The Road to Guantanamo, dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2006.
This movie is the story of a very deep sickness in Western culture. If I hadn’t worked retail, I might find the whole thing too surreal to believe. However, I have witnessed the kinds of people that could rationally reach the insane conclusions necessary to act as the guards and interrogators in this movie do.
The futility of “breaking” people so that they will say anything in order to point to something as if that’s evidence is clear here. It’s a grim bit of drama. Guantanamo is a new kind of Theatre of the Macabre, a Las Vegas replication of the Grand Guignol:
“Before the war, everyone felt that what was happening onstage was impossible. Now we know that these things, and worse, are possible in reality.”
This is a stage on which thousands of Pierrots take violent revenge on the world of Arlecchino.