At the post above, Mr. Morris himself left a comment in which he said "I tried to put the Abu Ghraib photographs into the context of Abu Ghraib" and this becomes clear very early in the film. It doesn't explicitly try to place the events at Abu Ghraib in the larger context of the war in Iraq. There's not much of a prelude to help us understand where they fit into a larger tale. For example, we get no idea of how John Yoo's memos or the decisions of the powers in Washington D.C. abetted what happened at the prison. This is reinforced by the fact that the film never really leaves the Abu Ghraib: the reenactments take place there and all but one interviewee was at the prison at the time the infamous photos were taken. (The lone hold out is the guy who analyzed the photos for the trials of the military policemen and women.)
Despite having narrowed his focus, Morris proceeds to muddy the waters. The most glaring example is Specialist Sabrina Harman. Many of the photos were taken by her and we see and hear excerpts of letters she wrote to her partner which are sad and rueful. In the letters, which are shown to us in extreme close-up, Harman explains that she is taking the pictures to document what happened because no one would believe the shit going on around her. So are we to reconcile her words with the photo of her bending over a corpse smiling as she gives a big thumbs up?
S.O.P. centers on the photos themselves and works its way out from them. While photographs may not lie and thusly present a certain truth, they are by no means the whole story. At one point, Lynndie England, another of the military specialists, notes that her sister in arms, Megan Ambuhl, was visible in the photo of her holding the leash around the neck of one prisoner but that Ambuhl was cropped out by Specialist Charles Graner, who is portrayed as the ringleader here, as Ambuhl and Graner were intimately involved with one another. Ambuhl(?) comments later in the film that photos don't show you what is outside the frame. The film also notes that they don't give you context. For instance, England says that the photo of her holding the leash around the neck of the prisoner nicknamed Gus was staged for the camera. "He (Graner) would never had me standing next to Gus if the camera wasn't there." And then there's that corpse with Harman crouched over it. We see the bruises on the corpse and Harman's pose, but those pictures don't tell us how that man ended up all bruised in a body bag. We are told that he died during torture and this surely makes the act of having one's picture taken with a dead body pale in comparison.
The interviews were shot with Morris' own invention, the Interrotron, which has the subject looking straight into the camera and thusly straight at us in the darkened theatre. In a departure from convention, there's no cuts to Morris as he asks questions so we are forced to looked directly into the eyes of the interviewees and ask ourselves what we think about these people as they tell their stories. And their stories mirror the photos in that these "bad apples" often refer to people that are never interviewed, shadowy powers we really don't understand. Graner is in military prison and was not allowed to go before the camera; Army officers give orders for the subjects to follow; and there are the "ghosts", interrogators from Other Government Agencies whose activities are stricken from the records. The interviews aren't definitive – there's more outside their frames and more context to be had.
Interspersed among the shots of the horrible photos and interviews are reenactments. They are highly stylized and most, if not all, of them look as if they were the work of Bob Richardson. The harsh light in some of them is a dead giveaway as they look exactly like certain shots from JFK, which he also shot. (I'm thinking particularly of the one where Garrison and his cohorts are sitting at a table discussing what they've uncovered. The light above the table appears as if it were the sun itself.) They are mostly close-ups of events inside the prison, such as the mouth of a guard dog as it barks at a prisoner or of shell casings hitting the floor. But these short extreme slow-mo shots are not there to advance a narrative. Instead they serve to illuminate the interviews in the same narrow way the photographs present a view of what was happening inside Abu Ghraib. If the photos give a slice of decontextualized reality, the reenactments are seemingly hazy bits of the interviewees' memories, as if we could get inside their heads. They also stand as microcosms of the prison just as Abu Ghraib is a microcosm of the wider Iraq war.
Now that Standard Operating Procedure has left Madison theatres, any locals reading this will have to rent it. And I highly recommend you do. But understand what this film is and what it isn't. If you want to get a bigger picture and have the Bush administration implicated, then watch something like Taxi To the Dark Side by Alex Gibney. Morris only hints at a larger scene and refrains from giving you a chronological narrative where someone writes a memo in Washington D.C. and then Army commanders in Iraq give certain orders which are then carried out by the grunts on the ground. At the end of S.O.P., the military investigator labels certain acts in the photographs as abuse while others are standard operating procedure. For a schmoe like me, it's all abuse. Morris is interested in the miasma of Abu Ghraib and how those of us who were not there can come to understand it via the infamous photographs.
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