film begins with a stunningly hypnotic 20 minute montage, which takes us, through fragments in constant motion, into a Memorial Day weekend blow out in Ocean City, a military shore town in Maryland that doubles as a locus for bargain basement tourism. We follow a gang of young women, outnumbered by their slightly older-seeming male companions, as they drink themselves into oblivion, spew casual racism, cry, fight, rape––and capture it all via handheld consumer video. The gaze of the film, at this point, is firmly within the crowd: with the exception of one act of violence recorded from across the street through the magic of digital zoom, all the behavior seen seems to be a performance for the camera, and the footage is too intimate and invasive to be shot as though by an dispassionate observer. Shot on location amidst a real holiday weekend party not unsimilar to the apocalyptic Venice Beach perma-kegger that runs through Richard Kelly’s supposed fantasy Southland Tales, it’s choreographed amazingly well and acted (by members of Fox’s theater company and extras found on Craig’s List) sufficiently convincingly.
For its first half, Memorial Day plays like an art film about the depravity that poor, uneducated, mostly white kids lapse into under the guise of merely having a good time, a digital verite indictment of the generational nihilism bred by Girls Gone Wild, The Real World and popular culture’s general evasion of moral consequence. But after a transitional scene, in which the location seems unchanged but characters suddenly appear dressed in fatigues, Memorial Day abruptly moves from the world of weekend warriors to an actual war zone. Our drunken racists and rapists––and their victims––are now charged with capturing and guarding anonymous Muslims, their unquenchable but blasé appetites unchanged.
The rest of the film is given over to narrative reenactments of the imagery made famous by the Abu Ghraib scandal. Fox and his actors imagine the infamous leash incident as stemming from one soldier’s failed seduction of another. Actual memos outlining the rules of interrogation are read out loud and laughed at by kids who we’ve already seen obey nothing but their own unexamined ids. Human pyramids are built to scale. A repeated tableau features these uninterested prison guards discussion their personal exploits in front of a cage of hooded figures; in the most effective moment of this second half, the victim of a sexual assault from the first part of the film confides to a friend how the incident made her feel while a prisoner whose hood has come loose stares out from the background. She movingly describes combating the bad behavior of others with further bad behavior. She’s talking about her personal life, but Fox’s political metaphor is loud and clear.
And that’s it. Virtually non-narrative, Memorial Day sets up the party zone as a moral equivalent to the war zone, hammers that connection home and then stops, content with offering an equation in lieu of an argument. But for all its faults, there’s implicit an implicit and surprisingly conservative critique wedded to that equation that can’t be easily dismissed.
Nowhere do we see commanding officers condoning or interfering––the Iraqi prison is the same authority-free zone as the impromptu motel orgy. There’s an element of metaphoric fantasy here, for sure, but ironically, Fox’s chosen binaries feel slightly more wedded to a real critique than the works of the A-list filmmakers. If Errol Morris tells us that Abu Ghraib was documented by conflicted, innocent bystanders and perpetrated by good soldiers following the orders of our evil empirical leaders, and Brian DePalma tells us that said good soldiers are mostly being corrupted by/driven to commit attrocities by the pressures of a hellish environment into which they’ve selfishly been thrust by our evil empirical leaders, it’s amazing that the militantly anti-war Fox is the filmmaker whose point of view seems to hew most closely to the Rumsfeldian “few bad apples” theory.
Of course, it’s total bullshit––Fox isn’t actually suggesting that the soldiers responsible for misdeeds at Abu Ghraib take any real personal responsibility. He’s merely reminding us that sexual violence is something they learned not at basic training, but at spring break.
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