The Road to Guantanamo - Movie Review Example

The Road to Guanatanamo The Road to Guanatanamo is a successful docudrama which examines the War on Terror and the detention of people at Guanatanmo Bay and elsewhere by the United States. In the process, it reveals a lot of the neo-colonial subtext which underlies much of contemporary geopolitics, and was one of the lynchpins of Bush Administration policy. Part of War on Terror can be seen as a result of globalization. Economic integration has many consequences: some relating to culture and society, some relating to security. If you’re economic interests are shared, you must share the work in defending them against people who would do you wrong. In many respects the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, proved to be a globalizing event, further accelerating changes that were already underway.1 The attacks led to the Global War on Terror and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Britain threw its chips in with the United States, supporting it to the hilt. A broad range of countries settled on a common security policy which involved playing offence rather than defence. This policy has been criticized by many people and is partly—aside from the human drama—an important part of this film. The authors powerfully use their film as rhetoric in the course of the debate over what was the most appropriate response to the terrorist attacks of September 11,2001. But making a politically rhetorical film has its drawbacks. As author Bill Nichols writes, Rhetoric moves us away from style, to the other end of the axis between author and viewer. If style conveys some sense of the author’s moral outlook on and ethical position within the world, rhetoric is the means by which the author attempts to convey his or her outlook persuasively to the viewer. Pragmatics is that part of communications theory concerned with the effect of messages on their recipients and rhetoric is the means by which effects are achieved (Nichols, 134). There is a thin line, this critic seems to be saying, between documentary and propaganda. It is indeed hard to make a film that is stylistically inventive and artistic and which also provides political food for thought. However, in Road to Guantanamo, the directors and actors do manage to accomplish this. They focus on what dissecting much of the world order and showing us the binaries that lay beneath the surface. In doing this they accomplish the highest goals of contemporary documentary film-making. In her analysis of The Thin Blue Line, Linda Williams argues that the aim of contemporary documentary filmmakers is to seek the “reverberations and repetitions” that reveal multiple and contingent “truths” rather than a unitary, unproblematic “Truth.” (Grant, 22) One of the key insights of this film is to examine the difference—so often based on power and prejudice—between east and west. It is useful here to talk about orientalism. At its core, Orientalism is the belief that the nations and people of the East are inferior to those in the West. However, it is not so cut and dry. It can take subtly essentializing and paternalistic forms. Generally speaking, it reinforces imperialistic ideas about the Orient that were first transmitted by Western explorers. Not all of these ideas are necessarily bad, but some critics believe they have come to dominate the West’s public perception of Eastern cultures, to the point of drowning out authentic Eastern voices. In this sense, Orientalism, a term first used in this way by the great critic Edward Said in the 1970s, involves a struggle for power and identity—a struggle that has deepened more and more over the last few years with the rise of globalization and the War on Terror. Orientalism is not simply a critique of the way the East has been portrayed in art and literature produced by Western cultural workers, but also a critique of Eastern politics, economics, and diplomacy. The first explorers of the Orient brought to the West the first stories and images of the people of the East. In that respect they are responsible for setting the tone of the relationship between the two cultures. These first early images seemed in some way, Edward Said argues, to occasion what came after them—political and administrative control of the East as a vast colony. (Edward Said, 121). No effort was made to understand the cultural divide between East and West; this lack of understanding led Westerners to believe their own way of life was simply better and should be taught to Easterners. We can see this often in the way the Bush Administration treated Muslims, for example. And how the United States has treated the whole world as its colony. In the film Road to Guanatanmo these views are meshed with the actor’s re-enactment to create a devastating tableaux of contemporary geopolitics: an “enmeshing” of fiction and non-fiction, as Michael Renov calls it (2). The politics of the film remain very relevant. We see how Orientalist ideas can continue to have their hold on contemporary scholarship and even in the news media. Although for the most part colonialism has ended, the rise of globalization has created a unique system of trade and cultural exchanges, many of which put Eastern countries at a potential disadvantage. The War on Terror has also created a further divide between the East and West. In a way these two solitudes have never known less about one another. When looking at globalization and the War on Terror In this way Orientalism can be seen as all about power. As Said writes in his book, cultures are constructed by the other. Continuing the critique of Bernard Lewis, the historian and critic of Islam, we can see how he has recently been called “perhaps the most significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq,” who urged regime change in Iraq to provide a jolt that — he argued — would “modernize the Middle East” (40). He believed that something had gone wrong in the Middle East because it did not look like the West. He wrote that many Islamic countries had given up on reform and refused to embrace modernity. This being so, it would be necessary for the West to modernize them either through economics or military overthrow. We see in this film the direct consequences of such thinking. Road to Guantanamo is not a unique film but it is powerful. It makes many political points without being heavyhanded. It shows us how colonialism and orientalism are both still with us, and how we must be vigilant if we wish to be free. References Grant, K. B. and Sloniowski, J.(eds) Documenting the Documentary: Close Reading of documentary Film and Video. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. Lewis, Bernard. “The Question of Orientalism.” New York Review of Books. June 24, 1982 Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2002. Michael Renov (ed). Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routledge, 1993. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Said, Edward. “Orientalism: An Exchange.” New York Review of Books. August 12, 1982 Read More