Déjà vu and Despair: Punishment Park

If you’ve seen or intend to see The Road to Guantanamo, reviewed in this space last week, it might be a good time to revisit Peter Watkins’ 1971 Punishment Park. The two films, 35 years apart, provide perspectives on the abuse of power that are both complementary and contradictory. 

Watkins, an Englishman, came to the United States in 1969 to make a series of documentaries on American history, but the project was eventually canceled. Instead he was inspired by the political turbulence of the era to create Punishment Park, a cinema verité depiction of a government crackdown on Vietnam-era dissidents. The film was released last year on DVD by New Yorker Video as part of a series called “The Cinema of Peter Watkins.” Other films in the series include The War Game, Culloden, The Gladiators and the biopic Edvard Munch. 

Punishment Park imagines a scenario in which President Nixon invokes his rights under the 1950 Internal Security Act and establishes detention camps for dissidents, militants and draft-dodgers—indeed, anyone who has committed an act of “sabotage” or who the government has reasonable cause to believe has the intention of committing such an act. Substitute “terrorism” for “sabotage,” pour yourself a stiff drink, then settle in for 90 minutes of deju vu and despair. 

The storm of criticism unleashed upon the film’s release would be no less anachronistic than the content in today’s heated political climate. The film was assailed as an anti-American polemic, a dangerous and subversive treatise that would provide aid and comfort to the enemy. 

The film cuts back and forth between two lines of action. In the first, a group of detainees faces a right-wing citizen tribunal in a series of improvised confrontations based loosely on the trial of the Chicago Seven. The actors—amateurs selected for their appearance and political views—improvised the dialogue, a creative decision that both helps and hinders the movie, lending the action a degree of immediacy while simultaneously rendering the characters as two-dimensional stereotypes. 

Each prisoner is questioned in turn before each is given the choice of a lengthy prison term or a few days in Punishment Park, a vast expanse of desert in which they will be left to wander while the military police hunt them down in a sort of state-sanctioned version of “The Most Dangerous Game.” 

The contentious environment inside the interrogation tent is further established by the details of photographer Joan Churchill’s framing of the scene: The detainees are disheveled and unkempt and face their interrogators while surrounded by the trappings of power: Guns, billy clubs and uniformed officers lurk always in the background. And while they sit alone in the heat, facing a torrent of abuse, the tribunal’s members pass around a pitcher of ice water, and are later shown taking a break while munching at a catered buffet. 

The second line of action features the previous group of detainees, who have already faced interrogation and have opted for Punishment Park. In a series of interviews with the narrator (voiced by Watkins), the prisoners discuss their predicament as they run from and eventually confront their captors. 

In addition to the cross-cutting and mise-en-scene, the film employs a series of techniques designed to increase the pace and heighten the dramatic tension. The presence of the narrator/filmmaker sets up a confrontational dynamic between the players and the camera, and when the narrator finally drops his objective distance and becomes part of the action, expressing his outrage to the military police who have shot down several detainees in the desert, Watkins raises challenging questions about the role of media, the value of journalistic objectivity, and the civic duty of a democratic citizenry. 

It may be difficult in these times to suspend our disbelief long enough to accept that the federal government would allow media access to such an exercise; Watkins seems not to have anticipated the corporate efficiency or the sheer Orwellian chutzpah of the current administration, which has learned the lessons of the past and imposes severe restrictions on the press. 

The Road to Guantanamo, criticized by some for not telling the government’s side of the story, could not do so because the government simply refuses to tell it. Watkins’ film, on the other hand, is a product of its era, a time when politicians had yet to learn these lessons, allowing their dirty laundry to be aired at the 1968 Democratic Convention, at Kent State, in Vietnam and elsewhere. In that sense, Punishment Park is almost nostalgic. 

The Harrowing Road to Guantanamo

Al Gore may be soaking up the spotlight with his doc du jour An Inconvenient Truth, but The Road to Guantanamo, opening today at Shattuck Cinemas, is a far more incendiary film and one that many Americans would do well to see. 

The Road to Guantanamo tells a harrowing tale, and though it ends happily enough for the young Englishmen whose story it relates, it is full of anguish and anger on behalf of the potentially hundreds of innocent detainees who have not fared as well. 

The film is part documentary, part dramatization. It tells the story of the “Tipton Trio,” three Englishmen of Pakistani origin who set out for their native country so that one of them can get married there. There were actually four of them at the start of the journey, but one vanished somewhere in Afghanistan, where the young men had traveled to be of some help to fellow Muslims caught in the crossfire between the United States and the Taliban. 

They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, rounded up with a group of alleged Taliban soldiers, arrested by the Northern Alliance, turned over to the American military, and eventually shipped off to Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They were lucky to even make it that far, but that was far from the end of their troubles. At Guantanamo the trio was subjected to inhumane conditions and repeated interrogations. They were systematically humiliated, beaten, abused and degraded. 

Though the story is dramatized, the action is interspersed with news footage and interviews with the Tipton Trio themselves. The technique may sound clumsy on paper but it works quite well, taking the simple, just-the-facts monologues of the young men and illustrating them with dramatic re-creations of their experiences. 

The dramatized segments feature young actors with little professional experience, chosen because they reflected many of the same traits as the men they portray; they are young, adventurous, brash, not especially religious and certainly apolitical. They are just kids, really, caught up in something too dark and too vast to comprehend, and the casting of these young actors brings those qualities to the fore. 

The film has already sparked controversy for its unflinching portrayal of the trespasses of the U.S. and British governments. Doubtless, its claims will be refuted, written off as politically-charged fantasies. But the tale is real. 

It seems like just a few years ago that tales of abduction, torture, indefinite detention and unlawful imprisonment occurred only in far-off lands: criminal deeds done by lawless, totalitarian governments or shadowy drug cartels in exotic locales. But now the American government is in on the act, if not for the first time then certainly for the first time on such a grand scale. 

Fahrenheit 9-11 kicked off this latest wave of political documentaries, but unlike that film and the many that followed in its wake—Outfoxed, The Corporation, Wal-Mart: The High Price of Low Cost, and even An Inconvenient Truth—Road to Guantanamo is not so easy to dismiss as a politically motivated polemic, especially in light of the recent suicides at Guantanamo. 

The film avoids many of the pitfalls of some of its recent predecessors, keeping the focus on the story itself rather than on the political players; George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair make only brief appearances. 

The filmmakers spend little time recounting the How and the Why, instead focusing their cameras on their subjects and sticking to the What. Why distract the audience with the pale justifications, obfuscations and moral rationalizations of politicians? Directors Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross dispense with the small talk and get right to the point, knowing that it is far more effective to simply stick to the facts, to simply show what happened to these men and leave spin to others. There is no more effective and affecting story to be told than the disturbing tale of how an unchecked government and an unwinnable war robbed these young men of more than two years of their lives. 

But those two years were not wasted, for these men did not cave in; they did not give in to the temptation to ease their suffering by saying what their captors wanted to hear. 

“It only made me stronger,” one of the men says in an interview, and the line received a round of applause from a recent San Francisco preview audience. This sense of irony is pervasive throughout the film, as we watch burly, ruthless Marines—“Honor-Bound to Defend Freedom,” as their slogan reads—systematically subverting every tenant of their democratic ideals in a misguided effort to protect freedom by destroying it. 

At times the film draws uneasy laughter, as if it were simply a comedy of errors as the big, bad bully misses the forest for the trees, lording his power over the powerless while his world crumbles around him. It is truly bewildering and dispiriting to think of the U.S. Marines wasting the time and resources to ask a few clueless kids, over and over, “Where’s Osama?” 

The film reinforces the realization that bin Laden has in fact achieved a crucial—if “asymmetric”—victory, having reduced the once-mighty United States to a nation of paranoia and recklessness, ruled by an increasingly undemocratic government bent on squandering its vast power and wealth in pursuit of the unattainable goal of an undefined victory over an unseen enemy. 

But the military acts at the behest of our president, and our president prefers to paint with a broad brush, with good represented by white faces and evil represented by brown ones. The Tipton Trio never had a chance. 

Even when evidence to the contrary rests right before their eyes, the Marines at Guantanamo see only what they want to see, choosing to gaze instead through the same polarizing lens favored by al Qaeda. 

And for many Americans, that’s quite all right. “My country, right or wrong,” apologists say. But they never finish the quote, never include the words Missouri Sen. Carl Schurz used to modify the statement: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”