THE DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER Alex Gibney opens his Oscar-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room with Tom Waits’ scraggly refrain: “What’s he building in there?” The singer-songwriter’s haunting inquiry plays over shots of the towers of the once-mighty Texas energy colossus and creates a sense of mystery and, even, fear. It’s the latter response, in all its mind-altering, dignity-shattering power, that serves as the emotional nucleus of Gibney’s latest hard-nosed, meticulously researched examination of the American dream-machine gone awry, Taxi to the Dark Side. To that end, if he would’ve employed Waits’ monk-like chant in his Best Documentary-winning picture, he would’ve had to alter it to say: “Who’s he torturing in there?”
I’m not going to hedge: Gibney’s film, about how this country’s descent into Inquisition-style tactics evolved at the highest levels of our government and its gruesome manifestations in countries far away from the American imagination, is more than what The New Yorker’s David Denby labeled “one of the essential documentaries of the ongoing war” on terror. It is not only the best such film, but the best documentary I’ve ever seen. Period.
Long after you leave the theater, the photos of corpses zippered shut with Y-shaped stitches; the videos of hooded men in dark hallways forced to masturbate in front of men and women in uniform; the gasps of your fellow audience members as these images rotate through Gibney’s scholarly dissection of the dispassionate legalese that provided cover for The White House to implement the policies which lead to centuries-old methods of pain and humiliation to be captured and, later, exposed by 21st century technology — you will still feel this movie deep in your gut, and it will disgust you.
The title comes from two different sources from, literally, opposite ends of the world. “Taxi” refers to an Afghan taxi-driver named Dilawar, whose story of wrongful arrest, detainment, torture and murder by American forces at Bagram Air Force Base, north of Kabul, acts as the framework within which Gibney traces the origins of America’s use of terror in its War on Terror. “The dark side,” on the other hand, (also used as the title for a must-watch Frontline documentary) refers to a statement made by Dick Cheney to NBC’s Tim Russert, in 2001, in which he said, according to the press notes: “We also have to work through … the dark side … it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”
From the lips of the Vice President, ensconced in a U.S. TV studio, to the “pulpified” remains of a worker on a military base in the Third World, herein lies the special power of Gibney’s rhetorical strategy: to put a face, however battered, on the specific choices made by policymakers. As a result of this technique, it is impossible to argue with Gibney’s thesis that the administration, not a few “bad apples,” set up the ladder down which military personnel of descending rank climbed into the torture chambers of not only Bagram, but Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Despite Gibney’s ferocious objection to torture — which comes, we’re later told, from his father, a former Navy interrogator during World War II who abhorred the practice — he applies an even hand. Indeed, the interviews he conducts with the guards responsible for Dilawar’s death show how anyone, under the “right” conditions, can become the evil they purport to fight. The interviews with those like John Yoo, who was the legal architect of those conditions, are conducted with grace and fairness, too — which is why these people, with their spurious justifications, reek, at the least, of bad faith and, at the worst, of criminal intention.
“They wonder why it happened,” says a former military policeman once stationed at Abu Ghraib during the documentary. Now, thanks to Gibney, we most certainly do.
Taxi to the Dark Side
Directed by Alex Gibney.
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