Imagine a film in which an SS officer explains the operational plan of the Holocaust to a Jew, describes the crimes of political purges to a communist, presents the future concentration camps to a Roma person or a homosexual. Imagine that this very same officer spends approximately two hours recounting memories of a life spent serving these criminal purposes, shortly before his death, when biology is the only enemy coming to crush him. No matter how human a face one tries to put on such a monster, it will be difficult to convince us of the purity of his intentions.
Now imagine another film, in which the SS officer is replaced by a CIA agent who has murdered 68 people around the world in operations to establish dictatorships, who was present at the execution of Patrice Lumumba, and who was working to overthrow Allende in Chile when the passage of time brought him to seek ultimate forgiveness from his God, being a Catholic, after all. If you find this difficult to imagine, you can watch it for two hours in Martin McDonagh’s disgraceful creation, which has taken on the task of whitewashing the crimes of American imperialism during the 20th century.
In a film set almost entirely on Easter Island, with fairly good cinematography and a very powerful performance by John Malkovich, McDonagh attempts to show us the human side of imperialism’s monsters. I don’t know to what extent he can inspire sympathy for people who undertook the operational planning of the bloodshed of entire peoples. But the use of satire in recounting crimes against humanity, such as the torture at the National Stadium in Santiago, the disappearances of political prisoners under Pinochet’s regime and, of course, the elimination, the murder of anti-imperialist leaders across the globe, is literally chilling in its cynicism and in the way it attempts to normalize the bloodstained history of American imperialism.
The scattered remarks of contemporary political correctness, comparing the impact that the assassinations of Kennedy and Lumumba had on the world, or the emphasis placed on the local names of various places, cannot conceal the fact that the entire undertaking is an attempt to present the crimes of imperialism as a mere — and indeed domestic, North American — political conflict. The narrative that Kennedy’s assassination was the decisive turning point, that the whole misfortune was simply that the wrong people found themselves at the helm of the American government and its agencies, may be convenient for a section of the American public that rails against Republican politics today. But it is also a familiar apologetic narrative about the crimes of the United States during the 20th century, crimes on which History has already passed judgment: the narrative that a few rogue agents were preparing and installing dictatorships in collaboration with local fascist elements, while official American policy was not strategically bound to these choices.
And as if all this were not enough, the film presents us with an all-powerful CIA, capable of predicting every detail of History, even the exact date of the coup in Chile (September 11, 1973), as early as February of that same year. Through this display of power, but also through the lines delivered by “those in the know”, it attempts to convince us that any resistance to this system, to these regimes, is futile, that the only possible form of resistance is individual action, which likewise ends in an act of self-sacrifice that leaves the system itself unscathed.
McDonagh’s film reminds us, in monumental fashion, that cinema is political — and it remains to be seen how serving the political purposes of a system that has built its own industry for precisely this reason since the 20th century will be rewarded.
