Betsey Culp

(Warning: Contains a spoiler.)

Once upon a time, in the not-too-distant future, the material world overwhelmed the physical world. In other words, there was so much garbage on earth that it crowded out the people.

Human beings, being human and therefore somewhat intelligent, realized the spot they were in and took off for outer space, leaving a corps of robots to clean up the mess they had made. For several centuries, the bots labored, gathering up debris, compacting it into cubes, and piling them neatly. Over time, the mechanical workers began to fall apart, until only one remained. He took good care of himself. He recharged his solar panels as needed and replaced worn out parts with salvaged ones. Day in and day out, this little Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class continued at his appointed task, with only a single cockroach for company.

But Wall-E was a robot. He didn’t need company. At least, he didn’t at first. As the years went by, however, Wall-E began to change. Seeking shelter from the elements — for survival, not comfort, of course — he created a home for himself. He began to collect odd little artifacts — a light bulb, a doll, a slew of cigarette lighters. He found an old tape of “Hello, Dolly!” and divised a way to screen it. He watched that movie again and again, drawn especially to the singing and the poignant moment when the hero and the heroine join hands. He began to develop a personality.

Wall-E might have continued like this indefinitely, bringing home his treasures, watching his movie, meticulously piling his cubes of trash into rectangular patterns. But one day the city where he lived received a visitor. A lovely, white, ovoid Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator. Eve.

Wall-E, poor lonely Wall-E, immediately fell in love with Eve. He followed her everywhere.  He plied her with presents. He watched over her. But she was a young robot, without his transformative experience. She felt nothing. She was on a mission, assigned to discover whether there was plant life on earth.

It turned out that there was.

Eve dutifully took the tiny plant Wall-E gave her and returned to her space station, followed by her knight in rusty armor. There, in the midst of self-sufficient robots and humans gone flabby from years of weightlessness, he did his best to protect her from harm. Eventually, her precious cargo caught the attention of the ship’s captain, who realized that it was time to return to earth and restore the planet to its former glory.

And so they did. And everyone lived happily for a while, if not forever after.

It’s a good yarn. Pixar made it into a captivating animated film. But like its hero, the film has taken on a life of its own. In Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Rich said,

Mr. McCain should be required to see “Wall-E” to learn just how far adrift he is from an America whose economic fears cannot be remedied by his flip-flop embrace of the Bush tax cuts (for the wealthy) and his sham gas-tax holiday (for everyone else). Mr. Obama should see it to be reminded of just how bold his vision of change had been before he settled into a front-runner’s complacency. Americans should see it to appreciate just how much things are out of joint on an Independence Day when a cartoon robot evokes America’s patriotic ideals with more conviction than either of the men who would be president.

Jessica Jensen, writing in the Huffington Post, said,

The movie is an inspirational environmental call to action, and yet there is no mention of how or where people can learn to cut carbon emissions, save water, reduce their trash production, etc. Why didn’t Pixar put up a simple screen with “ten recommendations for loving planet Earth” at the end of the film — or a link to a site with educational information? It pains me that MILLIONS of people will see this movie and learn nothing about what they can do to save the planet!

On the other hand, Shannen Coffen, writing in the National Review Online, thought the film’s “call to action” went too far. He called the movie “Godforsaken dreck”:

From the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind.

Meanwhile, Patrick J. Ford argued in the American Conservative that the movie’s message was actually conservative:

The real tragedy of these callous conservative critics (say that three times fast) is that they are missing the real lessons of the movie, ones I found immediately attractive to a traditional conservative. In the film, it becomes clear that mass consumerism is not just the product of big business, but of big business wedded with big government. In fact, the two are indistinguishable in WALL-E’s future. The government unilaterally provided it’s citizens with everything they needed, and this lack of variety led to Earth’s downfall.

Oh my! In the face of all these heavy hitters, what’s a poor, self-respecting robot to do? He didn’t know he was a political talking point. All he wanted to do was to get the girl.

When my son was little, we went to see the movie “E.T.” I have no great fondness for Steven Spielberg. In fact, my animosity toward his films is a family joke. As we walked out of the theater, I began expounding on the distasteful decisions he’d made in this one. My son listened to the lecture for about a minute before he interrupted: “Mom, it’s just a movie.”

So is “Wall-E.”

This is not to say that we can’t — or shouldn’t — find underlying meaning in movies or other works of art. The possibility of layered interpretations is what distinguishes valuable works from the pedestrian. But during the past few years, we’ve become Johnny One Note, and that note is politics. Johnny sang loud and long during the recent presidential campaign, where candidates trying to express genuine concern for genuine issues found themselves reduced to sound bites and horse-race handicapping. He continues to sing out every time anyone mentions the very serious problems facing Americans — health care, the economy, global warming.

His song drowns out the sounds of reality. It deafens us to what should be a siren’s call, ineluctably drawing us closer to the things we value most — our bodies, our communities, and our natural environment. “Couldn’t hear the brass; couldn’t hear the drum.” All we can hear is Johnny, blowing his political horn.

In contrast, “Wall-E” is nearly a silent film. There’s very little standing between the viewer and the life-and-death situations that the robots find themselves in. Yes, “Wall-E” is just a movie. And Wall-E is just a robot. But even though he is made of metal, not flesh and blood, his anguish — and joy — sings to anyone who listens. It’s up to us to pull the plug on Johnny and so we can hear his song.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till next Tuesday.

It was a major film, created by a major director. And yet the producers found it so offensive that they refused to release it. An official at BBC, one of its sponsors, said after a screening,

My ass hurt.

One of its producers called it

worse than useless.

After the director retrieved a copy and it was shown in the United States, critics like Harold Rosenberg hated it. Writing about the film in the January 20, 1977 New York Review of Books, Rosenberg quoted another filmmaker, Luis Bunuel:

Movies seem to prosper in an intellectual and moral vacuum.

Rosenberg added that this particular movie

presents a dilution of the moral awfulness of the death camps and the killing of civilians and war prisoners, and it trivializes the significance of this vast organized death system by fitting pictures of corpses being dragged to pits into a rhythm of night-club performers, lush landscapes, chatter in sauna baths, and gentlemen reminiscing reflectively at their fireplaces.

Not everyone agreed. When the film first appeared in 1976, Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times that it

expands the possibilities of the documentary motion picture in such a way that all future films of this sort will be compared to it….

It… marks off, explores, calls attention to, and considers, tranquilly, without making easy judgments, one of the central issues of our time: collective versus individual responsibility.

And when it was shown at a Human Rights Watch film festival in 1995, the program said,

If you can commit to seeing only one 4 1/2 hour film in your lifetime, make the necessary arrangements to see this stunning masterwork. In one courageous, lyrical tour de force, [the director] takes on the sweep of history from Nuremberg to Vietnam, exploring the questions of guilt and responsibility for the horrors of war.

The film in question: Marcel Ophuls’s Memory of Justice.

Until recently, I had never seen it. I had never even heard of it, although I was familiar with The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls’s classic depiction of France during World War II. It took Philippe Sands, writing about Guantanamo in the May issue of Vanity Fair, to call it to my attention.

Toward the end of his article, Sands tosses out a reference to

the Oscar-winning 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg, whose themes are alluded to in Marcel Ophuls’s classic 1976 film on wartime atrocities, The Memory of Justice, which should be required viewing but has been lost to a broader audience.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I managed to turn up a copy. It turns out that The Memory of Justice is an astonishing film, with an astonishing story behind it.

In the mid-1970s, thirty years after the end of World War II, some British producers were watching with horror as the war in Vietnam unfolded. They persuaded Ophuls to make a film about the similarities between Nazi atrocities and U.S. massacres in places like My Lai. At least, that’s what the Brits wanted. Ophuls refused to be pinned down, saying that the topic was

an open question — but one that had to be explored.

Once he began interviewing people, he discovered that his initial caution was correct. He couldn’t follow the producers’ guidelines; he

was unable to crosscut, say, Auschwitz and Viet Nam . . . emotionally, I have found it wrong.

Instead, he presented them with a very long — and very different — film that explored in agonizing detail

the necessity of judgment, as opposed to the impossibility of judgment.

Producer David Puttnam protested:

We bought a concept, with particular stress on the interviews. We got a long, rambling personal statement, which is commercial death for us.

Ophuls countered that all they wanted was

a radical-chic version for America… [but] theatrical equations (Auschwitz-Napalm or Hitler-Nixon)… could only lead to the reinforcement of cynicism and hopelessness.

The British producers took over the film and chopped it up, simplifying its carefully constructed presentation. Time Magazine reported,

Many of his interview questions have been cut, along with footage of his family (his wife was a member of Hitler Youth) and of Germany during the Weimar Republic and later in the painful process of denazification. Also excised was a scene of middle-aged Germans, nude in a mixed sauna, discussing their feelings toward Jews. The BBC had particularly objected to the sequence on the ground that pubic hair had no place in a political film.

The story doesn’t end there.

Ophuls’s assistant managed to steal a copy of the original version and transport it to New York, where new financing was found. Ophuls restored the missing scenes. In 1976 Paramount released The Memory of Justice in the United States. And the critics went wild, one way or another.

Why does this film inspire such enthusiasm? And such hatred? For the same reasons that Philippe Sands finds it relevant now, thirty years later, when the United States is engaged in another horrifying war. It refuses to offer easy answers to difficult questions.

Sands’s Vanity Fair article and his new book, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, scheduled to be published next week, argue,

The abuse, rising to the level of torture, of those captured and detained in the war on terror is a defining feature of the presidency of George W. Bush.

Like the prosecutors at Nuremberg in the 1940s, and like Marcel Ophuls in Memory of Justice in the 1970s, he asks who is ultimately responsible for atrocities committed in a war.

Who is guilty? No one? Everyone?

In the case of U.S. activities in Guantanamo, Sands sides with the principles set forth at Nuremberg:

The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration — by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. At the heart of the matter stand several political appointees — lawyers — who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes of conduct and took themselves into a zone of international criminality, where formal investigation is now a very real option.

He adds that the people behind the interrogation of detainees like Mohammed al-Qahtani

face a real risk of investigation if they set foot outside the United States. Article 4 of the torture convention criminalizes “complicity” or “participation” in torture, and the same principle governs violations of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Convention].

He quotes a European judge who said to him,

It’s a matter of time. These things take time. And then something unexpected happens, when one of these lawyers travels to the wrong place.

In the end, Ophuls comes out on the side of Nuremberg as well, rejecting the idea of collective guilt that was so popular at the end of World War II. But he also suggests that in our complex and all-too-human world, it is never possible to achieve true justice. Hence, the epigraph that gives the film its name:

Plato believed that human beings were guided in the course of their brief lives in this imperfect world by the dim recollection of some previous and perfect state of the Soul, by the vague memory of Ideal Virtue and Ideal Justice.

In this imperfect world, that might be all we can hope for.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Monday.

Consensus: Stop-Loss is sincere and complex, and features strong performances, but it also veers into overwrought dramatic territory and tries to cover too much ground. (Rotten Tomatoes)

The logic behind the film Stop-Loss is simple:

How does a government handle its military needs if there’s no draft?

Rely on the patriotic instincts of its young men to volunteer. (Yes, the modern military includes women, but day-to-day combat — the nitty-gritty of any war — is still very much a man’s sphere.)

What does a government do if the war goes sour and the pool of volunteers begins to dry up?

Stop-loss. According to Title 10, United States Code, Section 12305(a),

the President may suspend any provision of law relating to promotion, retirement, or separation applicable to any member of the armed forces who the President determines is essential to the national security of the United States.

What does a volunteer do who has reached the end of his service — and the end of his psychological rope — if he is stop-lossed?

He goes AWOL. Kathy Dobie reported in Harper’s that as of 2005, some 5,500 people had gone AWOL. As stop-losses accelerated, so did desertions. In 2007, Courage To Resist, an organization that supports war resisters, said the count was up to 40,000.

How does a government stop the flow of deserters?

By relying on the ethos of honor and mutual protection that develops on the battlefield. Soldiers may enlist from a sense of duty or patriotism, but in the end they fight to save the lives of themselves and their comrades. (It seems difficult to make dramatic territory like this “overwrought.”)

There’s an odd convergence between this position and the loopy yellow ribbon of the bumper stickers or refrigerator magnets. Support Our Troops: that’s exactly what those guys in Baghdad and Fallujah and Basra are trying to do.

It’s one of those cases where the form is similar but the content is different. Imagine that you have two shiny red apples. They look the same. But cut them open, and you’ll discover that one is hollow — no content at all, just skin; the other is loaded with fruit.

The hollow apple can be found on any number of websites — for example, America Supports You, which is run by the Department of Defense; Soldiers’ Angels, which bears the slogan “May No Soldier Go Unloved”; Operation Support Our Troops, “about our troops, for our troops”; and Support Our Troops, a blanket site that provides a list of similar-minded websites. They endeavor to provide useful information about Vet centers and clinics, but much space is devoted to a kind of USO work, soliciting letters and packages for servicemen and women engaged in what is apparently a generic war.

The war faced by the soldiers in the movie Stop-Loss is anything but generic. It’s composed of specific sights and sounds, with actions based on strong individual relationships. They’ve seen — and through the wonders of modern technology, filmed — the slaughter by Americans of women and children. They’ve faced the terror of ambushes by seemingly invisible attackers on city streets. And all they have left is one another.

Yes, this shiny red apple is loaded with fruit. But it’s stinking rotten, and our soldiers know it.

In the middle of March, Iraq Veterans Against the War and a number of other veterans groups conducted a hearing at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland. The event was reminiscent of the Winter Soldier Investigation of 1971, where more than a hundred people testified about human rights violations they had witnessed in Vietnam. Like the earlier hearing, the one this year was ignored by the mainstream media. But members of the indy media were there. Amy Goodman described the event on Democracy Now:

Last weekend, in the lead-up to the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a remarkable gathering occurred just outside Washington, D.C., called Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations. Hundreds of veterans of these two wars, along with active-duty soldiers, came together to offer testimony about the horrors of war, including atrocities they witnessed or committed themselves….

What followed were four days of gripping testimony, ranging from firsthand accounts of the murder of Iraqi civilians, the dehumanization of Iraqis and Afghanis that undergirds the violence of the occupations, to the toll that violence takes on the soldiers themselves and the inadequate care they receive upon returning home.

The atrocities should surprise no one, says former marine corporal Jason Washburn.

The more guys we lose, personal friends, the less the guys really care what damage they did to the area and the people that got killed.

It’s all there, in Stop-Loss.

Frank Gibney was an old Japan hand.

During World War II, someone in the U.S. Navy had the singular idea that a person who had studied one foreign language could easily learn another. And so a number of young people found themselves in a special program at the University of Colorado, where they were hurriedly taught Japanese and sent off to serve as translators, interrogators, and code breakers in the Pacific. It must have been a surreal experience. But some of them remained fascinated by Japanese culture and embarked on a different kind of interpreting assignment after the war, presenting a view of Asia to Americans that was neither inscrutable nor exotic. Gibney was one of them.

He was a thoughtful and decent man. His books give the impression that their author was a Good American, concerned with human relations as much as public policy. But he was also a product of his generation, a firm cold warrior. And I’m not sure he was a nice man — he had more than a hint of the arrogance that sometimes characterizes Americans who have lived overseas for a long time.

Gibney stayed in Japan during the Occupation, and when he came home, he began to build a little empire of his own. He published eleven books, including The Pacific Century, which became a PBS series. He became a foreign correspondent for Time magazine and later worked for several other publications including Newsweek and Life. He served as president of Encyclopaedia Britannica in Japan and later ushered in the encyclopedia’s mammoth Chinese edition. The Japanese government awarded him first the Order of the Rising Sun and then the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Second Class. He became a professor, teaching courses in politics and heading the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College.

And he had a son named Alex.

Alex Gibney is a film producer. You may have seen the award-winning film and Oscar nominee Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Or the award-winning Who Killed the Electric Car?

More recently, Alex Gibney served as executive producer for Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight, which was also nominated for an Academy Award. In contrast to Frontline’s Bush’s War, Ferguson presents a clear — no, passionate — point of view: the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been devastating. He uses a coherent voice-over narration to construct his case, relying on a limited number of talking heads and a vast array of film footage drawn from sources as varied as Al Jazeera and CBS news. And while his theme may be the irresponsible decisions of the U.S. government, his focus is on Iraq — the streets of Baghdad, the walls of Fallujah —- where those decisions played out. This is not a war fought by high-speed planes dropping bombs on invisible human targets. This is a war fought in streets filled with pedestrians and bystanders.

But Alex Gibney also wrote, directed, produced, and narrated the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, which traces the development of the U.S. no-holds-barred policy toward the use of torture in its prison camps. Here, Gibney is his father’s son. In an interview in Harper’s, he says,

As a former Navy interrogator, he was furious about the Abu Ghraib scandal. As more details emerged about the way that torture appeared to be part of a wide-ranging policy, he was even more enraged. He encouraged me to take on this project. While I was working on “Taxi,” I visited him in Santa Barbara just before he died. One day, he said: “Go get your video camera; I have something I want to say.” We had to turn off the oxygen machine so he would be audible. A foreign policy conservative, he raged against Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush for upending the very values that he had defended as a soldier. His anger, and his belief that we could – and did – do better offered a ray of hope in a bleak film.

Reports like Taxi to the Dark Side and Gourevitch and Morris’s “Exposure” are beginning to have an effect on U.S. opinion and policy. But there’s a loophole, one large enough to drive a camel through. Given our present approach, “The Iraqis step, we step down,” we are now able to cede responsibility for the treatment of prisoners to the Iraqis, as Michael J. Totten reported on February 18:

Next to the Joint Communications Center in downtown Fallujah is a squalid and war-shattered warehouse for human beings. Most detainees are common criminals. Others are captured insurgents — terrorists, car-bombers, IED makers, and throat-slashers. A few are even innocent family members of Al Qaeda leaders at large. The Iraqi Police call it a jail, but it’s nothing like a jail you’ve ever seen, at least not in any civilized country. It was built to house 120 prisoners. Recently it held 900.

In this case, his words found a responsive reader:

As it turns out, the place was worse than I thought. Prisoners had to supply their own food or starve. I didn’t report that detail because I didn’t know it. But Marine Major General John Kelly (whom I don’t think I met) read my report, investigated the jail, and fixed it.

UPI reported on March 24,

The U.S. military says it is taking steps to alleviate conditions at the Fallujah city jail in Iraq after recent visitors found a filthy, overcrowded facility.

“They are being fed now,” Lt. Col. Michael Callanan said of the prisoners, who until recently had to provide their own food or starve.

Somewhere in the background, I can hear the voice of Frank Gibney, frail and ravaged with disease:

We had the sense that we were on the side of the good guys. People would get decent treatment. And there was the rule of law.

Many discussions of “Exposure,” the Abu Ghraib article in the March 24 New Yorker, comment that authors Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris assert,

The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was de facto United States policy. The authorization of torture and the decriminalization of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of captives in wartime have been among the defining legacies of the current Administration; and the rules of interrogation that produced the abuses documented on the M.I. block in the fall of 2003 were the direct expression of the hostility toward international law and military doctrine that was found in the White House, the Vice-President’s office, and at the highest levels of the Justice and Defense Departments.

The verb assert is appropriate. The statement appears out of the blue in the middle of the article, with little to back it up. Perhaps the authors’ forthcoming book and movie, Standard Operating Procedure, will provide proof.

The documentary Taxi to the Dark Side does, in excruciating detail, laying out statements by Dick Cheney, memos from Donald Rumsfeld, and a series of decisions by the commanders of the prisons at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo.

As the case builds, it raises the question, why didn’t the American people object? Can they plead ignorance, like Germans who protested after World War II that they knew nothing about the Holocaust?

No.

The evidence was there. Carlotta Gall reported on abuse at Bagram in the New York Times as early as 2003; stories by Tim Golden appeared a little later. The media kept the world informed as John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales redefined torture, and as members of Congress expressed shock over testimony presented at its official hearings. Even the about-face of John McCain has been duly covered, from his condemnation of “aggressive interrogation techniques” less than a year ago to his support for the CIA use of these methods at the beginning of this month.

Why, then, did the public not respond?

Taxi to the Dark Side offers the suggestion of Alfred McCoy, author of The Question of Torture, that Americans have become desensitized to the moral implications of violence by their exposure to violent images in the movies and on TV. A clip from 24 accompanies McCoy’s statement, in which Agent Jack Bauer passionately defends his use of electric shock to extract information from a suspected terrorist.

I’m not sure we should blame it all on the big bad media. A more complex mechanism seems to be at work, which may have broader implications than simply a complicity in the torture of prisoners. For some reason — I can think of several, including a decline in community relationships, a decrease in direct involvement with the natural environment, and an increase in media-mediated experiences — for some reason, Americans seem to have become numb. Like the prisoners with their padded gloves and blacked-out goggles and ear muffs, they show signs of sensory deprivation.

The problem is, as any army interrogator can tell you, a few days of sensory deprivation can induce psychosis.