Torture Porn

There hasn’t been such a gratuitous abuse of slow motion since Flashdance as there is in Standard Operating Procedure. Errol Morris’s film gives the same emotional significance in his tedious overuse of the technique to a drop of blood falling from the body of an Iraqi man who has been tortured to death, as it does to a cracked egg artfully dropped into a frying pan by super-bad man Saddam Hussein. Pretty, pretty pictures.

Errol Morris’s “expose” of Abu Ghraib is like watching two hours of “The Jerry Springer Show.” Never has there been so much play-by-play description of senseless, base behavior with so little insight. Coupled with Morris’s artful reenactments and endless slow-motion imagery, and the film makes Abu Ghraib into a music video, circa 1985. It’s an intensely disturbing, obsessively documented film about the disturbing, obsessive need to document.

The bulk of Standard Operating Procedure is a succession of Abu talking heads: poster girl Lynndie England, and some equally obtuse soldiers and investigators, describing the combination of bad judgment and casual sadism that gave rise to Abu Ghraib. But you long for an expert, some form of navel-gazing: an academic, a psychologist, Susan Sontag back from the grave, anyone, for god’s sake, even that knuckle-dragger Dr. Phil, to offer perspective in Morris’s intellectual void. As my movie companion Genevieve pointed out, these soldiers are the text-messaging generation speaking, devoid of introspection and simply acting compulsively documenting every step, no matter how stupid, in their lives with a photograph to prove their existence. If I heard one more monotone justification of how their actions were caused by someone else I was going to tear my hair out. Yes, as Morris points out in lockstep, unadventurous liberal fashion, the higher ups did escape blame or prosecution. Yes, the Bush Administration is morally corrupt. But does that mean these blank, affectless zombies with their thumbs up gestures and simulated fellatio weren’t stupid and sadistic too? Soldiers have been taking trophy photographs of their war kills and atrocities and collecting battle souvenirs since there have been cameras and since there have been wars. It’s ridiculously naive and proof of this film’s utter lack of judgment or context to act as if Abu Ghraib is some isolated incident of Americans behaving badly. With so many worthwhile films about the sickening misbehavior and incompetence surrounding Iraq, Standard Operating Procedure is an especially pointless exercise in inert moral outrage. We’ve seen many of these photos before: to see them paraded out once more is degrading and depressing without some new wrinkle, some fresh insight into the psychology of how and why they happened. It becomes pure shock and when combined with the fetishistic reenactments, gratuitous to boot.