Hallway to hell

Errol Morris examines the systemic faults of Abu Ghraib in Standard Operating Procedure.

“I think it is a horror movie,” Errol Morris says about his latest documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, a viewing experience bound to faze even his most devoted fans. “Or at least, that’s what I’ve been calling it: a ‘nonfiction horror movie.’ What was recorded in the fall of 2003 is a nightmare—a horrific nightmare.”

Morris is referring not only to the infamous photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, the central subject of his new film, but also more generally to the conditions there, which still make him irate (in an entertainingly Elliott Gould–ish way). “Violations, endless violations!” Morris, 60, exclaims over the hum of air-conditioning in a midtown hotel. “Even the very location of Abu Ghraib—forget about the symbolism of picking the most notorious prison under Saddam—is a breach of law. It’s being mortared constantly. Prisoners are supposed to be taken to the rear of the conflict. So there you are, on Tier 1A, with your copy of the Geneva Convention, and what do you say? [Affects a fussy voice] ‘Ahem, excuse me? This prison shouldn’t even be here.’ ”

Clearly, Morris is just getting started. And while many others feel only lingering shame at this point, the director is making no apologies for digging in so late. “Of course, it would be nice if Abu Ghraib would just go away,” he says. “That ain’t gonna happen.” And yet, much like the Oscar-winning The Fog of War (his 2003 profile of controversial Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara), Standard Operating Procedure bears the director’s signature obliqueness. There are long, eye-to-lens interviews with the very soldiers caught grinning and giving the thumbs-up in front of prisoner abuses: Sabrina Harman, concerned with her own culpability while taking snaps of naked human pyramids, and leash-tugger Lynndie England.

“I don’t think the press was really interested in their stories,” Morris offers. “Rather, it was all sound bites: ‘Lynndie, look this way; Lynndie, are you sorry?’ I would distinguish that from a real dialogue. I mean, imagine our shock when Lynndie came into the studio and was articulate. What I had read in the press was that she was perhaps retarded, unable to speak, kind of a lout. Subhuman. Clearly, these people were scapegoats and I have pulled them back from the edge of anonymity into something that is far more disturbing, namely being actual people.”

In doing so—and for deploying his usual reenactments, in this case restaging Abu Ghraib’s torture sessions—Morris is facing the greatest heat of his career, certainly since his landmark The Thin Blue Line got a convicted prisoner off death row. “I may be aestheticizing Abu Ghraib,” Morris says, addressing the question that will no doubt hound him, “but I’m also asking us to think about Abu Ghraib. Photos are these textless little pieces of the world, stripped of all context, stripped of before and after, right and left, top and bottom. They’re a small scrap, a surface of something. And it’s my attempt to tell a story visually, to bring that photograph back to life, that’s being attacked. My reenactments are certainly not an effort to deceive people into thinking I was there. If I had been, I wouldn’t be shooting at a thousand frames a second in Cinemascope.” (“Clearly Errol would have liked to have gone to Abu Ghraib itself,” says production designer Steve Hardie, “and even considered that in early planning. I told him, ‘Have a good time! Send me a postcard.’ ” The prison ended up being painstakingly built by Hardie on Hollywood’s old Warner lot.)

The reenactments have led Morris to a dark corner—even to a private hearing with the MPAA over his (ultimately won) R rating. “In the middle of this conversation, an intelligent woman from the ratings board said, ‘You know, horror films have changed since the beginning of the war. They’re not just about killing people; they’re about humiliating them.’ And it seems to me that this was the entire foreign policy of the United States! [Laughs]” Morris feels justified in his dramatic tactics; ultimately, he contends, drama was the secret goal of Abu Ghraib. “That hallway was actually a stage,” he says. “It was a proscenium, some bizarre theater created to intimidate the prisoners watching and also, presumably, the MPs who were orchestrating it. That insanity is my whole story.”

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