A not-very-short movie review
Feb. 13th, 2007 12:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyI finished watching Road To Guantanamo last night. I want to comment intelligently on it, but I'm still kind of reeling. I've watched a lot of movies lately that were upsetting for one reason or another, but not like this.
If you haven't seen it, it's about three young men from Tipton who end up in Afghanistan in September/October 2001, get captured by the Northern Alliance, and eventually imprisoned in Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta. While it's never made clear why they decide to go visit a war zone and then try to leave almost immediately (they come off as a bit naïve more than anything else), it is immediately obvious that the Americans intend to treat them as terrorists, despite the lack of any evidence. In fact, it's their tormentors' zeal that eventually frees them—the CIA insists that the fuzzy faces in a videotape of a bin Laden rally belong to them, but the video is clearly dated; at the time, one of the men was working in British shop at the time, and the other two were doing community service and regularly reporting to parole officers. Even with the most obvious alibis ever, the men are still held in Gitmo for three months and the Americans try to get them to sign papers admitting that they're linked to al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The movie switches between interviews with the actual victims and dramatizations of their experience—a technique I found jarring, given that I expected it to be a straightforward documentary. I was half-asleep when I watched the beginning, so when they introduced the real people and then had actors playing them, I was wondering who the other three characters were supposed to be. I'm sort of slow that way. At some points, they show actual footage of Guantanamo and actual newscasts; given that the facts of the documentary were almost certainly going to be contested by people still insisting that it's okay to imprison people for years and torture them, I'm not sure that blurring the line between reality and reenactment was the greatest cinematic decision.
This said, it's absolutely brutal. These men have years of their lives stolen; they're tortured, lied to, their families are threatened, and in the end, they're released without so much as an apology. And apparently, the torture scenes had to be toned down from the actual account.
The most poignant scene, to me, is one in which the prisoners in Camp X-Ray, forbidden from talking to each other, praying, or standing up in their cells, are forced to find ways of keeping themselves sane. They have no privacy and are kept awake by large spotlights with guards constantly shouting at them. One of the British prisoners tries to teach another prisoner, who doesn't speak English, how to rap. A guard comes by and, instead of telling him to shut up, asks him to perform, "one of those raps you're always doing."
Nervously, the guy starts freestyling about his predicament. It's awkward, but he gets it to rhyme, and it's oddly funny. The guard listens, and when he finishes, thanks him, almost embarrassed. It's as if the guard had started treating the prisoner as a performing animal, realized for a moment that he's talking to a guy around his own age who shares a lot of the same cultural interests and has a sense of humour, and has to repress that in order to carry on with the job of putting human beings in cages.
There are no consequences for this sort of injustice. In order to maintain a reign of terror, no one, from the Northern Alliance who rounded up civilians and Taliban alike and sold them to the Americans to the guards at Gitmo who tortured these men, to the CIA and MI5 agents who manufactured or distorted evidence against them, to the politicians who passed laws allowing for indefinite detention without charge, can be punished. They can't be sued, charged, or put into pens to bake under the hot sun. They can afford to make mistakes that shatter lives, and claim that it's all justified in pursuit of the bad guys.
It's action movie culture made into politics. I feel ill.
If you haven't seen it, it's about three young men from Tipton who end up in Afghanistan in September/October 2001, get captured by the Northern Alliance, and eventually imprisoned in Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta. While it's never made clear why they decide to go visit a war zone and then try to leave almost immediately (they come off as a bit naïve more than anything else), it is immediately obvious that the Americans intend to treat them as terrorists, despite the lack of any evidence. In fact, it's their tormentors' zeal that eventually frees them—the CIA insists that the fuzzy faces in a videotape of a bin Laden rally belong to them, but the video is clearly dated; at the time, one of the men was working in British shop at the time, and the other two were doing community service and regularly reporting to parole officers. Even with the most obvious alibis ever, the men are still held in Gitmo for three months and the Americans try to get them to sign papers admitting that they're linked to al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The movie switches between interviews with the actual victims and dramatizations of their experience—a technique I found jarring, given that I expected it to be a straightforward documentary. I was half-asleep when I watched the beginning, so when they introduced the real people and then had actors playing them, I was wondering who the other three characters were supposed to be. I'm sort of slow that way. At some points, they show actual footage of Guantanamo and actual newscasts; given that the facts of the documentary were almost certainly going to be contested by people still insisting that it's okay to imprison people for years and torture them, I'm not sure that blurring the line between reality and reenactment was the greatest cinematic decision.
This said, it's absolutely brutal. These men have years of their lives stolen; they're tortured, lied to, their families are threatened, and in the end, they're released without so much as an apology. And apparently, the torture scenes had to be toned down from the actual account.
The most poignant scene, to me, is one in which the prisoners in Camp X-Ray, forbidden from talking to each other, praying, or standing up in their cells, are forced to find ways of keeping themselves sane. They have no privacy and are kept awake by large spotlights with guards constantly shouting at them. One of the British prisoners tries to teach another prisoner, who doesn't speak English, how to rap. A guard comes by and, instead of telling him to shut up, asks him to perform, "one of those raps you're always doing."
Nervously, the guy starts freestyling about his predicament. It's awkward, but he gets it to rhyme, and it's oddly funny. The guard listens, and when he finishes, thanks him, almost embarrassed. It's as if the guard had started treating the prisoner as a performing animal, realized for a moment that he's talking to a guy around his own age who shares a lot of the same cultural interests and has a sense of humour, and has to repress that in order to carry on with the job of putting human beings in cages.
There are no consequences for this sort of injustice. In order to maintain a reign of terror, no one, from the Northern Alliance who rounded up civilians and Taliban alike and sold them to the Americans to the guards at Gitmo who tortured these men, to the CIA and MI5 agents who manufactured or distorted evidence against them, to the politicians who passed laws allowing for indefinite detention without charge, can be punished. They can't be sued, charged, or put into pens to bake under the hot sun. They can afford to make mistakes that shatter lives, and claim that it's all justified in pursuit of the bad guys.
It's action movie culture made into politics. I feel ill.
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-13 07:42 pm (UTC)That's all I can muster right now.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-14 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-13 11:25 pm (UTC)There are no words. One wonders what anyone can do to bring this to an end.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-14 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-14 03:12 am (UTC)I also, for some reason, didn't realize that it was a dramatization of actual events until I was at the end. I had not heard of the Tipton Three at the time, though I have many times since. IIRC, they were barred from entering the US when they came to promote the film.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-14 02:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-14 01:58 pm (UTC)It was so fundamentally shocking to me that I think I just turned my brain off for a little while. I remember I had just read Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl, a book which details, at length, a young psychiatrist's experiences in concentration camps. And after seeing this film I just thought, oh, nobody has learned anything. It's still happening, just quieter.
In Australia, the family of David Hicks is desperately trying to bring his cause to attention - he has been held for five years now without trial. Their campaign is a series of adverts in which is father, Terry Hicks, talks about him. Terry Hicks says his son's name, over and over again. I am reminded that this is a technique used by negotiaters working to release kidnap victims. Trying to humanise the prisoners to the abductors, to give them a face and a personality.
I know that I am numbed to violence. We see so much of it. I should be more shocked by the inhuman acts that are going on in the world today. But honestly, these things don't seem so strange anymore. Guantanamo is just another camp. Some day far from now, humanity will look back on this as a dark time. A time when terrible things were the norm, were acceptable in the name of patriotism.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-14 02:58 pm (UTC)The thing about David Hicks is interesting. I've wanted to do something similar—find names of people who've been imprisoned and just hammer them into the public consciousness. Everything they showed in the movie—putting them in pens, dressing them all the same, shaving their heads, referring to them by numbers—is what allows people to treat other people like that.