Redacted

Brian De Palma's film Redacted received some press over the weekend because of its reception at the Venice film festival. The interesting thing about this to me is De Palma's "realities of war" are presented as "fictionalized" because he claims his lawyers kept him from presenting the truth. So in his own way, De Palma has become a Scott Beauchamp, using fiction to execute both career and personal political agendas.

Many of the sites I've seen have criticized De Palma's previous films as unnecessarily violent and sick. I can't entirely agree to that as a long-time fan of film noir and De Palma's tendency to tribute the genre with modern techniques. I especially like Femme Fatale with its over-the-top story, acting, and dialog. However, Redacted is fiction, based on a single, horrific event. I partially liked the recent The Black Dahlia with the exception of the subplot that implied Elizabeth Short was some kind of lesbian prostitute, which ultimately makes the movie distasteful. This fictional element of the real case was created by James Ellroy, the author of The Black Dahlia on which the movie was based. However, Elizabeth Short's memory was tainted by this fiction. Nobody really knows for sure how she ended up grotesquely murdered. Those who don't read or research historical events see movies like The Black Dahlia as nearly factual. De Palma knows this, I'm sure, and he is probably counting on audience acceptance that his vision of the Iraq War is fact as presented in Redacted.

While Redacted is based on the real-life rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza and the execution of her family by four American soldiers, De Palma's agenda is to make the exception the rule. De Palma has openly stated that he wants American audiences to see the Iraq War in the way it is presented in his movie. His movie, however, is admittedly a mix of things downloaded from the Internet and fiction (see Redacted stuns Venice).

"It's all out there on the Internet, you can find it if you look for it, but it's not in the major media. The media is now really part of the corporate establishment," he said.

The film's title refers to how, according to De Palma, mainstream American newspapers and television channels are failing to tell the true story of the war by keeping the most graphic images of the conflict away from public opinion.

"When I went out to find the pictures, I said (to the media) give me the pictures you can't publish," he said, adding that because of legal dangers he too had to "edit" the material.

"Everything that is in the movie is based on something I found that actually happened. But once I had put it in the script I would get a note from a lawyer saying you can't use that because it's real and we may get sued," De Palma said.

"So I was forced to fictionalize things that were actually real."

The film, shot in Jordan with a little known cast, ends with a series of photographs of Iraqi civilians killed and their faces blacked out for legal reasons.

"I think that's terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to this suffering people," De Palma said.

What can I say about Redacted that De Palma hasn't admitted to? He admits he researched the film on the Internet and we all know how reliable that can be. He claims things were fictionalized, yet he he has not specified what. I think his need to fictionalize was actually fictionalized so that the film fit his agenda. In addition, he mentions "suffering people" and I have yet to see evidence that anyone in the Middle East is suffering worse because of American presence there. Yes, we are at war in their country, but we have our military desperately building schools and public services that terrorists seem hell-bent on destroying. It's a shame that De Palma can't tell the difference between criminal activities perpetrated by a very small number of American soldiers and the day-to-day raping, honor killing, murder, and mutilation perpetrated by Muslims on other Muslims. At least our military investigates, arrests, and prosecutes those who commit such crimes. Throughout the Middle East, rapists and murderers roam free.

I think underlying this story is something you won't see reported and analyzed by the MSM. That is the ways that documentaries and fiction are fusing to produce a reality that isn't so real. Anything from Michael Moore has as much fiction or misrepresentation as it has facts. "An Inconvenient Truth" excludes scientific rebuttals and therefore misleads. Now we have Redacted that is presented as the "reality" of war, but is a strange mix of Internet video and scripted scenes with actors. The viewer will be left out of knowing the context of the downloaded videos, who created them, and how reliable the author was (keep thinking Scott Beauchamp or Jayson Blair).

De Palma may have given us such gems as The Untouchables, but like so many other Hollywood liberals, will demonstrate his lack of integrity, knowledge, and insight as he turns his talents to politics.

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