Bob Ellis

by Ellis, Bob; Brooksbank, Anne;

  Suburbs were pounded and two hundred children, Al Jazeera said, were killed. The hospitals could not cope with the wounded. Funerals were fired upon, and nobody much thereafter dared go to the cemetery, burying their loved ones instead in back gardens or a ‘mass grave’ (they called it with irony) in a recreation ground. The British began to complain of American ‘heavy-handedness’, asking mildly if hearts and minds were won this way, and a truce was cobbled up to let blood transfusions and medicines in, though a few hours later the Americans shot dead an ambulance driver …

  SUNDAY, 9 MAY 2004

  ‘To the people in the Middle East, and too often today,’ said Senator Edward Kennedy in his familiar, piercing, arresting voice, ‘the symbol of America is not the Statue of Liberty. It’s the prisoner standing on a box wearing a dark cape and a dark hood on his head, wires attached to his body, afraid that he’s going to be electrocuted.’

  Before him Donald Rumsfeld looked haggard and uneasy, somewhere between Robert McNamara in The Fog of War and Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. Senator after senator railed at him, and asked him questions he tiptoed around.

  ‘What were the instructions to the guards?’ asked John McCain, a war hero long imprisoned by the Viet Cong.

  ‘That is what the … investigation,’ said the dwindling Rumsfeld, ‘that I have indicated … has been undertaken … is determining …’

  ‘Mr Secretary, that’s a very simple, straightforward question.’

  Rumsfeld took damage in House and Senate for seven consecutive hours. One young black Congressman amiably asked him if he would patriotically resign.

  The pictures had been aired on CBS three days before. Rumsfeld had known of them in January. He had not seen them – he said – till they’d gone to air. He’d ‘never imagined the impact they would have’.

  Neither, it seemed, had George Bush, who’d also known of them in January. ‘I share a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way … they were treated,’ he said with a wide-eyed frown on the White House lawn. ‘Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That’s not the way we do things in America.’

  Quickly on Fox News a battle of names and numbers began. This is ‘abuse’, not ‘torture’. ‘Much, much worse things’ (though these were unspecified) were done in Abu Ghraib by Saddam Hussein. Paul Wolfowitz weighed in suddenly saying ‘six hundred thousand corpses’ had been found in mass graves; twice the number he’d alleged before.

  But none of it played out very well. The presence of Lynndie England, a perky little round-faced Sally Field–like girl, fag butt in mouth, pointing cheekily sideways at the penises of dishonoured men, or dragging across a dirty floor a bearded man in a dog collar by a dog lead, meant women could no longer disjoin themselves from what else would be, or seem to be, Men’s Business. There were white panties on the head of a man handcuffed to prison bars for whom this was disgrace, dishonour. There was fondling by Lynndie of mortified, pious married men. There was an electric lead on the penis of the man on the box in the quickly famous dark-crucifixion shot. There was, in another case, ‘a mouth around my penis’, said Haider Salifar Abed al-Abbadi. ‘It was only when they took the bag off my head that I saw it was my friend.’

  Growling big dogs menaced naked, chained and terrified men, teeth near their genitals. These were the idea of Major General Geoffrey Miller, the jug-headed bellowing fool Curt Levy had interviewed at Guantanamo Bay in The President Versus David Hicks. Dogs like these for a Muslim were filthy, degrading, frightening, hellish beasts. Another pretty woman, Sabrina Harman, posed with a bent head and a sweet smile over the half-open mouth of a bearded man lately beaten to death and now packed in ice, his eyes under sticking plaster lest he stare at her too accusingly. Further photos and videos not yet released showed the buggery of a boy, the rape of a girl and the sodomising with a neon tube of a terrified, internally injured young man. Shoshana Johnson, a handsome Afro-American woman captured by Iraqis in the war – and shown memorably, terrified, in their clutches on film – said they had treated her well and respectfully; treated her like a lady, not like this.

  ‘A few bad apples’, as usual, was the official story. A few, very few ‘rogue elements’. A hundred and thirty-eight thousand were doing their job well. Not the men laconically drifting round the pyramid of naked scared humans, orgiastically entangled for the cameras, their private parts tastefully blurred in the broadcasts, to whom it seemed pretty much routine. The general in charge of the prison, a woman called Karpinski, said it was news to her; apparently no prisoner complained.

  Then a picture of a hooded man being pissed on by a man in a Queen’s Lancashire Regiment uniform enmired the British too. It was proved a forgery a few days later and the Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan made to resign (another notch on the six-gun of Tony Blair, who alone in Britain like 007 is licensed to fudge the truth), but by then other cases of British maltreatment were in the courts and the headlines reported cases thus far suppressed, abuse of innocent men in custody and beatings to death.

  It simply turned the whole thing over. It posed the difficult question: who were the bad guys now? How could we, so righteous over 9/11, continue righteous now? Who, indeed, were the terrorists now? ‘We see it as a war on terror, and they see it as a war on torture,’ I wrote to Scott Bates in Washington, ‘and it almost doesn’t matter who is right. Because this is the way America will be seen by the Muslim world for a hundred years.’ Across the Middle East and across Europe and the world, it was politely, potently suggested that America had lost ‘the high ground’ and would not get it back …

  TUESDAY, 25 MAY 2004

  I walk the dogs on the beach by the grey, still water. It is empty of other dogs and humans like the set of a Beckett play. I think of my dead dog Charlie, and his missing eye, and his midget hubris, and how in ignorance I gave him a life less good, and less kind, than he deserved; and how I unknowingly anguished him once by taking him to the place where he was born and he looked, and looked, and looked for his mother and brothers and they were not there. His replacement, Alfie, bounds around my ankles happily unknowing of the lessons I have learnt.

  It is hard to live on Earth altogether, but we have to try …

  5.30 P.M.

  The dark is back now, beyond the jacarandas, and the familiar single file of lights far off that is Ettalong, and the lighthouse flashing, and the rain at last beginning. And all the tendrils of this gathering of stories are moving towards each other through the dark. Will Blair, Howard, Bush and Sharon be gone by the end of the northern Fall? It could be so. Will Rudd be in Baghdad among cheering Australian soldiers saying it’s time to go home? It could be so. Will Ali Bakhtiyari walk out of Baxter into a new free life with his family in Adelaide or New Zealand? Will David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib walk out of Gitmo and President Kerry order it burnt to the ground? Will this be the promised good?

  It could be so. It could be so. Or the world may differently turn and the planets line up less fortunately, and the foul dark things that have happened this terrible year continue and over time prevail, and trample us under, distorting and choking the planet and smashing its cultures and in photos leering with thumbs-up gestures over the tortured of the earth. A breath of prayer might here be in order: Deliver us, O Lord, from evil; do it soon.

  Lest we forget.

  Lest we forget.

  Night Thoughts in Time of War

  THE DEATH OF SADDAM HUSSEIN, 2007

  It’s fair to say, I think, that the freedom we fought for was evident in our view of the last moments of Saddam Hussein. He was free to wear a hood, and chose not to. He was free to speak to his captors, but we were not free to hear what he said. He was free, I suppose, to make a mighty speech, but we were not free to hear it. His black-hooded executioners were free to conceal their identities, but he, in the last five minutes of his life, was allowed no similar privacy. We did not see him drop, his neck break, his neat suit fecally stained, nor the vengeful witnesses da
nce around his body, spitting on it if they did, kicking it if they did.

  So what Iraq’s new ‘freedom’ gave us this time round was the censored version of the killing of a man, a man still on trial for other crimes, a man who in almost any other jurisdiction would not have been killed at all. Certainly not on the holiest day of the Sunni calendar – the equivalent of breaking George Bush’s neck in Washington on Christmas morning. Very, very rarely do we witness, with warning, the last moments of a life. These were pretty surprising. No rage, no railing, no sermonising, no physical struggle. A courteous, mild exchange about the black scarf he must wear. An accompanied walk to the drop, with the posture of a professor approaching a lectern in another town. And then, of course, what we in our freedom were not allowed to see.

  These images will either change world history or they will not. It depends a bit on how many Americans watch them over and over and how many watch, instead, the funeral of President Ford. But those who do will imagine, surely, how George Bush might have behaved on a similar gallows, and the physical struggle, hortatory tears and loud pleadings while his captors held him down. They may ask, too, a fairly simple, arithmetical question, and it’s this: if a head of state can hang by the neck until he is dead for having ordered, or countenanced, or signed off on, or not punished, or failed to countermand the torture and killing of a hundred and forty-eight Iraqis guiltless of any great crime, what will happen to the generals, bureaucrats, prime ministers and heads of state who ordered, or countenanced, or signed off on, or did not punish, or did not countermand, the killing of a hundred and fifty thousand Iraqis guiltless of any great crime – this is now the official Iraqi government estimate of the dead – and the torture of ten thousand more of them in Abu Ghraib?

  They may also ask – as many legal experts have across the world – how much was fair about a trial in which three of the defence lawyers were shot dead, and those that survived forbidden to see the prosecution’s written testimony before it was unveiled in court, and only those parts of the proceedings the government liked were telecast, lest Saddam ‘grandstand’ his cause and gain followers. And how wrong it was that this trial was not aborted and another trial begun in The Hague.

  They may ask as well why Saddam died so soon. Something to do, perhaps, with his coming genocide trials, and the complicity of Germany, France, the US and the UK in the manufacture of his nerve gas, anthrax, cluster bombs and helicopter gunships, and his amiable business relationships with Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush Senior, once Head of the CIA, in past decades, and how his genocidal methods back then did not greatly annoy them, not so long as he paid his bills.

  And these are the freedoms we fought for. The freedom to ask – and not be told, lest we ‘encourage terrorists’ – what really happened, and who was in the loop when it happened. Such were freedoms Nixon encouraged in Chile when he helped Augusto Pinochet to censor, torture and kill those inconvenient to the many, many secrets America wanted to keep. These are the freedoms we fought for, and will now defend in Iraq for decades if Bush and Howard, brothers-in-arms for ‘freedom’, get their way. In Saddam’s hanging we saw them all at once.

  The Age, January 2007

  6.

  THOUGHTS AND IDEAS

  THE MIRACLE OF BLACK AND WHITE, 1981

  In a period when Stardust Memories, The Elephant Man and Raging Bull have returned to astonish cinema audiences with what should, I think, be called the miracle of black and white, it might be a good idea at last to analyse the differences between that eloquent medium and its vulgar successor.

  Imagine Casablanca in colour, Citizen Kane in colour, The Best Years of Our Lives in colour, Modern Times in colour, In Which We Serve in colour, The Pumpkin Eater in colour. The mind revolts against it with good reason. The fact is that black and white as a medium seems to confer on its subject a dignity, stature and credibility that colour seems to take away. It confers a kind of royalty too, as is evidenced in all the radiations of the meaning of the phrase ‘the Silver Screen’.

  In your mind’s eye imagine The Last Picture Show in colour, and play it through. In place of an austere classic of provincial deprivation you are, I think, observing something else, something not so very far from three episodes of The Restless Years. Why is this? In your mind’s eye imagine The Hustler in colour: the felt on the pool tables green, Paul Newman’s eyes a piercing blue, the balls a variety of clashing colours in sudden motion. Why is this prospect so much more daunting than what we absorb from the film as it is? In your mind’s eye imagine Wild Strawberries in colour: the old man’s parchment skin, the green hills rolling by, the gay colours of the children’s clothes in the flashbacks to the summer house. Why does the mind revolt?

  Antonioni, when he made films in black and white – like L’Avventura and La Notte – seemed to be making sufficient statements about the sterility and hollowness of twentieth-century man. When he made films in colour – like, Blow-up, Desserto Rosso and Zabriskie Point – he seemed to be trivialising with visual glibness the importance of the questions that he asked. Was his art in decline, as has been charged, or was there another reason?

  Fellini made films in black and white, like La Strada, La Dolce Vita and 8½, which are regarded with almost biblical awe by people who saw them in those more full-hearted years. It is to be doubted that the selfsame people even saw Casanova, a work by any rational criterion the equal of any of the above. The simple fact is that Fellini’s colour films, though received individually with considerable praise, have been on the whole adjudged as a body of work as diminishing his once Shakespearean reputation to that of a beguiling intellectual clown.

  Ingmar Bergman has likewise been shrunk to mortal dimensions by his work in colour. Merely to mention the names of his black-and-white films – Summer with Monika, Waiting Women, A Lesson in Love, Afternoon of a Clown, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, The Magician, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence, Persona, The Hour of the Wolf and Shame – and then to mention the names of his colour films – Now About All These Women, A Passion, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, The Serpent’s Egg and Autumn Sonata – would suffice to make the point.

  It seems then that the use of colour makes films more vulnerable to criticism. In black and white they have an inviolable chastity that critics dare not attempt to penetrate. In colour they are easy game. Why are these things so? The answers, I think – none of them easily provable, all of them open to question – are these. Black and white, because it contains less information, is, like its cousin radio, a swifter means of telling a story. A story as vast as Citizen Kane could not be told in colour in a mere two hours. Because it is at one remove from observed reality, moreover, it permits, within its automatic suspension of our disbelief, more swift and epigrammatic and melodramatic ways of telling a story. The dark stoic humour and sardonic theatricality of Casablanca – a film in which the supposedly Italian Sydney Greenstreet and the supposedly French Claude Rains both have English accents – is acceptable at one remove from life in black and white, where I suggest it would not be in Panavision and colour … The fact is that black and white is more of a verbal medium, more of a narrative medium and more of a fantastical medium.

  It is more of a visual medium too. It permits you to vary the frame size more dramatically – as Woody Allen does for instance in the shot in Stardust Memories of the distant diminutive elephant on the beach – and to dissolve between almost any image and almost any other, no colour consonance being necessary in the simpler and harsher medium. It follows that black and white, therefore, is inherently more impelling, more dramatic, more comic, more eloquent and, as a rule, more memorable than colour. That black and white aggrandises and colour trivialises seems more obvious than not. It is more sexy too. A simple demonstration might be the defloration scenes in One Summer of Happiness and The Blue Lagoon.

  Is there any use for colour then, except in obvious places like nature documentaries on tel
evision and films where costumes are an important component of the effect, like MGM musicals and biblical spectacles? The answer even here is in some doubt when one remembers the easy success of the Astaire–Rogers black-and-white musicals of the 1930s, and the overpowering effect of those black-and-white costume spectacles – like Julius Caesar and Throne of Blood – which seemed to show the distant past more truly in black and white, perhaps because it resembled marble statues and old engravings.

  One way to deal with the question is to look at some films whose effect was, without argument, enhanced by the use of colour. One such film in recent times was certainly Cabaret, whose aim was moral confusion and whose aim succeeded. The over-information inherent in colour worked in its favour in a film agog with gigolos, transvestites, bisexuals and adolescent Nazi fanatics. One needed not to know morally where one stood in such a film, and colour, which both trivialises and confuses, in this case was of help.

  Another more interesting case was The Graduate. Although a part of its theme was the bleakest possible view of the prosperous priorities of capitalist America, it cannot easily be imagined in black and white. In this case, I suggest, colour is used correctly, in lengthy lingering shots in which one has time to get used to the image on the screen – a little red car crossing the Golden Gate bridge, a girl observed through trees farewelling her parents, a single shot in a hotel bedroom encompassing a whole post-coital conversation. The eye has time to drink in all the information before the shot is changed. This same long lingering over the image is used as well, with considerable success, in the huger films of David Lean – the endless sand dunes of Arabia, the sea-washed beaches of Galway – and the later films of Stanley Kubrick – interminable but somehow majestic shots, in 2001 and Barry Lyndon, of almost anything at all. The commercial success of such films leads me to believe that this is the way to make the distraction of colour acceptable to an audience – with longer shots in longer films. Some films that are both fast cut and in colour and have succeeded usually prove upon examination, like Star Wars, hardly in colour at all – white costumes down white corridors, white gunfire in the utter black and white of starry space; or, closer to home, like Stir, where the colour component is negligible.