There's a purist stance that seems to have taken hold in the documentary world, one that says a good documentarian just points the camera and shoots.
Only Michael Moore seems to have a free pass to embellish.
Certainly the much more respected Errol Morris doesn't. Standard Operating Procedure -- his film that looks behind the infamous photos of Lynndie England, Charles Graner and company, humiliating the prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison -- is like an episode of CSI, with digital science, flashy graphics, floating text, artful black-screen interludes, dramatizations and an ominous Danny Elfman score. At times he'll focus almost obsessive-compulsively on a trickle of blood or a drop of water.
The people who hate this movie, seem to hate it for that reason (and the suggestion that truth is subjective and malleable according to presentation).
The CSI comparison is apt, since Morris is the type to want to get his man, or redeem him -- whether it's uncovering an injustice in The Thin Blue Line, or recording a confession of guilt, as he did with Robert McNamara in The Fog of War.
In Standard Operating Procedure, he's not exactly out to acquit the military police who unwisely left a photographic record of their malfeasance. But he does paint them as stooges in a more sinister coverup of real torture at Abu Ghraib.
His supposition: After the deaths of Saddam Hussein's sons, the Bush Administration began turning up the heat to capture Saddam himself by any means neccessary. Shortly after a terse visit to the former Baathist torture chamber by then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the politics of the place changed. The Military Police in charge soon found themselves overruled by an influx of Military Intelligence personnel who had a whole new attitude to torture, which they communicated to the MPs.
This is confirmed by Gen. Janis Karpinski, who had been in charge of the MPs and essentially found herself out of a job a few days after Rumsfeld's visit.
His other salient point -- only people in the pictures, simple folk from places like West Virginia, ended up taking the fall (and no one above the rank of staff-sergeant at that). Meanwhile, the real torturers weren't dumb enough to pose for pictures while they went about their business.
For obvious reasons, Standard Operating Procedure is almost entirely the testimony of the aggrieved -- from Karpinski, to England, to Sabrina Harman (seen giving a "thumbs up" while posing alongside a body bag).
The pictures themselves, of course, are almost iconic -- naked prisoners being made to pile up on each other, masturbate, wear women's underwear on their heads. England, who had a baby with the supposed sociopath Graner, is seen pointing mockingly at one prisoner's genitals.
In some cases, Morris pulls back from the croppings -- exposed through digital technology -- and reveals intelligence personel who managed to avoid the frame. At other times, he dramatizes damning anecdotes. The prisoner in the body bag supposedly continued to undergo "waterboarding" three hours after he died. When they realized he was dead, intelligence officers ostensibly decided to remove him from Abu Ghraib by putting him on a gurney with an IV in his arm, to avoid a possible riot.
If imaginative presentation is Standard Operating Procedure's biggest fault (and it does arguably create a dispassionate tone, ill-befitting an atrocity), it does make two hours of talking heads easier to absorb.
(This film is rated 18-A)
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