Film

A hooded man standing on a box. A prisoner cowering from a barking dog. A grotesque pyramid of naked Arab men; behind them, you can see a smiling American soldier. This is what happens, these images tell us, when power is abused and any semblance of morality gets snuffed out.

You only need to hear the words Abu Ghraib to start the slide show in your mind’s eye, yet Errol Morris’s recycling of the photos isn’t gratuitous. Their reappearance is key, since it sets the context for the bigger picture of how and why. Like his other investigative looks into the evil that men (and women) do, Standard Operating Procedure never offers concrete answers; it lets the perpetrators explain themselves straight into the camera, and we’re left to sift through the testimonies. The more someone like snapshot superstar and former PFC Lynndie England—she of the dangling cigarette and deadened gaze—speaks about “following orders,” the more we see the filmmaker’s impressive balancing act at work. He makes England seem sympathetic even as she verbally ties her own noose, then holds the camera on her silent face just long enough to inspire pity.

But what do torture re-creations accomplish, other than pushing the movie onto the wrong side of the aesthetics-of-representation argument? Is there anything that arty, slo-mo pantomimes of people in pain can make us feel that real-life counterparts can’t? For a film like Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, staged moments can fill in a gap. Here, these mockeries of suffering are nothing but a cheap false move, in every sense of the phrase.