Patricia Morris
on
Brian de Palma’s Redacted
A Film About US
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Redact:
1. To draw up or frame (a proclamation, for example).
2. To make ready for publication; edit or revise.
[From the American Heritage Dictionary, cited at www.dictionary.com where “redact”,
coincidentally, was Word of the Day on 12th September 2001.]
But this sort of journalistic account of the atrocity is not what Redacted is about. Rather, De Palma’s film suggests that the horrific tale of a rape and murder is familiar territory to us, the sort of story available at home in any news report or gossip blog any day of the week. Indeed, one of the villains of the piece quite incidentally tells a story about a barely reported and comparable atrocity in which his brother’s gang was involved Stateside. The frequency of our hearing such stories may even explain the oddity of the cliché’d phrase, “brutal rape”. We hardly notice the tautology. How can a rape not be brutal?
De Palma’s point is that the newsworthy fragment is merely part of a larger, more important, more awful story which is not about what happens out there but rather about what happens, or doesn’t happen, within us; that it is we who generate the subject matter, and in one way or another, none of us is innocent.
Fable and Transmission
De Palma plants an early signpost to indicate that the film is not an attempt to illustrate a melodramatic news-story, nor is it a simulacrum of an actual event. It is a parable or a fable and its purport is to speak of our compulsion towards senseless sacrifice and bloodletting. He embeds a book, an archaic emblem of an archaic ideal, in a videoed scene. Private Angel Salazar, who usually prefers images to words, reads to camera, his own camera, a fable used as an epigraph to a novel. We might note that “angel” actually means “messenger from God”, and that the name “Sal” is borrowed from the biographer - but not the protagonist - of an alternative America in Jack Kerouac’s classic of 1955, On the Road. The novel from which De Palma’s Sal reads to camera is John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra (1934), another masterpiece of American literature, which belongs to Sal’s bookish fellow soldier, Gabe Blix. The story within a story comes from W. Somerset Maugham’s last and deeply moral play, Sheppey (1933), which demonstrates the difficulty in the modern world - or perhaps any world - of following Christ’s teachings. Death appears as a character who describes a fable-like incident, supposedly from 1001 Nights - tales within tales - which John O’Hara then used as the source of both an epigraph and his novel’s title: Death recalls how one morning in old Baghdad a Servant flees to Samarra to avoid Death who earlier supposedly made a threatening gesture towards him in the marketplace. Later that day the Servant’s sympathetic Master sees Death passing and reprimands her for scaring his Servant. Death denies having done this. Rather, it was a gesture of surprise upon seeing the Servant in Baghdad when she had an appointment to meet him later that night in Samarra.
So begins De Palma’s riff on heritage and transmission.
O’Hara’s novel is a novel of manners set in Little America where social cohesion depends on a social contract of conformity and shared responsibility. The protagonist of the novel, over three compulsively drunken days, scandalously transgresses several social and sexual boundaries. When he sobers up he resumes his mantle of social responsibility and rather than face shame and exclusion from his community, he commits suicide.
One of the soldiers in Redacted describes his recurring nightmare of being a snail having to make its way along a razor’s edge. This is another oblique reference to Maugham, this time to his novel, The Razor’s Edge (1944), in which, in contrast to several vividly drawn characters, the often unseen, ostensible protagonist foregoes the promise of status and wealth to go on a life’s quest for spiritual enlightenment. However the narrator indicates at the conclusion that all our lives may be just such quests, whether or not we forego worldly comforts. The epigraph to this novel of Maugham’s, from the Katha Upanishad and translated for him by Christopher Isherwood, reads: “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over: thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.”
Redacted makes use of other devices typical of the fable, such as giving meaningful names to its characters. The bookish Gabe Blix’s first name, Gabriel, reminds us of one of the chief of God’s angels who in the Bible is sometimes the Angel of Death. Amongst other things, at the Annunciation he foretold to Mary the virgin birth of Jesus, and in the Muslim tradition, in the 7th century he gave the Koran to Mohammed. The same soldier’s surname reminds us of Hans Blix, the former United Nations weapons inspector who found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction to justify invasion. What horror would have been avoided had Hans Blix’s report been taken as seriously as were the Archangel Gabriel’s bizarre messages?
The character called Lawyer McCoy is the real McCoy, the moral voice of America. While his experience of the atrocity will leave him a broken man, it is he who at the time of its occurrence refuses to participate and instead decides not to watch but to keep watch. This was his mode of expressing his outrage. He could not stop the atrocity without killing his fellow soldiers or being killed by them, but nor could he find it in himself to walk away. His sense of duty has him decide to keep watch lest the perpetrators of the crimes be discovered and the reputation of the institution he serves be tarnished. Yet it is he who later is their Judas.
Angel Salazar’s surname, a contraction of St. Lazar, provides a direct reference to the wars in Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo. Saint Lazar, revered in that region, died in a 14th century battle against “the Turks” in Kosovo. The night before this battle an angel descended and offered him a choice – much like the soldier in The Razor’s Edge: he could choose earthly, military glory, or he could choose heavenly glory. He chose the latter.
In De Palma’s movie, unlike the heroes of literature, religion and fable, while the characters kill and maim, not a single one of any persuasion exhibits what we might recognize as moral probity. There is nothing of the good to be seen anywhere, in anyone. There is a surfeit of ideology but there is no morality.
While the script is relaxed about references to spliffs and joints, the relevance of hard drugs is conspicuously ignored. One has reason to believe that the episodic extremes of savagery in any army are a consequence occasionally of genuine psychosis but usually the result of artificially heightened mental states. These are induced by stimulants taken as an anti-dote to the cocktail of mortal stress and deadly boredom which contemporary troops have to endure and which De Palma so skilfully conveys in Redacted.
Reno Flake, who corresponds to the real-life soldier who received a 110-year sentence for his crimes, is indubitably crazy as his fabulous surname tells us. But his first name introduces the elephant in the room, the curious absence of drugs at Camp Carolina, Samarra. Reno, Nevada, is the crystal-meth centre of the United States, indeed Reno police say that well over sixty per cent of their law enforcement work concerns this particular illegal stimulant. Aside from Private Reno obviously having a personality disorder, there are indications that for him and B.B., “ice” is the drug of choice. It causes euphoria, excitement, physical over-activity, wakefulness, aggressiveness and violent behaviour. After three years it leaves users with long-lasting brain damage whether or not they stop taking it. The actors playing Reno and B.B. are so cranked up in some of their scenes that sometimes it looks like just bad acting.
At the end of Act One, after the checkpoint shooting, B.B. Rush rushes to defend his buddy, the Flake: “You can’t afford remorse… You get weak, you die.” He reminds their fellows of the essential cliché, “We’re here to follow orders, not ask questions.” Ironically, it is the two villains of the piece who can’t decide whether the correct term of abuse to use in reference to “the enemy” is jihadi or hadji, unaware that both are self-styled Arabic terms of respect, the first a selected distortion of a broader Koranic term and used by militarist insurgents to describe themselves, and the second an ordinary term of social respect meaning something like “Sir” or “gentleman”. So in the full flow of their abuse, the soldiers, unwittingly, are perfectly mannerly. Again, ironically, B.B. and Reno raise the most pertinent question and provide the most logical if chilling answer to it. B.B. asks, rhetorically, “What are we doing here?” He answers that the local people, all of whom are “the enemy”, are only too happy to have the American army in Iraq because their intention is to kill Americans and it saves them the bother of going all the way to America to do the job. So the answer to the question, “What are we doing here?” is, “We are here to die”. The soldiers are kin with the servant of the master in the fable, who went from the city to Samarra to escape Death, where unbeknown to him, Death had always been going to meet him.
Victors in War
When De Palma has held us for some time on that knife-edge of killing boredom and killing suspense, the first thing that happens is a massacre of the innocents. This is not the atrocity which occupies the centre of the film. At the checkpoint, a driver, incomprehensibly, races past the heavily armed soldiers, past the countless stop signs, attempting to get through the double chicane of the military roadblock. Supposedly he is in a hurry to get a woman in labour to a hospital maternity ward but clearly it is an act of insanity - unless, of course, it is an act of full intentionality. Needless to say, the soldiers, startled out of their torpor, bewildered, and afraid of being blown up, empty their weapons into the car. Reno Flake delivers the coup de grâce. The next chapter in the inexorable, eternal cycle of violence and revenge, of slaughter and self-righteousness, may now unfold.
While the trigger-happy soldier’s fellows cross-examine him about how he feels about having murdered an innocent pregnant woman, and while he and his equally despicable fellow psycho launch into attempts at a defence of his actions, we begin to suspect that all of them are asking the wrong questions. They have fallen so far into the trap that they cannot see its mechanism, that the dregs of any Christian sensibility the soldiers still possess is being manipulated by the people whose land they occupy, call them jihadis or hadjis, what you will. Quite obviously, the entire checkpoint episode was a set up, an act of commitment and suicidal defiance which the American soldiers can never begin to comprehend. The local man who raced through that checkpoint was not doing it because the woman was about to give birth in the car – though she may well have been – and nor was he risking their deaths because he was illiterate and couldn’t read the signs in ten languages saying “stop”; nor could he have been ignorant of armed soldiers’ orders to shoot when a car jumps a checkpoint. It’s not as if they had not become familiar with checkpoints during Saddam’s regime. Clearly the driver, if not his passenger, was as intent on his mission as any suicide bomber - except with less training – being literally willing to die in order to wrest the moral high ground from the occupying force. For the jihadis a moral victory has been won. The American soldiers are now, amongst other epithets, instantly transmuted into the murderers of innocent pregnant women. Although they are not the mortal victims, they are the psychological and moral victims of a familiar carnage in which people will volunteer themselves to be slaughtered in order to prove without question the barbarism of their killers. This is the ultimate, Neitzschean formulation of the master-slave relationship, the strategy of opposition available to those who conceive of themselves as punished and oppressed. It is the aim and the accusation of all martyrdom. And of course it is suicidal, the epitome of intentionality.
So the American soldiers are thrown further into states of doubt, anxiety and tension, momentarily grappling with their consciences, in so far as they each have one. What they cannot see is that even in death those whom they subjugate or eliminate will manipulate them, drive them crazy if possible, but always keep the upper hand, a stranglehold. The occupying force has already lost the battle in ways it cannot comprehend. And the story has hardly begun.
More Hal than Handel
De Palma chooses for his film’s overture the opening section of Handel’s “Saraband”, traditionally a seductive dance for couples, the steps taking them alternately towards and away from each other. It is a musical form which quotes from two of the great film directors of our time, Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick.
Normally film music is a tactic used to seduce us into losing our self-consciousness as spectators. Immediately in the opening scenes, De Palma strives for the reverse effect. He uses the music to ensure our discomfort, to create in us an impulse to change something while, with the sergeant on duty at the checkpoint, we are locked in the mind-numbing boredom of waiting for the inevitable horror that looms. There is a fault in the loop of his overloud MP3 player. The music relentlessly repeats the same section of delicate, seductive baroque Handel, here anachronistically and dramatically over-orchestrated. The soundtrack becomes an acoustic emblem of historical reference to what we have lost or left unchanged in our imperial European heritage. Neither we in the audience, nor the soldier decked out in the world’s most advanced military gear – but whose MP3 player is faulty - can escape the dual discomfort of the track, too demanding in its volume, too boring in its lunatic, machine-like repetitiveness: more Hal than Handel.
Kubrick uses Handel’s “Saraband” in several arrangements in his extended analysis of the dialectic of social manners and morality, Barry Lyndon (1973). He uses the music in counterpoint to illustrate the martial aspirations and pointless deaths of the mid-18th century Seven Years War, what Churchill regarded as the real first world war; he uses it in the exposition of three duels in different emotional keys; he uses it as the accompaniment to the sexual dance in which Redmond Barry and the young German peasant woman delicately and mutually deceive and seduce each other. Most powerfully, he uses it as the motif signalling Barry’s profound grief when his beloved son dies, and by implication, signalling Barry’s capacity for love.
Bergman titled his last film Saraband (2003), referring to Bach’s “Saraband”, a piece which a father and daughter, both skilled musicians in a fraught master-slave relationship, play on cellos, not iPods. Bergman explores the fluctuation of intelligent human attachment and rejection in a tight domestic setting. He reveals a panorama of complex relationships, from sophisticated, tender love to perverse aggression. In contrast, while De Palma explores the same dialectic, his setting is as vast and expressionless as a moonscape in a fable, and the relationships he depicts are narrow, crude, cut-throat, and stupid.
De Palma’s musical quotation from Kubrick, amongst other things, refers to their respective technical choreography. De Palma, with a budget from HDNet of only five million dollars, shot Redacted on HD video and designed his footage to replicate current technological advances for home-made film. In contrast, in order to make his lavish Barry Lyndon sets look like period oil-paintings, Kubrick filmed mainly in natural light or candle-light using the most advanced Zeiss lens technology to that date, adapting one of only ten such lenses in the world made by NASA for satellite photography.
We are the Camera
De Palma’s intention is Brechtian. He aims to alienate the viewer from the viewed, to show the gap between the artifact before us and the reality it purports to represent, to provoke the audience into applying critical reason to the action rather than becoming emotionally absorbed into it.
He updates one of the classic Brechtian techniques, that of the actor directly addressing the audience. He situates the viewer inside Sal’s video camera so that Sal, ostensibly recording himself, unwittingly turns us into voyeurs suddenly in possession of omniscience. And we are also the web cam, we are also the night-vision equipment. Nowhere is this filmic strategy more chillingly effective than when we find our gaze is that of a praying jihadi watching, via the web cam images on his laptop, the video of the American soldiers’ much respected and beloved black master-sergeant James Sweet being blown up by a booby trap; and later we are forced to see with the same gaze the grotesque events around Sal’s murder.
De Palma constantly interrupts our fantastical immersion in the film. It is full of dissonant breaks and reversals in our involvement that force us into self-consciousness. He keeps reminding us that the “villains” who perpetrate the atrocity are actors just doing their job, ordinary people like you and me. Had he employed stars in these roles, we wouldn’t, for instance, feel the layered resonance when the soldier villains espouse the political cliché that in killing innocent “hadjis” they’re just doing their job. For, in that moment, they are also just actors doing a job. De Palma refuses to allow us to be swept into supposing we are watching another exciting war movie with good guys with whom we can identify, and bad guys from whom we can disassociate ourselves.
His camera-wielding Private Angel Salazar, whom we deliberately are misled into supposing will be the protagonist, plans to call his documentary for his film-school application, “Tell Me No Lies”. He supposes, perhaps along with the postulated audience of De Palma’s film, that the detailed record of a soldier’s life will impress the selection committee for revealing the unknown. But De Palma himself aims to demonstrate to us that if Sal were accepted into the film college on those grounds, that college would belong to a school of thought which De Palma questions, even repudiates.
Redacted is, if nothing else, a critique of the inheritors of cinéma vérité and cinéma direct. Unlike Sal’s project, De Palma’s project poses the problem of whether it is possible for a film-maker to make a film that tells no lies. He demonstrates first that documentary footage can only give a partial truth, but more to the point, that the truth we claim to seek, or at least, all we need to know, is far from elusive. Whatever is redacted, is redacted by our need to cloud our own vision. The important truth is the fact of the underlying moral vacuum in the factual detail with which we distract ourselves in our manic detective work. The truth is easily available to us, would we but see.
De Palma shows that despite censorship, doublespeak, misinformation, propaganda, lies and denial, we all, every one of us on every side, know all we need to know. Not only is our world today awash with technological advancements that force the information upon us all the time, but we know deep within our hearts. If anything is redacted, it is because we excise it ourselves just as he shows us an unknown agent blacking out parts of those unbearable stills in the final “slide-show”. By means of our moral torpor, we reflexively expunge evidence of its very consequences. The truth does not hide in a psychotic soldier or in a dastardly army or a greedy government administration; nor does it hide in masked Islamists or jihadi butchers. There is no “they” who withholds what we are entitled to know. It is we who do not want to see presumably because by seeing we would know and by knowing, would have to confront the implications of our inaction.
De Palma logs most of the scenes via the new technologies - TV news out-takes or You Tube or video blogs or web cams’ footage or film from a pocket video camera or a view through soldiers’ night vision equipment. He beguiles us for a while into supposing, as Sal would have us do, that we are privileged voyeurs of an otherwise hidden layer of events. But the method soon inserts a non-verbal substratum of commentary about the destructive immutability of the human condition in contrast to our scientific advancements that grant us a godlike eye to survey all.
Angel Salazar says of his preoccupation with turning his camera’s gaze at every detail, that his film, which is this film, must tell no lies. He speaks to the camera monitor which is where we, the viewers, find ourselves positioned. We are the camera. What he doesn’t anticipate is that included in the truth he will tell, will be the manner of his death. Sal’s film title is self-referential, an injunction directed towards himself. In one sense, every time he talks to his video camera, he is talking to himself. And he is so busy talking to himself, at his end, that he cannot protect himself from being kidnapped and killed, and his corpse displayed as a jihadi trophy, with hideous irony, all preserved on camera by someone else with a compulsion to record and watch every detail. His tortured remains are later displayed in a dusty clearing, the head set upright, facing forward on the prone corpse’s chest, signifying an altogether different sort of gaze. We are all like Sal.
Meanwhile the faceless, praying “enemy” views the evidence of the act of revenge on the web-cam images on his computer screen. Why is the “enemy” always faceless? De Palma positions the shot so that we see what the jihadi sees, as if we are viewing our own laptop. We are inside the jihadi’s head. We are the enemy.
Redaction and Silence
At the Samarra checkpoint, which by now we know so well although the film has hardly got going, and alongside the characters, watching and being watched, we wait in a dreamlike state of oxymoronic bored vigilance and suspended dread. We wait, as it were, a life-time, for something to happen. The something that happens can only be violent death. This, de Palma seems to be saying, is what war is. War is not about rescuing the underdog from oppression, it is not about defending a country against its enemy, it is not about glory and victory, and it is not about good battling against evil. It comes not out of circumstance, which merely provides the occasion.
War is death without reason, it is killing without the application of human thought. It is what the human race does, and always has done, so well. War is not so much a battle as the opportunity to express the moral decrepitude that skulks in the soul of each one of us. One way or another, we will find a way to express these foul needs, whether we are Christian or Muslim, clever or dumb, sick psychos or God-fearing moralists. Whether we fight or whether we watch, each one of us is culpable.
The silent Munchian scream in the last frame, aesthetically sublime and signifying evil, sums it up.
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Patricia Morris
