Tag Archives: Terry Gilliam

Bradley Manning, Guy Fawkes, and the star chamber awaiting Julian Assange

Posted on by
Reply

You wonder what Elizabethan era failed coup plotter Guy Fawkes means to Anonymous. Their now iconic mask is actually an image under license from the film V FOR VENDETTA. The mask’s smirk connotes an elusive rabble-rouser and perhaps mocks Guy’s namesake bonfire holiday in Britain, meant to commemorate the burning of the would-be king-killer but ambiguously may also celebrate his near success. Anonymous wants to project an indomitable rebellious spirit, omniscient and untouchable, but Guy Fawkes most certainly met the death of revolutionaries immemorial.

If Fawkes had any reason to smirk it was because he was able to leap to his death to avoid the fate of his fellow conspirators, each hung until half dead, then castrated, disemboweled and dismembered while still conscious. Their torture was as much a punishment as a deterrent to anyone who would emulate their populist heroics. Today of course I think of the punitive treatment being meted to accused Wikileaker Bradley Manning, whose abuse would seem to be wholly unwarranted, considering he stands accused, not convicted, and for most of his detention, not even charged.

Guy Fawkes and his colleagues were found guilty by the Star Chamber, now the sinister pejorative for all subsequent secretive quasi-courts. It’s something akin to the Grand Jury mechanism being contrived to finagle the extradition of Julian Assange. Not to stop Wikileaks, but to bodily hurt Assange, have him drawn and quartered figuratively whatever, that the four corners of the kingdom bear the message, dare to defy authority and we’ll wipe that smirk off your face.

The Guy mask reminds me of the masks worn in the interrogation scenes of Terry Gilliam’s dystopian classic BRAZIL where the cherubic smiles masked unspeakably vile tortures.

Semantics aside, Bradley Manning must be freed, and Julian Assange protected. Why should our heroes be martyrs?

Permissible degrees of torture

Posted on by
Reply

Department of Information Retrieval.
In the film Brazil, the smallest typo, a brush with an unlicensed repairman, or a humanitarian impulse, can see you in the hotseat.

There are no permissible degrees of torture.

I’d like to try to make that point sometime. I’ll ask for a volunteer. I’ll explain to the volunteer and to those watching what I intend to do. “Put you arm behind your back where I can grab it and twist it slowly. Like this,” I’ll illustrate. “I’ll twist gently but steadily until it might begin to hurt.” It will be up to the people watching to decide at which point I’ve gone too far.

Then I’ll have to hope that there aren’t too many sadists in the crowd. Plan B might be to grab for something like a baseball bat, out of view of the volunteer, and appear prepared to hit him with an unsuspected blow. Much will depend on the onlookers rising to interfere.

In that manner we will all be able to explore what it means to accept a certain degree of torture, up to a point. And that point should lie somewhere between the anticipation of torture and the application of pain. If my subject wets himself or herself at just the thought, perhaps my audience will urge that even the anticipation is going too far.

I hope we can recognize that we want to tolerate not a single degree of torture.

Many experts have been coming out to say that torture is not effective. In this era of modern chemistry, we have all sorts of drugs and serums for overcoming a person’s mental resistance. Putting aside whether those methods are themselves ethical, if interrogators want to learn something from a detainee, there is no need to resort to torture.

Torture is not about interrogation. Torture is about terror. It is terrorism exercised upon a defenseless captive, and it is terrorism practiced against a population who are subjugated by the fear that they too may face torture.

We have declared war on terrorism. Terrorism such as our governement defines it does not exist. There are no idealogues whose chief pursuit in life is the spread of terrorism. This is a myth. Terrorism is not an ideology.

Terrorism is a practice, and we are its greatest perpetrators. In the main it’s called state-sponsored-terrorism. Extra-judicial assassinations, the sanction of indescriminate killing, the tolerance of disproportunate civilian casualties, the imposition of inhumane social structures, all constitute the terror we are imposing upon an occupied people.

Torture is another method by which we terrorise our subjects.

Are we united against terrorism? Why then are we not also aggreed that we are united against torture?

Brazil redux

Posted on by
Reply

Brazil interrogation finale
Is it time to bite a bullet and watch BRAZIL again? You might remember this movie as a wonderfuly dark comedy. Now it’s horror! And the evil doesn’t vanish when you turn the lights back on.

When Terry Gilliam made BRAZIL in 1985, his film was a sci-fi comedy, granted it was Orwellian and unsettling. Gilliam had to take out full-page ads in Variety to beg the studio to release it, because the studios thought it was too dark.

Could he have released BRAZIL now? Now it’s all come true! Now it’s plain horror! Remember the premise? Department of Information Retrieval! War on terrorism! Swat abduction! Sanctioned interrogation! Secret detention, except the family receives the bill! Bureaucratic arrogance! Even facelifts gone awry!

Jonathan Pryce stars, Robert DeNero is Tuttle, the repairman who defies the Central Services monopoly, he’s the terrorist!

Do you think you’ll have the stomach for it? Will any of it be funny? On DVD you can chose from three versions: the one Hollywood wanted -with what is now know as the “love conquers all” ending, the compromise version we all saw in the theaters, or Gilliam’s director’s cut. Your choice. They’re all going to be plenty scary.