Beyond Terror: 3-4 June 2005
Transcript
Eugene Jarecki
janet Lang : Okay, great, this is great. Welcome. We really are on a tight schedule so I'm going to have a very, very short introduction to a very, very talented director that we're really excited about having here and available to us for the full time of the conference. Eugene Jarecki, as most of you may know, directed the Trials of Henry Kissinger which was quite an extraordinary documentary that won a number of awards including the Amnesty International Award, and a very powerful movie, and one of the things that Jim and I are especially interested in is the way in which we can work together and find ways for taking our history, particularly difficult periods in our history, and reflecting them back to the population to encourage discussion, debate among people involved in different areas not just within the academy. This is really the main kind of thing that we can almost intravenously put into our democracy I think is debate. So the more we can do that in more interesting ways the better. So we are big fans of Eugene Jarecki even though we just had the opportunity to meet him right now.
What I want to do just very briefly here is read to you just a couple sentences from the BBC interview that he gave which I just found really terrific. And he's talking about this current film that we're going to see Why We Fight . And what he says is, when he's talking with regards to comparing Kissinger from the (?). “I thought I made a film about U.S. foreign policy,” that is the Kissinger one, “but the audiences seemed to be most interested in talking about Kissinger the man. To me that felt politically impotent because the forces that are driving American foreign policy are so much larger than any one man. In the next film I wanted to go further. I didn't want to stop and be an easy-going or simple scapegoat. I wanted to have a much more holistic approach that really took on the system.”
He's just going to talk just a little bit now about the film, but the main thing is we'll try to get as much time as we can for discussion afterwards at dinner, tomorrow, during the breaks and whatever, he's here and all I can say is that at breaks and whatever, the line to get to him forms behind me.
Eugene Jarecki : I always find it embarrassing as a movie maker that movie makers are given some sort of welcome mat in a society that has interest of the level of this conference. Movies have come to occupy a strange place in our lives, but seems exaggerated to me, and yet we are also recognize that there might be some force to them that can help shape ideas and help encourage other dialogue. I certainly hope that's true. I'm not totally sold on it being true. I sort of ask myself at each film is political action colored by my own vanity or whether it is colored by trends in society or whether I might be better off doing something more hands on. So, having said that, I do keep doing the movies, and I am getting closer and closer to what I think is a kind of political action in film, and that's really what I meant, I guess, in that quote with regard to trying to sort of put the system on trial. We live in a society in which saying the phrase “I'm going to put the system on trial” is a joke in movies. Something we all laugh at. Because the system has been made so complicated and the assumption by all of us is that most of what we face, the catastrophe that we were talking about upstairs, are kind of inevitable, and that there's so little to be done about them, and the public has bought in to this for so many reasons, and understandable reasons. So I didn't want to blame anybody. I didn't want to blame the viewer. I didn't want to blame Mr. Bush. I didn't want to blame the people came before Mr. Bush. So I really was trying to figure out how to make the past haunt the present. And to do that meant closing the gap between what we've experienced in the past and this kind of black hole of institutional amnesia we're facing now.
I was on my way over here today and I passed a building that said on it an inscription. I was a little lost so you may not find the building if you go walking. But the building said on it, “Speak to the past, and the past shall teach thee.” I don't know who said that, but it was inscribed on the building, and I thought,
Wow that's great, that's kind of what I'm trying to do.” And I really think the media speaks for itself. I do want to say the movie is made for as wide an audience as possible. One of the problems you confront as a political film maker face is that films are the province of the liberal left and that the right barely makes films that don't need to be owned by every media outlet in the country would be an act of absolute gratuitous waste of resources to go make films and fill the airwaves. So the right doesn't make films, and so the left makes films. And so, then you come along and you must be making a left-wing film you must be preaching to the converted, and I said I haven't even said anything yet. I'm not sure who the converted are. I do know that as we stand where we are, the media structures in the United States are designed to make you preach to the converted. They're designed to make sure your message against the status quo, or any message that may threaten the status quo—Dan Rather—stops existing in moments; Dan Rather being said.
So in my case I wanted to make sure that I could get this thing out there to as wide an audience as possible and exclude nobody. I didn't part of a party. I don't belong to an American party. I don't even (?) in the two party model. And so it was very easy for me and extremely natural to make a film that does not try to preach to any choir. Now having said it falls into the trap that everyone in this room is a kind of choir, in fact it can be better said that this is a showing in which we are sort of preaching to the prophets I suppose or the people who wrote the very Bible itself. So I think that in a way I ask for everyone's forgiveness for a film that may be really orchestrated to reach an American public that is less versed on a lot of these matters than the people in this room. I hope it doesn't fall afoul of anyone's expertise. But it certainly is not designed to play to the expensive seats; it's known to play to the cheap seats. Where, that's us.
So I hope you like the film, and I'd love to talk about it at length here or over dinner afterwards depending on the time. I love talking about it, and most of all love I love hearing about it. So I hope you enjoy it. Thank you.
jL : We unfortunately don't have a huge amount of time; we have a pitiful amount of time. But we are going to definitely continue this discussion over dinner. And you'll have some time to sort of think a little bit more about that and come up with some questions. . .
EJ : Yeh, I don't mind not eating and doing questions. That's fine. I'm in the sort of mood. I'd rather have the time.
jL : Good.
EJ: So we can do a few questions here.
jL : Good. Why don't we, here, here.
Nikos Passas : I'm Nikos Passas from Northeastern University and this is the sixth time I've watched this and it still moves me. And I wanted to congratulate you. I did my class and used your film. At the beginning you mentioned that Mr. Bush. You make it so that this kind of film preaches to the converted. What exactly do you mean?
EJ : Well the marketplace is so extremely dominated by popular media, so when you, the moment that you, go into this kind of territory, and this is true for many forms, I mean, mine is one of thousands, and it isn't only about the military, on its own, but it should be about, that it doesn't fit well either between toothpaste commercials, which is the dominant goal of television, or the theatrical goal, which is to sell popcorn. So the whole concept in the theatrical world is essentially what all there is, give me 30 second concession inventions, that is chocolate covered this or that. And so the movies are what hold us in the theater, in a sense. And there has been a generally impression that, and this happened with the film When We Were Kings as a kind of classic example. Here is a film about Muhammad Ali, very much about Muhammad Ali's legacy for today's youth, black generation which highly recalls an urban demographic, to be political correct. And they felt the urban demographic was too dumb to watch a documentary. And so the film, this filmmaker, who spent 25 years to make that film, in order to share his love of Muhammad Ali and his sense of the meaning of that time in the 70s with a new generation of young black people, found himself—sorry, urban demographic types—found himself up against the distribution mechanism that had a very strong assumption about the IQ of the urban demographic and therefore didn't distribute the film in inner cities at all. The film was entirely shown to competent people like me. And so I ended up trying to take some kids from the projects who I was teaching at the time to go see the film, and I had to bring them to Carnegie Hall to see it. And that's a classic pigeon holing in the distribution model where at the end of the day, films like this, if one is not careful, and I think one can be careful and this is, we're in a big moment because we're in a growing period of time where the public is, the public has spoken about having a greater appetite for proof than the media would have had us believe, so we're in a good moment, yet a good moment in the shadow of an incredible legacy that has been constructed of pigeon holing these things so that they reach the art houses in every major city, and those art house audiences are already a calculated loss for those who run the status quo. They know they're not going to reach those people and they also know those people don't really matter. And that we can all knock ourselves out, you know great weapons little wounds. So we can all knock ourselves out and feel good about ourselves and go home. I think that they're not counting on is out of these little wounds does come great weapons. Great weapons of history started in little wounds. I think it's a miscalculation by the powerful but we're living in it at the moment and it hasn't yet, I think the success of Michael Moore and the success of Super Size Me, almost more than Michael Moore. Super Size Me is almost more the remarkable achievement than the Michael Moore achievement because Michael Moore is really just, and I have a lot of admiration for Michael Moore, Michael Moore was playing into an election year (?) with a lot of animosity and political dissent, etc. And Super Size Me, the guy just decided to take on McDonald's. And I drove by a McDonald's ad today where they were literally selling fruit salad in a McDonald's ad. And I thought, “God, if I were Morgan Spurlock, I'd feel like a million bucks right now driving by that ad.” You know. So I'm just waiting for Lockheed to start fruit salad, [Laughter] or bombs that feed.
Hugh Gusterson : Hugh Gusterson from MIT. (?) I'm studying nuclear weapons scientists for many years. . .
EJ: [Laughs] Great.
HG: and I've spent many years building relationships with individual weapons scientists. . .
EJ : Wow.
HG : So when I talk to them I get beyond crass ideological statements. . .
EJ : Where were you when I was making the movie? I could have used some brains.
HG : (?)
EJ : True, true.
HG : But I try to get beyond crass ideological statements to get them to reflect more deeply on what they do, (?) their ambivalence and so on. So I'm very fascinated that the movie, particularly with the guy who lost a son on 9/11, you obviously felt a very strong relationship and trust with him. And with the woman who quit the military and so on, how did you go about building that relationship so that you get the quality of interview material that you captured in your film.
EJ : Um. . .
HG : And how did you find that (?)
EJ : Okay, in a weird way the answer to both is the same as a pretty dissatisfying answer. Cause it's like everything we all do, there isn't really a rule. It's like the great moment in Citizen Kane when they ask Hirst—I don't remember the character's name—but they ask Hirst “how do you run a newspaper?” and he says, “I try every damn thing I can think of.” Basically the relationship with the lady from the Pentagon is a completely different relationship and to some extent a completely different strategy of human interaction all based on my own sincerity. I mean I don't lie to anybody but I am very gentle toward people who are ultimately sharing their lives with me. I don't really value movies that much. I'm not a movie goer, I'm not a movie buff, if I wasn't doing this, I probably would be involved in a life of maybe political crime, I don't know. You know. So I'm left to do these things but left to do them with regard to the human lives I'm invading. And so I think that people may sense that there's a very sincere reality of mine. You know, I came to Wilton the father for example because at the end of my Kissinger film, George Bush, who I know was given the film for Christmas by Alexander Polose, which was sort of funny, but he appointed Kissinger ironically you know to the 9/11 Commission and the one thing I hoped to do with the film above anything else was to promote public awareness of the sort of two-sidedness of the story and the sort of case for case a good old hearing. Assuming Dr. Kissinger's innocence throughout, which I don't say smugly. And then came his appointment to 9/11, and then I suddenly said well this is, this is beyond the pale. I mean this was like putting Al Capone when he's under suspicion in charge of the IRS. And probably not the best, I suspect, that could have been done for the families of 9/11, and so I wrote my congressmen and a few of them said no it was too sensitive to question Henry as a candidate for the 9/11 Commission. So I wrote a lot of people in the media, and they said it's way too sensitive a thing. I ran out of options and I ultimately called the families of 9/11. I had friends who died in 9/11, I knew people who knew people. And I asked them to look at the film. And they had made a very glowing public statement about Kissinger. This all kind of leads to how I got to Wilton . Because they made a sort of glowing public statement about Kissinger, and I said, you know, I just want you to know more than you may know, and still judge for yourselves, but BBC had asked me to do an investigation and it was interesting and certainly would make me think twice about you know whether it's the right, whether—I wrote Dr. Kissinger a letter at the time, and I said certainly, I understand you advocate your own innocence, but you certainly recognize that millions of people don't, and therefore you're bring that baggage into the very sacred space in which this families needs answers to questions. He didn't respond but I shared that letter with the families and I think that resonated with them. They watched the film and they changed their public statement, and he resigned five o'clock the same day. And I felt, probably in the first time in my life, that I had gotten my political crime career going. You know, I felt like I tasted blood, even if I was one percent of the reason he got off that Commission, I felt like I'd done something with my chubby little suburban life. And so after that, the pedigree, the legacy of that was that it left me on a bunch of family newsgroup servers and lists of 9/11 families, and on one of them, while I was buoying around trying to figure out how to take a very academic subject—which is very, it's academic for all of us, imagine how academic it is for people whose daily life it isn't—and how to make it human, and that was sort of in stories, and then there was Wilton so I reached his rabbi, and I took an enormous amount of time of being very kindly—so I had to get my head around the fact that there were Jewish New York cops— [Laughter] and once the rabbi, you know, once the rabbi vetted out my Holocaust roots, and felt that I was an acceptable correspondent—he was a very good man—he put me in touch with Wilton, and then it was a very careful matter of trying to learn more about Wilton, and I thought I was dealing with a man who was a major advocate of the Bush Administration, and I thought that until the interview. So I didn't, that was not a structured transformation, there was (?). There was one thing he said early on that I let pass, and I'll tell you right now, whenever you're interviewing somebody—I don't know if this is a technique or what cause I don't know what I'm doing but—the guy said something about something he don't like about it all went down, and I thought, “Wow, he didn't just develop that thought? Thank God.” Because usually what happens, I'll give you an example, and then we've got to go, but I went down to film John Eisenhower. And met him at a deli. And all of a sudden I'm ordering John Eisenhower a BLT with mayo and an ice tea. (?) So I ordered two of each. John and I sat down, we had a lovely lunch, I kept thinking that I was eating with his dad, sitting in this deli in the middle of nowhere. He brings me to his office, let's film here, the office was horrible looking. So I said, “Think we can film anywhere else?” and he grumpily said, “Well, I guess we can film in my house but my wife will bitch at you, but if you can put up with that. . .” So I said, “Oh, let's go to your house.” We're driving to his house, and he starts ranting about the Bush Administration. And I said to him—and I was decidedly not making an anti-Bush film. My whole agenda was not about Bush. If I felt that we had made a Bush film, I would have had another Kissinger problem, and I would be sitting with audiences just talking about the madness of King George. And so we go driving and he's ranting, and I said, “Don't get me wrong here John, didn't you, but aren't you a Republican?” And he goes, “Yeh, voted Republican my whole life,” he goes, “I voted for this bastard.” And I said, thinking to myself, where is the camera? At minimum, where is the microphone. And I said, “Well John, um, let me take that again.” But I didn't have a cmera, I didn't have a microphone. I went on talking to him and I said to him, “John did you—Sir Eisenhower—did you, um, so what do you mean ‘bastard'? What happened?” And he said, “Well, I had an awakening.” He said, uh, basically, “Grew up Republican, I worked in the military, worked in the White House.” He said, “When I was in the White House, perfectly academic, Republicans ruled the party of big white men in America . I was a big white man, so I voted Republican. George Bush came along, made clear to me that he too represented the party of big white men, I voted for George Bush.” He said, “It's really only been during the Bush Administration,” I have a phonographic memory, so this is what the man said, he said “It's only been during the Bush Administration that I've that discovered big white men are the men most to be feared in this world.” At that moment I was thinking, “What are the odds of getting this guy to even come close to that again?” He took a left turn into the driveway; that thought never reemerged. And will never be on tape. He's 83 years old, he's not going to do an interview like mine again, he liked doing it, he's supportive of me, but he's done it. And therefore it teaches you a lesson which is sometimes don't ask. And in Wilton 's case, I didn't ask for the entire transformation of Wilton 's character. And that was a benefit. Maybe, but it wasn't a strategy, it was more, maybe, it was a little bit of a tactic, you know. . .more of the whole. . .it was a tactic.
jL : We are all spellbound, and we'd rather not eat, but I know that we have a. . .
EJ : What is this? Should we do one more? Can we do one more and then go eat? One more and then go eat?
jL : Can we actually do one and a half?
EJ : One and a half and then go eat.
jL : Okay, cause I just wanted, I'm the half.
EJ: Two and a half. . .
jL: No. . .
EJ : Two, we'll have three. . .
jL : I'm the half.
EJ : Oh, okay. I'm sorry. . .
jL : I'm the half. Okay. The half is just when you were answering your. . .
EJ : Dan I'll walk with you. . .
jL : Okay. But you said, “The people have spoken.”
EJ : Yeah, I have a big view about that. . .
jL : In a positive way. That would be a wonderful thing for us to hear on our way down, so if you could maybe end with that, and in between you could do Katherine. . .
Katherine Lutz : Katherine Lutz. I'm here with the Watson Institute. I'm an anthropologist who studies (?). . .
EJ : The fact that you guys do this is amazing. It's fascinating. I didn't know you did that.
KL : (?)But I. . .I'm blown away by the film. (?) I just had like a horrible stomach ache, I have a huge headache, and, so I'm very. . .
EJ : Mission accomplished.
KL : (?) I feel in my heart right here, how powerful this is. I mean, I think my question is, is, and some people may respond to this, and you just said, you show this to audiences people always feel good about themselves. Preach to the, preach to the. . .
EJ : Right, right.
KL : I can't imagine who would feel good about themselves. Who would agree these politics, who would take these set of ideas and (?).
EJ : That is, my shorthand is incomplete. What I mean is, I got asked by a lot of left-wing groups right after the film won Sundance, to bring it out, to bring it out better. In fact, when James called, the idea that there was a defense seminar going on—or a defense sort of colloquium going on—was very attractive particularly because it wasn't that. Because all I was getting was, all I was fielding requests from people with whom I have some political overlap, for sure, but they were. . .they didn't know the film, they just knew its buzz, and my whole strategy is how to get it out in a way that escapes the very tragic partisan party game that's going on in this country, because you can take a perfectly good thing and absolutely ruin it just by how it gets PRed, and so, I did agree to do one, and I went (?) majority asked me to do some house parties across the country, which I was never going to do until the film was much more out there, and until I compare them with some right-wing groups that can offer a competing opinion. I don't agree with the sort of way that last year went on with lots of films really sort of drumming up party support, I'm not a party supporter, and I don't make films for that. So, in the end, end up getting co-opted by that, that's where the money is coming from, let's be honest, that's where the left-wing money is going to the party, the party, and I won't do that. So when they asked me to go down there, under some funny rubric that isn't (?) called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, I went down and I spoke in Baltimore with the film. And the same thing happened, the same thing happened at Sundance. At Sundance you have this big audience, almost 14,000 people gave the film a standing ovation at Sundance three times. And then we had about six standing ovations every single time. So I go up there and I feel like Stalin. You know, it's a little awkward. People stand up, this and that, you're out there trying to do something that you think is useful, and there's a lot of political energy and that feels good, until they start something about “The film's so great, I'm so great, oh you're so articulate, so nice, the movies, movies, movies.” I hate movies. So I don't like the fact that they like the movie first and foremost. I don't want to hear about the movie, in a certain sense. I'm not trying to be thankless, I love the fact—it's flattering to those who made it, everybody involved—but you want to take the political energy and say, “Okay, now what?” Like this conference is doing. And it's very hard to make that transition. I'm starting to and I'm starting to learn how. And my whole next two years is about how to take the movie is great comments and go “Stop! Now let's do the next thing.” And I do get questions now and then like “What can we do?” and things like this. What people feel good about is the political energy dissipates from the room. It's a threatening political energy. Why? Because people like Chalmers, (?), Charles Louis, Karen Katowsky, Chuck Spinney, and to their extent Richard Perle, these people are all offering 70, 100 man years of developed thinking about this. The audience is incredibly political moved. And then I get up there, and because the way movie work, suddenly it's all about the film, the filmmaker, and all this phenomenological shit, and the point goes, and everybody goes home thinking they've done their political thing for the night. They go back, put their kids to bed, pay the mortgage, and they feel like, maybe they drove the SUV, but the counterpart is they saw the movie. I become part of the problem! I'm like some sort of therapy for people who are part of the status quo. I can't do that!
KL : How is it therapy for people?
EJ : It's therapy because they feel, “I went to go see Why We Fight as opposed Shrek , and therefore I've done my bit.” And if we winnow down our political action as a society, that's not the people who (?), that what the issue I said up front, the issue I have with the public is how do you take a public that is hopeless, and take a pessimistic—not a pessimistic, I'm not a pessimist—but take dark material and make it empowering. And not just—because Americans live with quiet despair. We all do. We don't make what we thought we'd make. Our kids live in a world we didn't we'd know they'd live in. The music doesn't sound like it did, the movies don't feel like they did. . .so I'm going to come along and tell them the truth? That it's worse when they even know? If I were them, I'd rather hear Bill O'Reilly tell me you know it's worse in Cuba, or I'd rather the President tell me it's the rag-heads doing it, or I'd rather hear the Church tell me, yes, it's a shit life, but next time it'll be better. You know, all those things get you through the night, but I don't get people through the night unless I figure out how, with the help of people like you or anybody who can help, how do you make the public feel the truth in an important way? And I do think the public has spoken—I'll get back to that idea—the public has spoken because the mainstream media convinced us that the public did not want an effort, they only wanted the lives of Mr. O'Reilly, Mr. Bush, Mr. whoever. They said, “I don't want those lives! I want Super Size Me. I want, something that feels like it's happening, and that feels like it's playing with the currency that I'm actually thinking about the 30 seconds a day when I'm not putting the kids to bed or driving them to school. And so I think there is an appetite for truth, and therefore a moment right now to seize that I'm happy to be a part of.