Redacted (2007)
Accent DVD (region 4)
d. Brian De Palma; pr. Jason Kliot, Simone Urdl, Joana Vicente, Jennifer Weiss; scr. Brian De Palma; ph. Jonathan Cliff; ed. Bill Pankow; cast. Rob Devaney, Patrick Carroll, Izzy Diaz, Daniel Stewart Sherman, Zahra Zubaidi, Karima Attayeh, Mike Figueroa, Shatha Haddad (90 mins)
Redacted concerns the daily lives of soldiers in Iraq, at the Samsarra checkpoint, and incidents leading up to one of the most notorious war crimes of the Iraq occupation: the rape of a 15 year old girl by American troops and the murder of her family, all innocent victims of American brutality.
Beginning with a disclaimer, to the effect that this film is fiction, Redacted is inspired by an incident that was widely reported to have taken place in Iraq, with a title card explaining the film “visually documents imaginary events before, during and after a 2006 rape and murder in Samsarra”.
“Redacted” is a military buzzword for “censored” and DePalma here examines how US authorities are concealing the truth of military conduct in Iraq from the American people, in this instance the rape and murder of Iraqi civilians by US troops, atrocities which make a mockery of US democracy as they are dismissed under the term “collateral damage”.
The context of a rape committed by military troops echoes director Brian De Palma’s study of the rape of a Vietnamese girl by US troops in Vietnam in Casualties of War, the inter-textuality confirmed by Redaction’s chosen tagline, “truth is the first casualty of war.” The film unfolds from several different viewpoints, including a video diary by Iraqi soldiers stationed at a region where they seem bored as have had little dealings with any insurgents, the protagonist intending his diary to be an actual war film that will enable him to go to film school when he returns stateside. His desire to record a war movie leads him to videotape the rape.
The Marine ethic here amounts to an uneducated “fuck or fight”, believing that the Iraqis get what they deserves as they are sub-human “sand niggers”. The two representative rapist Marines embody America’s gung-ho Republican War on Terror ethic and for DePalma signifiy what American democracy has come to mean – a total betrayal of the ideals that once made the country great but now reduce it to occupiers and rapists unconcerned with killing innocents simply they are not American. Indeed, the might of the US military is an inhumane duo which considers remorse for the killing of a pregnant Iraqi woman as weakness: saying that killing Iraqis is like stomping on cockroaches. These bastions of American democracy, in a story retracted by the media lest it blacken the war effort and cause criticism of the Republican authority behind it, raid the house of an innocent Iraqi 15 year old schoolgirl, rape her and then execute her family. Redacted uses this harrowingly dramatized incident to indict the Bush Government as a war criminals and rapists in Iraq as the gang-rape co-ordinator (appropriately named Flake) says to the girl he is about to rape and sodomize that he is looking for weapons of mass destruction, that he doesn’t know where they are but he knows they are there are will find them whatever happens.
For director DePalma, Redacted exists to analogize the Bush-led invasion of Iraq to the rape of an innocent 15 year old girl, in much the same way that he indicted American military authorities in Vietnam for the rape of another 15 year old girl in the earlier Casualties of War.
DePalma’s cinematic source here though is less Hitchcock than Peckinpah: a soldier at a check-point watches a scorpion fight ants, recalling the opening to Peckinpah’s seminal western The Wild Bunch and the gang-rape leader Flake announces proudly that he is America’s “wild card”. For the third time in the cinema of terrorism is the staging of a beheading video, interrupted at the last moment in The Kingdom and Body of Lies but here carried through to the convincing end in a context which arguably sympathizes with the insurgents. Hence, the beheading video, convincingly staged, is not evidence of the “barbaric and brutal nature of the terrorists and their complete disregard for human life” but an understandable reprisal for a worse atrocity committed by American troops, there for no reason but to rape and kill the innocent. The hypocrisy of the American (Republican) military spin condemning terrorist reprisals is here scathingly revealed by DePalma with misanthropic irony – America is a corrupt and hypocritical warmonger in Redacted.
Director Brian DePalma interviewed
Rape as Patriarchal American tradition is a theme in DePalma’s films and he again deploys it. However, here he uses it to condemn American moral and ethical hypocrisy by showing the American military no different to what they condemn about the insurgents, though DePalma elaborates fully and contextually on the daily horror faced by US troops that would provoke such inhumane rage in its more repugnant men in uniform, many of whom would not investigate the rape and prefer to cover it up. The raping Marine’s wryly ironic defence is equally condemnatory of the American-led Iraqi war – “bombing and killing them is okay but raping them isn’t?” – adding that prosecuting him for what he did is just aiding the terrorists. And, as no prosecution is forthcoming in documents subject to the title act, the lone marine with a conscience reflects that he went into Afghanistan for the right reasons after “what they did to the towers” but that Iraq was a whole other matter. Concluding in a section called “collateral damage” Redacted offers photographic evidence of American atrocities against civilian Iraqis, seriously impugning the ethics of America’s conduct in the Iraq War and a fine companion to such as The Situation and Taxi to the Dark Side, both of which also sought to explore American war crimes in Iraq and those responsible.
Redacted is DePalma’s most political film to date, and one of his finest though essentially about the Iraqi experience as different from the War on Terror.
It is one of the first fictional Iraq War films to indict the American military as war criminals, a theme balanced in Taxi to the Dark Side, which concludes with the revelation that George Bush, as one of his last official acts in office, decreed that none of his government would ever be subject to war crimes trials. On the basis of Redacted and Taxi to the Dark Side, American democracy has become a hollow ideal which justifies human rights violation on a personal and institutional level and makes a mockery of the American constitution.
