Taxi to the Dark Side

Dilawar, an Afghani taxi driver, was a footnote to court hearings concerning at least a half-dozen American soldiers and officers dealing with the torture of detainees during war.  A footnote, in so many cases, is a fact or an aside excluded from the body of an argument, but can often change the impact of the argument.  As one of the interviewees in Taxi to the Dark Side states, this footnote can be the Devil in the details.  The entire documentary deals with footnotes, forgotten bits of information.  Just as Dilawar was a footnote to the court martial of American soldiers who were just following orders, those soldiers, who detail much of the movie’s main story arc, were footnotes to a war that wasn’t concerned their stories.

The movie begins with landscape shots, beautiful and serene, that survey the pastures and crop fields of Afghanistan.  This was the landscape in which Dilawar was raised.  He was, according to his brother, a hardworking youngman, he laid a rock wall that served as a fence for his family’s peanut farm.  When Dilawar was no longer able to work in the fields he volunteered to drive a taxi between their small village and the larger metropolitan areas.  Dilawar never returned from one of his trips as a taxi-driver.  Dilawar died at the hands of American soldiers under strict orders to retrieve information from detainees concerning terrorist actions, but with no specific guidelines as to what, exactly, they were supposed to do.

Each of the soldiers and officers interviewed who were sentenced in the torture trials, are lit in Taxi to the Dark Side, by strong key light on a near-90 degree plane to his profile.  This casts half of the face in extreme shadow.  The lit half of the face is not blown out, but all of the features are very clear.  In the beginning of the piece, this lighting is very disorienting and raises huge questions as to the filmmaker’s attitude toward these subjects.  As the piece continues and interviews with attorneys, journalists, and politicians are presented (mostly with very flattering light) it becomes clear that the soldiers have always been in a half-light.  Certainly, the piece concedes, these men were capable of very grave things, they have a dark side.  However, because of torture policies that came strait from Rumsfeld (who made light of some torturous activity by saying that he often stood for longer durations than these detained men), the soldiers, on the frontlines were kept, at least, half in the dark to take the fall if anyone should be held accountable.  But, finally, the story was kept half in the dark.  These men had jobs, lives that were ruined because the presidential administration had already acquitted themselves of all fault.  These soldiers had been pushed to footnotes at the bottom of the proverbial page of history.

The movie spends most of its time on footnotes.  Presenting many facts in the center of a black frame preceded by an asterisk as a a B-roll cutaway.  Even as the movie employs famous footage of press-conferences, presidential speeches, and journalistic footage it will cut to a footnote describing the subtext of Colin Powell’s UN adress pushing for an invasion of Iraq.

The main story arc begins with Dilawar’s death in Bagram Air base in Afghanistan.  This story takes a back seat as those soldiers who had beaten him, interogated him, eventually, killed Dilawar, tell of how they had been ordered, non-specifically to brutalize this inmate. Their story goes to Abu Graib, Gauntanamo, the White House.  The taxi to which the title refers is a figurative ride that beigns at a minor footnote among thousands of pages and ends as a social and artistic indictment of a presidency, a war, an era.

Upon watching this piece I sat silent in the dark as the credits rolled past.  I had been familiar with much of the press on Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay, but still could not digest the experience of seeing this movie.  The insistence upon examing the minutae of facts and stories that had heretofore been overlooked, the presentation of soldiers as both perpetrators and victims and the insistence upon the guilt of a President that I personally did not like but still felt some civil duty to respect had been all but too much. I wanted a cleaner answer.  But, the movie told me that there wasn’t any.  I, personally, had to accept fault for the fate of Dilawar and so many others because of my apathy, my ignorance as to what my government was doing.  Certainly, I am not completely at fault, I was, after all, half in the dark.