Rendition

I saw this movie yesterday, and wound up liking it quite a bit more than I'd expected. The acting and dialogue is all great, and they only have one clumsily expository scene despite the heavy-handed political theme. Unfortunately, one of the three plot threads the film follows is done in a confusing way for reasons that seem under-motivated, but you don't actually start being confused by it until near the end.

Meanwhile, while making a bunch of other worthy political points in obvious ways, it also did a good job with a subtler point, namely that normal people find the idea of torturing another human being distasteful. And everyone understands that. A normal person isn't going to have the stomach for the torturing job. So, consequently, once you adopt routine torture as a matter of policy you're soon enough going to find that your torturers -- not the Bushes and Cheneys and Yoos but the people who actually need to get their hands dirty -- are going to be people inclined toward sadism. Normal people aren't going to want to be professional torturers, and the ranks of professional torturers are going to be filled with people who like torturing. Like everything about this foul business, of course, that's a terrible way to get accurate information.

Comments

I think you're actually wrong about Bush and torture. He is the kind of person to get his hands dirty. More than one source speaks of his mistreatment of animals in his youth. Such behavior is a classic precursor to sadism and cruelty towards people in later life. His famous interview with Tucker Carlson wherein he fairly revels in the death of Karla Faye Tucker is another example of his mindset. No, were it not for his circumstance and station in life it is perfectly plausible you would find Bush swinging the phone book at a man bound to a chair.

Posted by steve duncan | October 22, 2007 8:26 AM

The purpose of torture can be confession as much as it can be intelligence. Given how the Bush administration has politicized everything else, I'd say their torturing protocols are likely to come down on the confession side -- especially when an election looms.

And here's the quote and source of Bush torturing small animals as a child. It's Nicholas Kristoff in the Sunday Times, quoting a childhood friend of Bush before the 2000 election

"We were terrible to animals," recalled Mr. Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush home turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. "Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them," Mr. Throckmorton said. "Or we'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up." When he was not blowing up frogs, young George -- always restless and something of a natural leader -- would lead neighborhood children on daredevil expeditions around town, seeing how close they could come to breaking their necks.

I leave it to the reader to determine whether this is funny ha ha ("boys will be boys") or a harbinger of things to come (IIRC, torturing small animals is a gateway for sociopaths).

I know where I stand. Wonderful to think of Bush fulfilling his childhood dreams as President, isn't it?

NOTE Don't you love the circumlocution of "put firecrackers in the frogs"?

Posted by lambert strether | October 22, 2007 8:43 AM

Steve could be right, since Bush really seems to get off on humiliating people who can't do anything about it because he's the president: insulting nicknames, face clasping (Pombo, Cuellar), kissing (Lieberman), the Merkel back rub, lots of bald head rubbing, having Andy Card fetch cheeseburgers.

The confusing plot thread is particularly odd because the rest of the movie is so hollywoodized (though the Romeo-and-Juliet bit is part of the hollywoodization). It's as if the director wanted to leave in an echo of arthouse film even though everything else was in blockbuster idiom, and I'm not sure the mixture works.

Posted by KCinDC | October 22, 2007 9:31 AM

Watching too much Dexter? Discoveries in the realm of psychology would stand to contradict your point. No one feels that he would be an abusive guard, but given the keys over prisoners he becomes one (so the famous experiment suggests).

The novelty of the Bush administration is to codify and sanction torture practices until they become, legally and plausibly, not torture. There is no coverup because they aren't practicing torture, cf. all these memos that say so. They hire interrogators, not torturers, because they are practicing advanced interrogation. Given sufficient officious ceremony, even acts like waterboarding might offer plausible deniability re torture.

Posted by Kriston Capps | October 22, 2007 9:56 AM

The First Step
by Leo Tolstoy

I remember how, with pride at his originality, an Evangelical preacher, who was attacking monastic asceticism, once said to me "Ours is not a Christianity of fasting and privations, but of beefsteaks." Christianity, or virtue in general—and beefsteaks!

During a long period of darkness and lack of all guidance, Pagan or Christian, so many wild, immoral ideas have made their way into our life (especially into that lower region of the first steps toward a good life—our relation to food, to which no one paid any attention), that it is difficult for us even to understand the audacity and senselessness of upholding, in our days, Christianity or virtue with beefsteaks.

We are not horrified by this association, solely because a strange thing has befallen us. We look and see not: listen and hear not. There is no bad odor, no sound, no monstrosity, to which man cannot become so accustomed that he ceases to remark what would strike a man unaccustomed to it. Precisely so it is in the moral region. Christianity and morality with beefsteaks!

A few days ago I visited the slaughter house in our town of Toula. It is built on the new and improved system practised in large towns, with a view to causing the animals as little suffering as possible. It was on a Friday, two days before Trinity Sunday. There were many cattle there. […]

Long before this […], I had wished to visit a slaughter house, in order to see with my own eyes the reality of the question raised when vegetarianism is discussed. But at first I felt ashamed to do so, as one is always ashamed of going to look at suffering which one knows is about to take place, but which one cannot avert; and so I kept putting off my visit.

But a little while ago I met on the road a butcher returning to Toula after a visit to his home. He is not yet an experienced butcher, and his duty is to stab with a knife. I asked him whether he did not feel sorry for the animals that he killed. He gave me the usual answer: "Why should I feel sorry? It is necessary." But when I told him that eating flesh is not necessary, but is only a luxury, he agreed; and then he admitted that he was sorry for the animals.

"But what can I do? I must earn my bread," he said. "At first I was afraid to kill. My father, he never even killed a chicken in all his life." The majority of Russians cannot kill; they feel pity, and express the feeling by the word "fear." This man had also been "afraid," but he was so no longer. He told me that most of the work was done on Fridays, when it continues until the evening.

Not long ago I also had a talk with a retired soldier, a butcher, and he, too, was surprised at my assertion that it was a pity to kill, and said the usual things about its being ordained; but afterwards he agreed with me: "Especially when they are quiet, tame cattle. They come, poor things! trusting you. It is very pitiful."

This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity—that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself—and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!

Once, when walking from Moscow, I was offered a lift by some carters who were going from Serpouhof to a neighboring forest to fetch wood. It was the Thursday before Easter. I was seated in the first cart, with a strong, red, coarse carman, who evidently drank. On entering a village we saw a well-fed, naked, pink pig being dragged out of the first yard to be slaughtered. It squealed in a dreadful voice, resembling the shriek of a man. Just as we were passing they began to kill it. A man gashed its throat with a knife. The pig squealed still more loudly and piercingly, broke away from the men, and ran off covered with blood. Being near-sighted I did not see all the details. I saw only the human-looking pink body of the pig and heard its desperate squeal; but the carter saw all the details and watched closely. They caught the pig, knocked it down, and finished cutting its throat. When its squeals ceased the carter sighed heavily. "Do men really not have to answer for such things?" he said.

So strong is man's aversion to all killing. But by example, by encouraging greediness, by the assertion that God has allowed it, and, above all, by habit, people entirely lose this natural feeling.

Please read on... Question: Why have Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, Socrates, Carl Sagan, Kafka, Gandhi, Tolstoy and many others all argued that eating animals is at the core, the root, of all human problems? Why is the Greek Creation Myth related to this and also Genesis (Tree of Knowledge)? All of science points in this direction too (chimps vs bonobos, healthy diet for apes, environmental destruction, etc.)

When will we start looking at ourselves before pointing the finger and screaming "torture"?

Posted by Hugo Pottisch | October 22, 2007 10:29 AM

Richard Roeper thought it was too ham-handed with the liberal points it was making to be a good film. That bugs me in certain movies too, when they try to hammer the point home. Subtlety is preferred. To anyone that has seen the movie - did you feel the movie was hammering the point home or do you disagree and felt it was subtler? Did they present opposing viewpoints?

Posted by Jayhawk Max | October 22, 2007 10:44 AM

Movie audiences like political films. That's why they made "30 Days of Night" the #1 movie this past weekend. What? You couldn't detect the politics in a movie about pasty-skinned interlopers sucking the life out of an Alaska Native village, while the residents use their traditional knowledge to fight back? That's probably because the movie made the error of having the white people exterminate the Natives *before* the movie, such that there are no Eskimos with speaking parts.

Posted by Grumpy | October 22, 2007 11:06 AM

That's probably because the movie made the error of having the white people exterminate the Natives *before* the movie, such that there are no Eskimos with speaking parts.

I remember a scene in "Never Cry Wolf" when the white biologist is discussing in embarrassed detail the techniques and purpose of his study which involved microscopic inspection of wolf scat to determine what a wolf's diet actually consisted of. (Answer: mostly mice.)

The Eskimo digested this information for a few beats and then said, "Good idea" as if trying to coax a drunk man threatening suicide down off a ledge.

That scene and Charlie Martin Smith falling through the ice are all I remember from the movie. The Eskimo, obviously not an actor, deftly handled the droll bits and made the movie a bit more memorable for me. (Moral for Hollywood: look for ways to make your movies distinguishable. )

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | October 22, 2007 11:22 AM

I'm glad to hear you liked the movie, and thank you for specifically praising details such as dialogue. The script was considered first-rate by Hollywood insiders, which is no doubt why it attracted great talents such as Meryl Streep. For those of us who like movies and want to see more good ones, it's important that good scripts turn out well -- otherwise it's all but impossible to argue that good writing matters. Everyone knows that most movie audiences don't want to see political stories about torture, but a small number of such movies can still succeed if they can reach the discerning audience who does want topicality and substance. But if a seemingly good script falls flat, that's deeply discouraging -- to the studio and the talents alike.

Posted by Kit Stolz | October 22, 2007 12:19 PM

Yglesias' point about torturers was also poined out by C.S. Lewis all the way back in 1945 in "That Hideous Strength", in which a secret police chief who has just such a strategically counterproductive tendency to indulge herself with sexual sadism tells her disapproving boss: "You won't get anyone to do my job well unless they get a kick out of it."

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | October 22, 2007 6:48 PM

Gone Baby Gone was surprisingly good.

Posted by Mike | October 22, 2007 9:38 PM

Mike,

Agreed, a first rate movie. I enjoyed it more than Mystic River. Clearly, 1. Hollywood had been pushing the wrong Affleck to be A Movie Star and 2. Ben Affleck has wasted the last 10 years of his life acting in crap movies when he should have been writing and directing.

Posted by beowulf | October 23, 2007 1:49 AM

Yes, "Rendition" is definitely a movie worth seeing.

I didn't think the film itself was "ham-handed", but the dialog between the intelligence chief and the Senator's aide was not that necessary, since the entire movie pretty well laid out the point.

What wasn't TOO clear in the characterization is whether the CIA analyst was against torture because it didn't work, or because it offended him morally, or - more likely - that he couldn't decide himself which was the case.

He did try to choke the victim himself at one point. And it apparently took him quite some time to get to the point where he was willing to call it quits. He practically had to turn into an alcoholic to do it.

So I think he wasn't that opposed to it until the overwhelming pointlessness of it became apparent to him.

Unfortunately, the movie also didn't cover what happens to normal people who are tortured - the long-term effects.

It was also not clear how the torturer would deal with the personal consequences of his actions.

Although since they never caught the people they were trying to catch, clearly he was still at risk. Next time, his enemies might get it right...

Things to think about on the way out of the theater...

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | October 23, 2007 2:41 AM