The Bigger Picture

Errol Morris' Abu Ghraib doc seeks truth outside the frame.

by Sam Adams

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TALKING HOODS: Re-enactments supplement interview footage with those involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The third documentary about the abuse of American military prisoners to be released in the last 18 months, Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure inevitably suffers from a certain sense of déjà vu. The movie, which focuses on the Abu Ghraib scandal, includes the first filmed interviews with Lynndie England, who became the scandal's poster girl, and Sabrina Harman, who took many of the photographs that have since become the signal images of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. But many of its subjects are familiar faces, repeating their appearances in Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Taxi to the Dark Side as if doing the war-crimes equivalent of the talk-show circuit.

It is undoubtedly too early for the definitive account of what has been done behind closed doors in the name of the war on terror — or perhaps too late, given that every few months brings another account of evidence being destroyed or mysteriously misplaced. But Morris has not set out to assemble the definitive account. In a sense, Standard Operating Procedure is anti-definitive, a lament that the truth of what went on at Abu Ghraib will never be brought to light.

What remains are the photographs that in early 2004 first shocked and then rapidly numbed the nation's conscience. The images — the naked bodies of prisoners stacked like cordwood, England holding a leash wrapped around a man's neck, and, most infamously, a man draped in cloth standing on a box with his arms outstretched, electric wires dangling from his fingertips — have become so iconic they almost don't bear repeating. But what interests Morris is less what the pictures show than what they don't. As Megan Ambuhl Graner, helpfully providing Morris' thesis, puts it: "You don't see forward and you don't see back. You don't see outside the frame."

Morris' interest in looking outside the frame goes back as far as The Thin Blue Line, where he restaged every account of that film's central murder except what actually happened. In Standard Operating Procedure, investigator Brent Pack explains how he used internal data from the digital photos to assemble pictures from different sources into a coherent time line of events, which Morris stretches out across the bottom of the screen. But the photos are only a thin white line through an expanse of black space: a tiny fragment of the truth.

"Outside the frame," in one in-stance, means showing the un-cropped photo of England holding an Iraqi prisoner on a dog leash to reveal Ambuhl standing at the side of the frame. The photo was taken by Charles Graner, who was then romantically involved with both women, and later married Ambuhl. Did he crop out Ambuhl to protect his future wife, or was he just improving the shot? England says that the picture was Graner's idea, and she was merely playing along. "Maybe that's what Graner was going for," she muses, as if trying to divine an artist's intent.

The Abu Ghraib photographs touched off an international scandal, but Morris argues that the resulting furor obscured even larger crimes. The chilling photo of Harman giving the thumbs-up over a prisoner's battered corpse speaks volumes about the dehumanization of a war zone, but it says nothing about how the man ended up that way. Harman was indicted for taking photos showing the man had been beaten in captivity, despite initial claims that he died of natural causes, but no one was charged with causing his death. If the prosecution of the Abu Ghraib abusers was intended to send a message, the message might reasonably be interpreted as: Don't take pictures.

Using Morris' Interrotron technique, Standard Operating Procedure allows us to literally look England in the eyes, but what we see there is another blank. She looks shell-shocked, as if the deeper layers of her psyche have shut down. Morris sets out to prove that the explanation for Abu Ghraib cannot be found by focusing on the few "bad apples," but he proves it at the expense of providing his own theory of the crime. Laboring over his images, which here are glossy to the point of self-parody (a shot of an exploding helicopter is an outtake from Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle), Morris becomes trapped within his own frame, as sure as his subjects are trapped within theirs.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Standard Operating Procedure

Directed by Errol Morris

A Sony Pictures Classics release