14 moments of wtf from homeland, season 2

1. EVERYTHING IN BEIRUT. Holy crap on a cracker. These two episodes get their own subset of WTF.

First of all, Hamra Street, that infamous nest of Hezbollah operatives, actually looks like this:

Yeah, there's a Starbucks. But all the cool terrorists hang out at Gloria Jean's.

2. You're also more likely to find Lebanese women dressed like this:

 The idea of Carrie having to wear a headscarf to blend in is ridonkulous.

3. So is the idea of Carrie having to dye her hair and wear brown contacts. There are plenty of Lebanese with light hair and eyes. In fact, the woman who plays Carrie's informant in Beirut has green eyes. There are also plenty of European and American expats wandering around Beirut. No one would give her a second glance.

As a side note, most of the "Beirut" scenes were filmed in Yaffa, a Palestinian city now inside Israel. (You can see the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv in the distance in the shot when Carrie and Saul are on the roof.) Not only does Yaffa not look anything like modern Beirut, but like all Palestinian cities under Israeli control, it's been systematically de-developed and denied the resources to expand, modernize, or preserve most of its historic pre-1948 buildings. But apparently that crumbling, jerry-rigged, overcrowded look is what the show's producers were going for, cause that's how Arabs roll.

4. Random Arab Mob! Cause apparently that is also how Arabs roll, wandering the streets looking for random western-looking people to threaten for no apparent reason.

5. Hezbollah dude is also a wife-beater. Of course.

6. Brody's wife finds out he's a Secret Muslim. In one of the show's more horrifying and bizarre scenes, she reacts like he just told her he's in a secret child-molestation club or something. The only thing I can remotely compare it to is someone coming out as gay in maybe, like, the '50s--the sense of disbelief, shock, horror and disgust, like the thing this person is telling you about themselves can't even be a real thing that exists. What. The fuck.

7. Brody can go rifling around in a safe in Estes's office, because apparently there's no security camera in there. In the CIA building.

8. Pretty sure CIA officers are not allowed to keep secret documents in drawer safes in their offices. I think there is like some giant vault for all that stuff.

9. Also pretty sure you cannot park a car in front of the glass-fronted CIA headquarters, ever, for even like a second.

10. CIA interrogators win always! (Almost. See below.)

11. The whole absurd plotline with the Gettysburg bomb-maker. Stupid Arab, trying to run away from a sketchy dude who just turned up and demanded you go with him to an unknown location. Serves him right for getting killed.

12. Brody washes dirt and dead guy's blood off him in a car wash. Apparently no cameras in there either.

13. Hezbollah SWAT Team Sleeper Cell in Pennsylvania. Yeah, that happened.

14. ROYA HAMMAD. Who's Palestinian, we learn, despite her Persian first name. Which means she gets to be EXTRA CRAZY. No matter how well-groomed, successful, educated and integrated they are, those wily Arabs are always up to something.

Roya Hammad wins a special prize, though. She is the only character in the entire series to resist Carrie and Saul's foolproof interrogation tactics. Apparently you have to be a 100%, certified, screaming-in-Arabic fanatic to resist Carrie's interrogation superpowers.

22 moments of wtf from homeland, season 1

I'm watching Homeland. It's incredibly racist--basically, a melange of every Islamophobic stereotype in existence, wrapped in a slick, high-budget, well-acted package. An actual substantive critique is still to come, but in addition to an amount of racism that risks serious damage to whatever TV I'm watching it on, the show is just filled with so many random moments of "WTF?" that I had to make a list. And this is just Season 1.

SPOILER ALERT. Although if it makes the show a bit funnier for you, then I say that's a win.

1. Apparently the entire show takes place in a parallel universe where the CIA can conduct operations within the borders of the United States and against US citizens. When someone (way late in the season) brings up the fact that, oh right, this is against the CIA's charter, the problem gets dismissed with a simple "Fuck the charter." Okay, then.

2. People who work for the CIA have no problem disclosing that fact to people they just met, like an executive at some random bank, and rarely seem to worry about having a cover story.

3. Carrie drives around Baghdad (which looks suspiciously like Amman oh snap, it's Jerusalem) with no translator, fixer or bodyguard.

4. Carrie has classified material in her apartment and conducts surveillance out of her apartment, in front of a glass patio door.

5. Carrie has struggled with bipolar disorder since college, yet is somehow able to keep it a secret from the CIA despite the fact that they interview your first grade teacher when you're applying for a job there.

6. Brody can be captured in Iraq, chill in Syria for a while, then wind up in Afghanistan, because, you know, the Middle East is one big terrorist underground railroad.

7. By the way, Saddam IS connected to Al Qaeda, enough to sell them a captured American POW. Somebody call the New York Times.

8. Brody comes to care deeply about a young boy who's the son of terrorist mastermind Abu Nazir, except apparently not deeply enough to learn how to correctly pronounce his name, which I can only assume is supposed to be Issa (Jesus in Arabic.) Aissa is not a name in Arabic.

9. For that matter, neither is Raqim. Was the intern really too busy to Google "Arabic baby names"?

10. Carrie can have (unprotected!) sex with a suspected terrorist in her car and manage to keep her job.

11. The CIA finds Aileen Faisel's mug shot because she was arrested at a G8 protest. From the global justice movement to international terrorism...

12. The CIA can extraordinarily render a prisoner from Pakistan to, like, somewhere in Virginia and no one bats an eye.

13. Carrie says "We don't torture," right before she and Saul torture a guy with sleep deprivation, sensory overload, extreme cold and threatening to let his family get killed.

14. Fuck diplomatic immunity! And warrants!

15. The organization Abu Nazir started is called the Islamic People's Liberation Army, apparently the world's first Marxist-Leninist-Islamist organization.

16. The look on Carrie's face when Brody tells her he's a Secret Muslim. Actually, everything involving Brody being a Secret Muslim.

17. Al Qaeda equated with the North in the US Civil War.

18. Random smackdowns of racists that are completely incidental to the plot (Brody and Carrie stomp a neo-Nazi in a bar; Walker shoots a guy with a Confederate flag sticker on his truck.) I mean, not that I have anything against stomping racists, but is this the show trying to prove how non-racist it is?

19. Terrorists are hiding at your local dry-cleaners, making ball-bearing-filled suicide bomber vests in the back.

20. Brody's martyr video, in which he reveals that he's the world's first liberal patriot suicide bomber. I thought this was all about revenge for Eye-sa? They can't quite make up their minds, can they?

21. After being nearly beaten to death and dumped in a grave, Walker becomes a terrorist apparently just cuz.

22. In a moment of backpedaling to explain why he didn't blow himself up, Brody comes up with a better terrorist master plot than terrorist mastermind Abu Nazir. See what happens when you have a Marine on your side?

Coming soon: Season 2.

does torture work?

This is a follow-up post to the Zero Dark Thirty post in which I address one of the assertions that's arisen among the debates around the film.

One truism that opponents of torture (I'm one of them, if you couldn't tell) often throw into their arguments is the idea that "torture doesn't work." They usually mean that torture is a relatively ineffective intelligence-gathering mechanism. While this is true, I think it misses much of the picture of how and why torture is used by states, so I decided to write out some thoughts about that, culled from half a lifetime of what some might consider an unhealthy obsession with torture and how it works.

First of all, it should be said that even if torture worked perfectly as an intelligence-gathering mechanism, it would still be perfectly fine to be against it on moral grounds. But in my opinion, people who ask "Does torture work?" are only asking half the question. The follow-up question must be, "Work for what?" When you ask that question, you are asking why states actually use torture, not why they say they do.

I would argue that there are three basic purposes--overlapping and not mutually exclusive--for which torture is used. I am focusing primarily here on the use of torture by "armed bodies of men"--states, police, armies, etc. I am sure you can find examples that fall outside these categories, but probably not many. These purposes are:

1. intelligence
2. confession
3. social control

Let's examine them one at a time.

1. Intelligence. This is the use that is most frequently invoked to justify torture--in particular, the idea that certain people cannot be dealt with through "normal" interrogation methods and will only give up information under torture.

Here intelligence should be distinguished from confession. Intelligence is getting information from the prisoner that the torturer does not already have. Confession is the torturer starting with a piece of information and getting the prisoner to agree that it's true. More about the difference later.

Can you get accurate intelligence using torture? Sure. But not as reliably or as easily as you might think. People will resist betraying friends, family and comrades, or compromising a political project for which they made have risked their life and sacrificed a great deal. Often they will resist ferociously. This notion--that torture can be resisted and many people have done so--challenges one of the central myths about torture, the "perfect weapon" or "everyone talks" myth.

Consider an anecdote from Vietnam: A Television History, a fascinating PBS miniseries made in the 1980s, when the Vietnam War was still relatively recent. In one segment, the filmmakers interview an American GI and a female Vietnamese National Liberation Front fighter who were both POWs and were tortured. There stories, intercut, are almost identical--"this is how I was captured, this is what they did to me," until the end. The American GI ends his story with something along the lines of "and finally, they got me to say more than name, rank and serial number." The woman from the NLF ends her story with "but no matter what they did, I would never tell them anything, because I was fighting for my country and for freedom."

The point of this story is not to show the American soldier as "weak." It's to show that political belief, and particularly the struggle against oppression, is an enormously powerful motivator that has the potential to be stronger than any amount of violence. (Torturers often underestimate this power because they refuse to acknowledge that their opponents might have legitimate political grievances that are worth fighting and dying to rectify.) In struggles for political freedom and national liberation in particular, the interrogation itself can become an episode in the struggle for freedom, a focal point in which the entire political and societal conflict is concentrated down into a battle of wills between two people in a room, and in which all the accumulated bitterness of a lifetime of oppression can be turned into a weapon against the oppressor, who suddenly appears in his most concentrated and fully monstrous form in the person of the torturer.

Of course, the ability to obtain accurate intelligence through torture also depends on the torturers being able to detain the "right" people, ie. people with some intelligence to give. At this, torturers tend to be notoriously bad, arresting scores of "innocent" people who have no intelligence of value to provide. When you torture these people, they have no recourse but to lie, saying anything they think their torturers want to hear. When torture is used on a mass scale, this means that the intelligence agency is overwhelmed by a wave of "false positives," fake leads which inevitably lead to the arrest of more innocent people, in a positive feedback loop of information that is utterly useless from an intelligence point of view but results in the shattering of many minds, bodies and lives. Arrests of this type may in fact be quite useful for other reasons, such as discussed in point 3, but from a strict intelligence-gathering perspective they are a waste of time and resources.

What all this adds up to is the reality that, as an intelligence-gathering tool, torture is at best a very blunt, imprecise and time-consuming instrument. In his extensive study Torture and Democracy, political scientist Darius Rejali surveyed detailed police and military records from the Battle of Algiers, the brutal French counterinsurgency campaign against the Algerian independence movement, in which torture was used extensively. He concluded that for every actual intelligence lead obtained through torture, French authorities tortured another 15 people who had no information of any value, arresting up to a third of the Algerian population of the city over the course of the campaign. (Rejali 483)

2. Confession. I mentioned earlier in this post that confession must be distinguished from intelligence as a goal of torture, because the process of seeking a confession operates differently.

"Confession" can encompass a wide variety of things: confession to a crime that authorities believe you have committed, admission of membership in a banned political organization or of participation in banned political activity, etc. In each case, the torturer begins with a pre-determined "crime" and stops when the prisoner admits to having done it.

Torture works reasonably well for getting confessions. If you are being tortured and are told it will stop if you just sign this piece of paper, there is a reasonable chance that eventually you will sign it. The Stasi, the East German secret police, could boast of a 90% confession rate at Hohenschonhausen, their main detention center in Berlin. (This was aided by the fact that the Stasi maintained such an intense surveillance regime that there was often no doubt in the prisoner's mind that by the time they were arrested, the Stasi knew every detail of their "crime," however minor, and there was little point in resisting. Still, even under this regime, there were people who did not confess.)

Whether the confession is true or false is irrelevant here. In fact, torture works great for getting false confessions--see, for example, the Death Row 10, Black men who were tortured in a Chicago police station, some into confessing to murders that they did not commit. (It should be noted that in this case as well, not every suspect was successfully tortured into signing a confession.)

A specific problem occurs when the line between "intelligence" and "confession" gets blurry--which it does all the time. While torturers may claim, and even themselves believe, that they are interrogating purely for intelligence, they come to the interrogation with all sorts of biases that color what kind of information they expect to hear.

This happens almost by definition in the torture process. Why? Because professional torturers--the kind of people who choose this line of work and keep at it--tend to bring with them a high level of ideological investment in a particular worldview: an absolute belief in the goodness and rightness of the mission of the body (state, army, police etc.) on whose behalf they are doing the torturing, and an associated belief in the profound evilness, maliciousness and otherness of the people they're torturing. Professional torturers, by and large, are not born sociopaths; they are ordinary people who believe they are doing the right thing. If you are torturing people all the time, you need some mental bulwark against the reality of what you're doing in order to maintain your own sanity. You have to justify torture somehow, and political zeal is a particularly robust moral intoxicant. But this means that torturers have all kinds of biases about "us" and "them" and about the type of information the expect to get from prisoners.

A short example from Chile under Pinochet (also drawn from Darius Rejali's book) illustrates this point: the Chilean secret police arrest a woman who was a political activist and demand to know who helped her hide. After much torture, she admits that it was a group of nuns from the local convent who sheltered her. Her torturers keep going, refusing to believe that representatives of the Catholic church, whom they believed to be on the side of the state, would ever help an activist.

Torturers' generally crappy ability to separate truth from lies is further confounded by the fact that one of their deeply-held biases can be the very idea that torture is infallible and therefore intelligence obtained through torture must be accurate. Which brings us back to the "false positives" question.

3. Punishment, deterrence and social control. This motive for torture may or may not be explicitly stated, depending on the nature of the regime, but I would argue that it's always there, whether the torturers are themselves conscious of it or not.

In dictatorships, occupations, and other scenarios of explicit control by force, it is often stated quite plainly. So you have Rabin saying "break their bones," about Palestinians during the first intifada (he can claim to have meant it metaphorically but it was interpreted literally enough); you have talk of "teaching a lesson," "extracting a price," "softening them up," "showing who's boss," and various other iterations of the rhetoric of dominance and punishment. You have endless variations of the sentiment expressed by a French paratrooper during the Battle of Algiers:

"Given the manner in which the arrests [of Algerians] were performed, a majority of those who passed by the Villa [a makeshift torture center] had no information to give. That wasn't important. One of the objectives of the use of torture was to remind Algerians that, by definition, they were considered accomplices of the FLN. In principle it was necessary to humiliate them so that they know that the army has all the rights, without any limitation and that they, the victims, had only to submit." (Rejali 487)

Torture as social control works on an individual and a societal level simultaneously. For the individual, it is punishment for resistance, and sometimes, for mere existence as a member of an oppressed group. For a society, it is a blunt reminder of the social order, the most graphic and vicious enforcement of the dominance of one group over another, and a warning to potential resisters of the consequences they face.

Like all uses of force to maintain dominance, sometimes torture works great for this purpose and other times it completely backfires and only fuels more resistance. Which way it goes depends on numerous factors, many of which are in the hands of the resisters and the general population and not the torturers.

Societies that consider themselves democracies may be loath to admit this motivation for torture, but it is there. It is why torture can never be fully extracted from imperial dominance. You can never have empire without torture for long, because they operate on the same logic. If you dominate countries and whole populations by force, some members of that population will resist, and it follows that you will also end up dominating individuals by force.

This is the piece that's missing from most mainstream debates on torture--the understanding that American torture arises from American imperialism, and to get rid of one you must dismantle the other.

For much more on this topic, see the encyclopedic and invaluable:
Rejali, Darius. Torture and Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

laura watches zero dark thirty

I went to see Zero Dark Thirty the week it opened in New York, mostly to get watching it out of the way. I didn't particularly want to see it. Actually, I a lot didn't want to see it. But I did want to have something articulate to say about what seemed to be its terrible, terrible politics, and for that reason I had to suck it up and actually go watch the damn thing. In a theater, because I wanted to see how the audience reacted.

I had read some reviews and knew there was about half an hour of torture to sit through in the beginning of the film. I was prepared, and I still almost walked out during the first interrogation sequence, which is the longest and most graphic of several. It is, I suppose, reasonably realistic, in that it shows that acute physical pain is just one of many weapons in the US torture arsenal, and how the "American style" of torture relies just as much on humiliation, shame, degradation, threats, fear, crude dominance through total and overwhelming physical control of the prisoner's body, and the terror of indefinite detention in an unknown location with no information about your fate.

Other reviewers, including people who know quite a lot about the actual reality of the US's torture machine, have pointed out the many myths about torture that are reinforced in these scenes: the myth that "everyone talks," which is a torturer's threat but far from an accurate description of reality; the myth that everyone the US kidnaps and imprisons in its global gulag archipelago is an honest-to-god, verifiable, hardened Terrorist and not some poor schmuck who was sold for a bounty (not that torture would be justified even if the US only captured 100% Pure Evil Terrorists); the myth that torture always produces reliable, actionable information with relatively little effort while less coercive interrogation methods will definitely fail.

These myths are important because they are part of the arguments used to justify torture and are often believed by the torturers themselves. The myth that, no matter how much it may bother our conscience, torture is the only way to get certain information from certain people--this is the bedrock of all torture-justifying arguments, and especially those made in democracies. But the reinforcement of these myths was not what most disturbed me about this part of the movie.

I am not one of those people who has a problem, in a general sense, with showing torture on screen. I have written a lot of torture scenes. In fact I'm kind of obsessed with them, which is what has driven me to try to understand the actual lived experiences of torture and not the myths that get generated about it.  What's revolting in Zero Dark Thirty is not the torture itself, but where our sympathies and our identification are supposed to lie.

There is a scene which is featured in the film's trailer, in which Dan, Maya's co-torturer, talks to a prisoner through the bars of his cell and explains that he is going to break him. This is part of the interrogation--it's an intimidation tactic, to make the prisoner feel it is inevitable that he will talk and maybe it would be best to do it now. It was bizarre to watch, because I have written this scene, but from the other side, where the prisoner is the main character and the torturer is the villain.

But these torturers are not the villains. We are invited to see them as the heroes of this film--the people who successfully led "The Greatest Manhunt in History," as the poster tells us. These torturers are the characters we're supposed to be identifying with over the next two and half hours. These are the first scenes with the film's protagonist, Maya, her introduction to the audience. And what do we learn about Maya the first time we see her? We learn that she is squeamish for exactly one second, then sucks it up and jumps right on board with the torturing, explaining to the prisoner, when he begs for just a moment of relief, that he is responsible for his own condition because he has not cooperated with them.

In fact, the whole opening sequence of torture, when seen from a script-analysis point of view, is about Maya getting tougher. She starts out with a grimace, but half an hour later she's threatening some dude in Guantanamo and ordering a guard to punch him in the head for her. Along the way, she starts sort of wearing a headscarf and picks up gems of liberal-imperialist faux cultural wisdom like "Muslims don't celebrate with cake." What is the message here? That these torture scenes were really not about any of the poor men sucked into the US detention system, but about the "personal growth" of our hero into a proper, hard-assed, terrorist-butt-kicker capable of taking on the film's central mission, which is to track down and kill Osama bin Laden.

There are defenders of the film who have argued that the fact that the torture scenes are gross and uncomfortable to watch is somehow the filmmakers' way of showing the "moral complexity" of the War on Terror. I do not think the text of the film supports that argument. We never see any of the CIA characters, in the entire course of the film, question or debate the morality of what they're doing. Instead, they bemoan the fact that prisoners at Guantanamo are allowed to have lawyers (and at one point seem to imply that prisoners' lawyers have been communicating with Al Qaeda for them), talk about the Abu Ghraib torture photos as an embarrassing PR problem, and lament the "loss" of the detention program once Obama takes office (neglecting to mention, of course, that Guantanamo is still open to this day and it seems extremely likely that the detention program has just been moved around to new sites that no one has identified yet.) And, by the time we hear any denunciation of torture--from Obama, safe in the White House while our heroes are risking suicide bombs and assassination attempts in darkest Pakistan--we have already seen torture and threats of torture produce leads in the hunt for bin Laden's courier. So Obama sounds prissy and out of touch with the reality our main characters are facing.

In fact, the only negative consequence of torture that we see in the whole film is that it's a bit draining for the torturers to be working around the clock torturing so many people. Cry me a fucking river.

While a lot has been written about the film's depiction of torture (and I have certainly written a lot about it here) far less attention has been paid to the film's other highly problematic elements, as Deepa Kumar points out in her excellent review. Pakistani protestors--angry for the totally legitimate reason that foreign spies have been torturing, kidnapping and killing people in their country--are portrayed as a fanatical Muslim horde while we, the audience, are placed with the CIA officers, looking out at the scary Muslims who are threatening us. There are few times where I can remember thinking so distinctly while watching a movie, "Wait a minute, we're on the wrong side here."

Then there is the relentless drumbeat of terrorist attack after terrorist attack, running as a constant, existential threat throughout the film. It begins with the film's opening moments, when we hear the voices of people we know are about to perish in the Twin Towers--scared, talking to loved ones, fully and tragically human. It is a humanity afforded to no Muslim character in the film. The filmmakers chose to include scenes of terrorist attacks all over the world. What possible conclusion are we supposed to draw other than that everything our heroes are doing, no matter how unsavory, is necessary to fight this civilizational war of Terrorists vs. the western world?

The film's denouement is a chilling, almost-real-time re-enactment of the night raid in which US Special Forces land on a house where they believe bin Laden may be hiding and cold-bloodedly murder every adult in the house in front of their children. The fact that one of these people happens to be Osama bin Laden is, I guess, supposed to make us feel okay with this--even cheer--while women scream and children sob and soldiers pump rounds into dead bodies. In one of the film's crudest moments of shtick, a soldier hands a sobbing girl a glow-stick--as if, you know, Pakistani kids have never seen light and will be distracted by a shiny object from the fact that these dudes just murdered her entire family.

Now, at this point, you can say that the film was intended to show "the dark side," to show the moral ambiguity, or downright moral bankruptcy, that is required if you are going to be a soldier on the front lines of the War on Terror. You can say that the characters are interesting to watch even if we don't like them or think they are good people. But it seems very clear to me that the filmmakers did intend for us to identify with them, even if we find them morally questionable. They are, after all, the main characters. A film is watching a character in pursuit of a goal despite obstacles. The protagonist of the film is the person whose goals and emotional journey we're following and through whose eyes we see the world. And these filmmakers chose to make their protagonist someone who tortures and murders to "protect the homeland." (Yes, they actually say "protect the homeland.") And at the end of the film, she is successful. Mission accomplished. So, looking strictly at what is actually shown in the film and not what we want to believe about all this, who are we to avoid the conclusion that the ends justify the means?

Then there is the fact that Bigelow herself seems to identify quite unambiguously with the protagonists of the film and their ideology. Consider the last paragraphs of the LA Times article in which she defends the film from its critics. After a bunch of equivocating about torture, she says:

War, obviously, isn't pretty, and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences.

In that vein, we should never discount and never forget the thousands of innocent lives lost on 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks. We should never forget the brave work of those professionals in the military and intelligence communities who paid the ultimate price in the effort to combat a grave threat to this nation's safety and security.

Bin Laden wasn't defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.

In other words, "Yeah, yeah, fog of war et cetera. BUT 9/11! And also, support the troops."

I'm being snarky, but in all seriousness, it is hard to read this statement as anything other than an adoration of the US intelligence and military communities and a ringing endorsement of the dominant narrative of the War on Terror. What also stands out to me is the complete blindness to any possible negative consequences of the War on Terror to anyone who is not American.

If we know this is what Bigelow thinks about her own movie, how can we not see it as a piece of conscious, willingly-made imperial propaganda? Granted, it's a sophisticated, well-acted, slickly produced piece of propaganda. The fact that it stars a smart-seeming woman instead of a ham-fisted Jack Bauer type, and unfolds as a serious, thoughtful procedural and not a Michael Bay-like action extravaganza is its genius--because it makes the film more acceptable to educated liberals, "serious" movie-goers, and film critics (while still, of course, being able to corner the howling racist demographic.)

This, I think, is the film's true intention, and the motivation behind the substantial cooperation the filmmakers received from the CIA: to get people who consider themselves liberals to identify with the still-ongoing, if slightly re-branded, imperial project that 9/11 allowed the US government to unleash. And it should be said that in this the film has been wildly successful. Matt Taibbi, to pick just one example, calls the film "pulse-pounding" and "an unbelievably compelling thriller" and admits he was "blown away" and "caught up" in the "patriotic cheers" when bin Laden's bloody corpse is dragged onscreen in the final moments. (He then goes on to level a number of trenchant and accurate criticisms of the film, but my guess is the affective response is what the filmmakers were going for.)

Thankfully for me, there were no "patriotic cheers" at the screening I attended. But you have only to look at the number of accolades, the heap of critics' top-ten lists the film has appeared on, and the Academy Awards nominations (along with another Evil Muslims film made for educated liberals, Argo) to see how thoroughly the logic of the War on Terror has been accepted into our culture.

Whether by accident or as some kind of sick commentary, the date of Zero Dark Thirty's wide release also marked the 11th anniversary of the opening of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. But while you can find posters for Zero Dark Thirty in every subway station, you would have to look a bit harder to find stories of people like Sami Al Hajj, an Al Jazeera journalist detained and tortured by the US for six years for supposed (completely fictional, it turns out) links to Al Qaeda. Or Khaled el-Masri, kidnapped, tortured and raped on a case of mistaken identity. Or Adnan Latif, who died in solitary confinement at Guantanamo in September, after being cleared for release. These are the real stories of the War on Terror, and I could not forget them as I watched the film.

All of this is a very wordy way of leading up to my meta-criticism of the film, which is its relentless devotion to a singular perspective in which American spies and soldier (however morally flawed) are the heroes and evil Muslim terrorists are the villains. Kathryn Bigelow is great at the relentless singular perspective, as she demonstrated with The Hurt Locker. That was also a highly politically problematic film, but the singular perspective kind of worked on an artistic level.

The problem, of course, is that this particular singular perspective is not exactly under-represented in the American mainstream media. It just happens to be the dominant narrative being pushed by those in power, and they have no shortage of tools to encourage us to see the world through their eyes. Of course you can say that filmmakers have the right to tell any story they want, from any perspective they want, but you can't pretend that choosing a particular perspective doesn't have political meaning. I think things would get a lot more interesting if more filmmakers started turning the camera around.

the cabin in the woods and the banality of evil

This post contains minor spoilers about The Cabin in the Woods, but not anything that I think would ruin the viewing experience if you haven't seen it.
 
I saw Joss Whedon's The Cabin in the Woods weeks ago. I thought it was one of the most brilliant movies I'd seen in a while. It gave me new respect for what you can do within the horror genre. It made me think about things in my own work, and weeks later, I'm still interested enough to write a blog post about it.

Many, many critics have written about how classic horror movies resonate with their audiences because they reflect bits of the real world. The films of George Romero and John Carpenter are some of the most frequently-talked-about in terms of social commentary, but I'm sure conclusions could be drawn about many other popular horror films. Horror has enormous potential for social and political commentary, because it's about the bad things in our world, and what you think about who, or what, those bad things are and where they come from says a lot about what you think about how our society is structured.

It's not very much of a spoiler to say that that real bad guys in The Cabin in the Woods are not the zombies (or, to be precise, torture-worshiping zombie hicks) who terrorize our group of seemingly-stereotypical-college-kid protagonists. The zombies are just tools in an environment entirely remote-controlled by cold-hearted technocrats in a secret facility for the purposes of...oh I can't tell you that. Watch the movie.

The people who control the monsters (who, in fact, are the first characters we meet) seem, for all the world, like normal office workers anywhere in corporate America. And yet, their job is to think up new and creative ways to kill innocent people, and then to do so, over and over and over again.

The staff at this secret facility do not, on the surface, seem bothered by what they are doing. In fact, they seem to be having fun. They crack jokes. They place bets. They drink--a lot. Like violence workers the world over, they create a self-supporting and self-justifying in-group of people who understand their work and believe in the value of their mission. When once--just once--one of the torturers-in-charge seems to have a moment of sympathy for his victim as she struggles for her life, he quickly covers it up, from his coworkers and himself, with booze. An astute observer might read all of these behaviors as defense mechanisms, ways of insulating themselves from the reality of what they are doing.

Perhaps most importantly, these horror apparatchiks rely on a carefully constructed ideology to justify their actions. They are doing all this, they tell us, for the greater good--to preserve the world we live in and make sure our children can sleep soundly at night. Their evil is a necessary evil, regrettable but unavoidable to preserve our way of life. The alternative is somewhat unknown, but, they assure us, it would be much, much worse. Stop me if this is starting to sound familiar.

When I first saw The Cabin in the Woods, I immediately thought of this: US soldiers in Iraq, laughing and joking as they mowed down Iraqi civilians from the cockpit of an Apache helicopter. It occurs to me now that a far better parallel is this, Obama's coldblooded executive murder squad, dispassionately selecting whom to kill via Powerpoint presentation and staff meetings dubbed "Terror Tuesdays."

You can pick your analogy, but what stuck with me about The Cabin in the Woods was its thoroughly modern version of evil. In this universe, the monster is not something aberrant and freakish that was never supposed to exist. It is institutional, bureaucratic, well-funded, and it sincerely believes it is doing this for the good of humanity. I kind of wondered if Whedon and Drew Goddard had read The Liberal Defence of Murder. Or maybe they have just been paying attention for the past twelve years.

I would not dream of revealing the plot twist that leads into the film's virtuoso third act. Let us just say that the helpless victims turn out to be less helpless than everyone thought, including themselves. If you take The Cabin in the Woods as a metaphor for US imperialism, or any system in which a small group of people dominate others by violence, fear and superior technology, then the third act of the film is not just a clever twist. Its message is downright revolutionary.

welcome to palestine 2012: entry denied

Last Friday, I was getting ready to depart for the UK to join other activists participating in Welcome to Palestine 2012, the same campaign for which I was imprisoned in Israel for four days last summer.  I was prepared for another stay in prison.  The Israeli government had other plans.

A few hours before I was supposed to leave the US, I received an email from Jet2, the airline on which I was scheduled to fly from Manchester, England to Tel Aviv, saying that the Israeli government had informed them I would not be allowed into the country and Jet2 was canceling my ticket without a refund.  I shortly found out about half the US/UK delegation had received the same email.  In fact, the Israeli secret police sent a blacklist of 1,200 names to over 20 airlines across Europe.  The list included the names of hundreds of activists, but also nearly 500 people who had nothing to do with the campaign, including a French diplomat, a Dutch executive from the pharmaceuticals giant Merck, and several Israelis. Check out some of the dangerous people who were blacklisted along with me, including teachers, nurses and retirees.

I decided to head to the UK anyway.  Those of us who were denied boarding had a noisy protest with supporters at the Jet2 check-in counter at Manchester Airport for over an hour, after which Jet2 mysteriously decided to reevaluate their policy and issue refunds to us blacklisted terrorists.  Meanwhile, approximately a dozen Welcome to Palestine participants who were not on the blacklist slipped past Israel's Manchester Airport Checkpoint and made it onto the plane to Tel Aviv.  Upon arrival, one person was forced back on the plane almost immediately, while the rest were detained in Givon Detention Center in Ramle, the same prison where I was held last July.  We expect them to be deported in the next few days.

Today is Palestinian Prisoners Day.  3,500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are on hunger strike—2,300 for the day and an incredible 1,200 indefinitely.  They join four Palestinian prisoners who have been on a hunger strike for 40 days or more: Tair Halala of the Hebron area and Balal Diab of the village of Rai near Jenin (48 days); Hassan Safdi of Nablus (41 days); and Omer Abu Shlal (40 days).  Their primary demand is for the end of Israel's policy of administrative detention—a British colonial-era law that allows indefinite detention without charges or trial—and for better conditions and treatment inside Israeli prisons.

Many of the Welcome to Palestine participants who are currently in Israeli prison will be refusing food for the day in solidarity with the Palestinian prisoners' demands.  This morning, students in Glasgow occupied the BBC headquarters to demand press coverage of the Palestinian prisoners' campaign.  I'm currently in Scotland and will be at a solidarity rally in Edinburgh later today.  We are waiting to hear news of when our Welcome to Palestine comrades will be deported--Jet2's next flight out of Israel to Manchester is not until Thursday night.

This Haaretz article claims those of us who participated in Welcome to Palestine last year are banned for 10 years.  If true (and it's certainly possible it's just bluster) this is the first official word I've heard about it, since Israeli officials told us fuck all about what was going on at the time.

derry

I'm in Derry, Northern Ireland (or the North of Ireland, depending on who you ask.)

Today I spent most of the day hanging around the Bogside, the working-class neighborhood that was the center of Derry's Civil Rights movement and the site of the Bloody Sunday massacre.  Since I was still getting my bearings yesterday, I didn't realize it was basically around the corner from where I was staying (although everything is kind of around the corner from everything else here--it's a small place.)

There's a small museum with artifacts from the Civil Rights era, directly across from a spot where several people were shot on Bloody Sunday (my tour guide describes how soldiers flanked the march and took aim at the fleeing crowd.)  The man who runs the museum is the brother of one of the martyrs, Michael Kelly, murdered at age 17.

Uniquely chilling among the museum's small collection is the raw audio recording taken by a journalist on Bloody Sunday, which plays in a continuous loop throughout the small space.  Sound has an unmatched ability to bring you into the immediacy of a moment.  I listened to nearly the whole thing, lingering long after I'd read all the plaques on the walls.  You can hear the day begin with jubilation, chants, speeches, songs, the joy of mass resistance.  Somewhere along the line, there is a transitional moment, when it's clear to those on tape that something is kicking off but the full horror of the day is not yet apparent.  Voices take on an eerie, detached calm--interspersed with hacking tear-gas coughing--that I recognize from my own thankfully far less lethal confrontations with police.  Go here, move there, get down.  Are you all right?  Can you see what's going on?  And then the screams begin and all dissolves into terror, rage and grief; audible shock from people who are not unused to political violence; a mother of four being talked down from running out into the streets to extract revenge (with her bare hands?) in between instructions to her children to stay away from the windows or they'll shoot you.

I wonder what affect it has on Mr. Kelly, listening to this day on continuous repeat every day.  He seems used to it.

As in many places where there have been sustained periods of oppression, there are former political prisoners who now give tours to tourists.  My guide, who was seven years old on Bloody Sunday, at age seventeen was given a 14-year prison sentence for suspected membership in the IRA.  He served 7 years before being released.  As a teenager he was arrested, he says, "14 or 15 times," held for a week of interrogation before being released.  Every single time they arrested him at home, the soldiers broke down the front door, because they could.  It was only years later that he found out his mum had also been active in the IRA while raising nine children.  Neither one of them knew of the other's involvement at the time.

He gives me a tour of the sundry murals and monuments, and other landmarks less obvious.  I wonder what it's like, walking around every day through the markers of battles and massacres in which your community was intimately involved.  I suppose it is like this in every conflict/post-conflict zone.  This is the street where I was searched.  This is the corner where we threw rocks. This is the car park where there, against that fence, unarmed people were shot while fleeing.  This is that intersection, now a benign traffic circle, where for three days and two nights during the Battle of the Bogside, the rooftop of the Rossville Flats delivered a non-stop barrage of rocks and Molotov cocktails, defending the barricades that kept the police out, a people's version of the cannons protruding from the fort the settlers built on the hill above the neighborhood.

From settlement patterns and enforced residential segregation to house raids, internment (which we would today call administrative detention) and hunger strikers, to tear gas, "rubber bullets" the size of Red Bull cans and rock-throwing teenagers, there are many, many similarities to Palestine.  It's no coincidence that the Palestinian flag flies over the Bogside along with the Irish and several others from oppressed nations.  In this context it's quite interesting to see a peace process that has contained some actual peace and not just process, and a divided city trying, slowly, to put itself back together again.  But that's the subject of another post.