Errol Morris: Come Along On My Death Trip

ERROL MORRIS: COME ALONG ON MY DEATH TRIP
by Jon Zelazny

The acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris once devoted an episode of his cable TV series First Person to a criminal behaviorist named Michael Stone, a pleasant, slightly nebbish intellectual of about sixty who analyzes and classifies “evil” behavior, from the mildly exasperating to the most disturbing outer reaches of violent insanity. Morris seems to take an odd delight in having this gentle man run through a true-crime litany of torture, murder, and unthinkable depravity, then at the end of the program, asks Stone how he developed an interest in such gruesome activities. Stone seems puzzled by the question. He thinks for a moment, and describes how he endured some bullying as a schoolboy: nothing too terrible; he was just picked on and pushed around a bit. Morris then asks something like, “Do you think there’s something mysterious inside you, that you’re drawn to such horror?” Again, Stone seems surprised. “No,” he says simply, then thinks for another moment, and concedes, “Well… maybe a little.”

I suspect Michael Stone is as close as Errol Morris has come to finding his soul mate, and that Morris has posed these same questions to his own bathroom mirror. I only saw him once, at a screening at the L.A. County Museum in 1999, where he struck me as a similarly smart, decent, well-adjusted, modest, middle-class guy… who just happens be an immensely talented filmmaker with a boundless curiosity regarding man’s capacity to inflict suffering upon his fellow man.

This wasn’t my original impression of him. Back in the mid-80’s, I placed him squarely in the Mark Twain-through-Charles Kuralt tradition of American folk journalism; with the deadpan “oh, just look at these endearingly nutty people!” tone of both Gates of Heaven (1978) and Vernon, Florida (1982), Morris seemed well on track to becoming a kind of cinematic Garrison Keillor. Then, in his breakout film, The Thin Blue Line (1988), he audaciously redefined himself as both Visual Poet and Gritty Social Muckraker—in the same film, no less. When the film’s dual miracles (getting a murderer’s conviction overturned and making boatloads of money) firmly enshrined Morris in the very tiny pantheon of documentary wunderkinds, he tried his hand at a narrative feature for Robert Redford, and when it didn’t work out, he returned to his trademark “quirky people” theme for A Brief History of Time (1991) and Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control (1997).

In the past decade, however, things in Morrisland have turned very, very dark. His latest documentary feature, Standard Operating Procedure (2008), an examination of the abuses at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, completes an arguable trilogy that began with Mr. Death (1999), and continued in his Oscar-winning The Fog of War (2003). You’d be hard pressed to think of the people in this trio as “quirky;” they’re more icky, albeit in that uniquely American “Hey, I was just doing my job” kind of way.



One of the final images in S.O.P. is the gallows where Saddam Hussein was hanged, completing a narrative loop back to the opening sequences of Mr. Death, where Holocaust Denier darling Fred Leuchter, Jr. discusses his early career as a gallows designer, dropping classic technocratic assertions like, “The last thing you want in an execution is for somebody to get hurt.” (The trollish Leuchter didn’t actually deny The Holocaust, he just examined the ruins of gas chambers at Nazi death camps, and didn’t think people had been gassed in them. He put his opinions in an official report, and didn’t mind a bit when neo-Nazis the world over loudly trumpeted his “scientific” findings as proof that The Holocaust was a myth.) Leuchter clearly relishes being interviewed by Morris, and so calmly restates and reframes the context of the controversy he created, there’s a chance you might even end up half-believing his enormous pile of horseshit.

Which is in fact what first occurred. When he initially screened some raw Leuchter interview footage at Harvard, Morris explained at LACMA in ’99, he was shocked by the response: only about a third of the student audience understood that Morris was exposing a dangerously misguided fool. Another third believed Leuchter was nuts, but thought Morris believed Leuchter, and was showing the film to promote his theories, and even more distressing was that roughly a third of this highly educated audience found Leuchter and his arguments somewhat convincing, or at least worthy of further examination.



That Harvard screening motivated Morris to turn the interviews into a feature film, but also impressed upon him the necessity of including plenty of experts to counterpoint Leuchter’s every utterance, because it would be morally unconscionable to allow this fascinating little monster’s ramblings to go unchallenged. If Morris felt he’d covered his bases, he was mistaken: during the Q & A following our screening, a tiny old woman rose from her seat, trembling with fury, and castigated Morris for making “this movie that makes fun of The Holocaust.” The audience collectively winced at her incomprehension, and Morris looked like he wanted to sink through the floor, but patiently re-explained his intention of allowing Leuchter to reveal his own particular blend of arrogance, delusion, and amorality. The woman sat down, clearly unsatisfied. I doubt she was a reader of Nietzche, but she probably would have agreed with his famous admonition, “If you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

Undaunted, Morris has continued staring into the deepest, darkest abysses he can find. It wasn’t much of a physical jump from Fred Leuchter to Robert McNamara: the former architect of the Vietnam War is another well-mannered, bookish, older middle-American man with short dark hair and glasses; he and Leuchter could easily pass as first cousins.

Unlike Leuchter, McNamara is neither an idiot, nor a snake oil salesman, he just happens to have made decisions in World War II and the Vietnam War that killed hundreds of thousands of people; in his most startling admission, he muses that if the Allies had lost WW II, he would likely have been tried as a war criminal for his role in the massive firebombing campaign against Japanese civilians. McNamara refuses to divulge much rectitude on the decisions he made during Vietnam, though it seems clear he regarded Lyndon Johnson’s escalation as a mistake. What then seems to me the most obvious follow-up question—“Why didn’t you quit your job rather than wage a war you felt was wrong?”—Morris strangely avoids. Why doesn’t he pick at McNamara’s psyche the same way he pressed Michael Stone? Where are the counterpoint experts Morris felt Fred Leuchter deserved? Instead, Morris generously allows McNamara a major block of screen time to discuss his role in the Cuban missile crisis, a situation McNamara is convinced almost destroyed half of America and obliterated Cuba. If anything, it’s this sequence that finally, if obliquely, illuminates the mechanics of McNamara’s soul: he sleeps well at night because he believes that any mistakes he made that cost lives were balanced out by the decisions he made that saved lives.

The scumbags convicted of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib seem to sleeping pretty well too. After all, someone in authority told them to “soften up” those prisoners for interrogation, and they were in the middle of a war zone, so why wouldn’t you force “the bad guys” to jerk off in a line, or strip them naked and stack them in human pyramids? As one guard succinctly puts it, “We weren’t torturing them. That’s what was going on in the interrogation rooms after we handed them off.”

The Abu Ghraib scandal seems tailor-made for Morris’s abiding interest in how and why ordinary people commit shockingly depraved acts, but as in Fog of War, his focus again seems both too grand and too narrow… because the spectacle of under-trained and under-supervised redneck assholes running amok is only the most visibly grotesque symptom of a catastrophic system-wide failure of American command and control. I was surprised when disgraced US Army prison commander Janis Karpinski explains that she wasn’t just running Abu Ghraib, she was responsible for overseeing some dozen prisons all over Iraq. Clearly then, she wasn’t the day-to-day commandant we’ve been led to believe. So who was in charge? Morris never asks. And he loves to shoot inserts; why can’t he put up a damn flow chart of Abu Ghraib’s chain of command? And once those names are up on the screen, why doesn’t he find those people, and grill them as to what in the name of God they were thinking? You always hear how government bureaucrats are supposed to be so territorial; wasn’t there even one Army commander who said, “Hey, I don’t work for the CIA; they want to torture my prisoners, they can formally assume custody of them. What’s happening in my prison violates the Uniform Code of Military Justice, is directly undermining our national strategic objectives in Iraq, and is immoral, unethical, and illegal. I don’t give a shit about any bogus “authorizations” written by some crooked lawyer in the Bush Justice Department, and I don’t even care if my own superior officer rationalizes it—I’m not doing this!” (This isn’t some liberal fantasy. I was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the US Army in 1990, and we were explicitly trained to reject any order we believed to be illegal or immoral. The Army instituted this “safety valve” in hopes of preventing another My Lai massacre. Where were these people in Iraq? And if they exist, why aren’t they in Errol Morris’s movie?)

All of which reinforces my impression that Morris either can’t see the forest for the trees here, or simply doesn’t think the Big Picture would make a very interesting movie: Lynndie England’s surly “I done it ‘cuz my boyfriend said to” is compelling drama; a policy debate is not. The most cinematic aspects of S.O.P. support the story of Army CID Special Agent Brent Pack, who catalogued and studied the thousands of souvenir photos taken by the abusive guards. Morris’s artful depiction of this detective’s quest to divine criminal acts from a series of random photos echoes David Hemmings’ similar process in Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which then leads Morris to ponder why some wrongdoers feel compelled to document their own crimes. Which is a fascinating question to be sure, but when the context is detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib, who really gives a crap?

In The Thin Blue Line, the mystery of who killed Officer Wood is the entire defining issue of the film. One could claim the film also offers insight into larger social issues, but Morris doesn’t go wandering off to explore them. Here was a story nobody was covering: Morris found it, and told it, brilliantly. But not only did he not find Abu Ghraib, he only chose to rehash the most obvious and well-tread aspects of it. And without that sense of a truly fresh discovery as part of his narrative foundation, Morris’s trademark recreation artistry comes off here as dilatory, gimmicky, and self-indulgent.

Thus it seems safe to conclude that Morris’s films are stronger and more resonant when they’re free of the attendant baggage of historical significance. Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, Fast Cheap & Out of Control, Mr. Death, and his First Person shows stand as fully contained works; you come away feeling that a talented storyteller has shown you something you would never have heard of otherwise. Morris enlarges your understanding of the world in these films, and does so in a uniquely beautiful, entertaining, and often funny way, while in Fog of War and S.O.P., he aims big, then takes comparatively tiny bites out of some of the biggest American sandwiches of the past seventy years, and ends up with decidedly less than a full meal.



Like most films thus far concerning the U.S. occupation of Iraq, S.O.P. sadly attracted scant interest upon release, and even less business. As has been the case in the past, I’m hoping the disappointment pushes Morris back to the kind of subjects that allow him to be his best, and whether he next veers toward the quirky or the grotesque is fine by me. Is there something mysterious inside me, that I’m so drawn to the films of Errol Morris?

Well, maybe a little.