More evidence that Errol Morris is one of the world’s biggest blowhards is in his ponderous op-ed piece in the Times.

His subject was the widely seen photo of an Iranian weapons test. It transpired after the photo was published around the world that it was apparently altered; parts of the image seemed to have been duplicated. Reports said that it was possible one of the four missiles in the launch had misfired, and the image had been photoshopped to hide the incident.

For Morris, this is a ready-made occasion to proffer mundanity …

The alteration of photos for propaganda purposes has been with us as long as photography itself; it is not an invention of the digital age.

… after mundanity…

But while digitally altered photographs can easily fool the eye, they often leave telltale footprints that allow them to be unmasked as forgeries.

In Morris’s mind, however, this are deep thoughts—so deep that they require, as you can see in the second one, some four clashing metaphors to get across.

He predictably digresses into the distortion of photographs by Communist regimes. Morris then writes:

We understand Stalin’s intentions by removing comrades, but what is the purpose of these Iranian missile photographs? They are clearly altered. The question remains: Why, and to what end?

The portentous emphases are Morris’s own. As I’ve noted before, it is one of the filmmaker’s tics to ask questions with an air of profundity. But when you examine the questions you realize they aren’t very profound. The ones here, for example, are almost risible.

But now Morris is on a roll:

The danger here is not in three missiles versus four.

What does that mean? Who said it was?

We do not understand the intentions behind the photograph—real or digitally manipulated.

Yes, we do. We understand why they were released, and have a pretty good idea why they were altered.

Is it a threat? A warning? Or a bluff?

What do those questions mean?

All we really know about the photograph is that the government of Iran wanted to get the attention of the world, and it succeeded.

No—they got our attention with their missile launch. The photo is a sideshow. It wasn’t even released officially by the Iranians; it was taken, reports said, from a military web site in Iran by Agence France-Presse.

Why is this guy taken seriously?

Wired profiles Errol Morris with a lengthy story. It doesn’t mention the debate over Morris’ paying people to be in his new documentary, Standard Operating Procedure.

But it does have another example of something I’ve mentioned before, namely Morris’s ability to posit seemingly meaningful questions that, if you think about them for about, oh, thirty seconds, really aren’t that profound:

It is one of the outstanding ironies of Morris’ story that the photographs, which were seen by the world as documentary evidence of torture, were used as a way to distract attention from the brutal crimes that took place off-camera. While the low-ranking soldiers caught in the staged pictures went to prison, the teams of professional Army and CIA interrogators who actually tortured and murdered prisoners inside Abu Ghraib were never identified or punished.

First of all, who “used” the photos in that way? The U.S. service people who took the photos were clearly mistreating the prisoners they were supposed to be guarding. They were appropriately punished. But the implication here is that there was a unseen hand (literally absent in the sentence by the use of the passive) “using” the shots to “distract attention.”

There’s a separate issue of how far up the chain of command awareness ran of these activities—I’m talking specifically about the abuse by low-level soldiers and the photo-taking. I haven’t seen the movie, but it doesn’t seem that Morris is making that point.

He’s saying the controversy of the photos is covering up systematic torture and abuse by interrogators. I’m not a big-deal political documentary maker, but hasn’t that been the subject of years of front-page news of scandals, congressional hearings, political maneuvering and court cases? That whole “distracting attention” plan sure isn’t working! And the interrogators haven’t been tried because it’s a U.S. policy that, obviously, is under discussion, though you or I might think it’s wrong.

This is what I mean by Morris’s sophistry. “Isn’t that interesting?” he’s always quoted as saying. Well, no. Imagine a right-winger saying something similar: “The real irony is that the treatment of pregnancy in ‘Juno’ and ‘Knocked Up’ is being used to distract attention from the real crime, which is that 1.5 million innocent babies are brutally murdered in the womb each year. I find that very interesting.” He wouldn’t be taken seriously. Why is Errol Morris?

When Hitsville wrote originally about the fact that filmmaker Errol Morris had paid some of the subjects of his new documentary, “Standard Operating Procedure,” one commenter here took issue with it. He made this remark:

While some documentaries are surely “journalistic,” I would love to meet the first asshole who decided that all documentaries be judged according to the standards of journalism.

Well, I am that asshole. Now that the issue has made it to the New York Times, It’s worth explaining exactly why it’s wrong.

1) You can say that documentary making is a form of journalism, or you can say that they both have the same role, which by definition is to convey some species of factual information. Inherent in that process are certain ethical requirements. The stream of furors over fabricators in the press and in the sleazy world of memoir publishing, and, now, with the interest in this angle, in the documentary world, is strong evidence that people feel the promulgators of such stuff should be honest. Any species of documentary has its parallel in the print world. There is the advocacy piece; there are re-enactments of key scenes, based on the testimony of participants; and of course high-level investigative work. These are all valid, and viewers, like readers, are smart and can easily apprehend the difference between “Woodstock” and “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Hoop Dreams,” “The Sorrow and the Pity” and “Crumb,” and they can surmise on the objectivity of the makers with some reliability as well. But that ability breaks down when a documentary that appears to be operating at a very high level of objectivity was actually put together with some rules broken behind the scenes.

2) When you pay someone to be in a documentary, or a source for a piece of journalism, you create an incentive for them to embellish their story. They are working for you now; maybe they should give value for money. The scene being described might take on a little more drama; the tears for the camera may come a little bit faster. A filmmaker of great integrity might work hard to minimize those corruptions of the truth, perhaps. Others won’t.

3) It creates a market, in the economic sense of the word, for the truth. Many subjects of documentaries are of interest to one person—the documentary makers. Others have a much wider appeal and can make money writing their own book. A wide swath in the middle, however, will be delighted to find a potential new income stream available to them. That’s good for them, bad for the dissemination of information to the rest of us.

4) It’s possible that Morris that opened up a portentous can of worms: Here he has created a market for information of great national import. It’s hard enough for reporters to get information of governmental malfeasance; now American service people in the Middle East know there is a money to be made talking about bad behavior over there. Why should they talk to a legitimate reporter when they might be able to score a documentarian with a checkbook?

Those are the real-world reasons why you shouldn’t pay for interviews. The joke, of course, is that I didn’t even have to make those arguments. Morris knew it was wrong. If paying for interviews is OK, why did Morris just not tell people? When asked about this at a screening of the film, according to the original blog post about it, you can see he didn’t answer the question right away. (”Morris eventually acknowledged that he did, in fact, pay his interview subjects, jokingly explaining that he did so because ‘I have a lot of money and want to share it.’)

Here’s what Morris said when he was asked about it by a GQ interviewer:

“I don’t know if it’s a great idea for me to talk about it. I’ve always felt that if someone specifically asked me, I wouldn’t lie about it, because I think that would be incredibly stupid.”

This issue has a tangential similarity to the sophistry in the debate about payola in the music industry. It’s not illegal to take money from a record company to play a song on the air; it’s illegal to do that and not tell listeners. The argument isn’t about taking the money: it’s that both parties want to keep it secret. No one’s telling Morris he can’t pay for interviews; and if by his lights it’s ok to do so, why not just tell people at the beginning of the film—”Some of the participants were paid to be interviewed”?

Instead, as I wrote earlier, Morris has a penchant for gnomic utterances that are less than they seem. Here he displays another tick, turning an ethical issue that reflects badly on himself (paying people for interviews in his movies without revealing the fact) into an ethical pat on the back for himself. (”Yes I robbed the bank, but I made a personal vow to myself that I would answer truthfully if asked about it.”)

Morris also retreats into half-truths and semantic games. In a statement made to Hollywood Elsewhere, Morris said he paid Fred Leuchter, the subject of his film Dr. Death, to appear in certain scenes, but not to be interviewed. This is a specious distinction. He also muddied the issue by talking about travel expenses, when travel expenses are a side issue.

And when the NYT wrote about it today, the reporters quote him indirectly saying he had paid interviewers “for their time,” another bit of euphemism. (“We weren’t paying the congressman for his vote, Your Honor; we were paying him for his time.”)

And it’s probable, too, that Morris has been complicit in allowing the impression to get out that he didn’t pay for interviewers. In an extremely favorable NYT feature story on the new film several weeks ago was this passage:

That Mr. Morris was able to wrangle Ms. England—as well as Janis Karpinski, Abu Ghraib’s former commanding officer, and Tim Dugan, a contract interrogator, among others—came about through a careful and persistent cultivation of their subjects and their lawyers.

It’s possible that the reporter wrote that on his own authority and that the issue never came up in his interview with Morris. Possible, but doubtful.

The final argument Morris puts forth is that he couldn’t have gotten the interviews otherwise. This, too, is intellectually incoherent. (”There’s nothing wrong with doing this, but in any case I had to.”) It is the documentary-maker’s job to find the interviews, just as it is the reporter’s job to get the story. Sometimes, it can’t be got.

In my discussion with the commenter, I said that I hadn’t contended that paying for the interviews affected the content or integrity of the film, though of course it did. Journalism has all sorts of moral issues when it comes to seducing sources, as Janet Malcolm impoliticly noted many years ago. But there are some ground rules, and it helps both the craft and, more importantly, the understanding of audiences to adhere to them. In a world transfixed by reality TV that’s made up, memoirs that aren’t, and a fair and balanced cable channel that isn’t, I’d like to point out that the problem with the world today does not extend to the overstrict observance of such niceties. Where you stand matters.

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Hitsville: “Does Errol Morris pay people to be in his films?”

The original And the Winner Is… blog item.

The original Hollywood Elsewhere item.

NYT: “Film on Abu Ghraib puts focus on paid interviews”

NYT: “Of crime and perception at Abu Ghraib.”

Stephen Whitty, in his New Jersey Star-Ledger blog, goes after Errol Morris for paying for some of the interviews in his new film, “Standard Operating Procedure.” This is his argument against the practice:

Money, however, changes everything. Once cash is involved, all guiding lights are off, and it’s hard to even feel your way to the facts. Is this person saying this because he thinks it’s what I want to hear? Because he suspects it will make a better story? Will the fourth source hold out for more money, knowing what I paid the third one, and will he then feel obligated to exaggerate, so I feel I got my money’s worth?

Your guess is as good as mine—which makes my job, as a reporter, pretty much superfluous. Because if I can’t weigh motives and decide who may or may not be telling the truth, how dare I ask you to do that work for me?

I can think of several other reasons as well, which I list in a discussion with Hitsville commenter Jason Cohn here.

—————-

Previously in Hitsville:

Does Errol Morris pay people to be in his films?

Consider this, from Scott Feinberg, of the “And the Winner is …” blog, which tracks Oscars movies. Feinberg was writing about an early showing of “Standard Operating Procedure” at Brandeis University in NYC Massachusetts and a subsequent Q&A with its director, Errol Morris. The film contains lengthy interviews with some of the American service people who took the Abu Ghraib photos while working as prison guards, most notably Lynndie England, who was seen posing with a leash around the neck of one Iraqi prisoner.

Many grafs down in his discussion, Feinberg writes this:

A side note: I was a bit surprised by the answer Morris gave to a question about the interviews after the film. The questioner, a noted journalist, asked Morris how he convinced these individuals to agree to be interviewed, and specifically if he paid them at all, “which is not okay in my profession.” Morris eventually acknowledged that he did, in fact, pay his interview subjects, jokingly explaining that he did so because “I have a lot of money and want to share it.” (He did not disclose an amount of money or if this is his standard practice.) I, frankly, don’t really have a problem with this—it got these people to sit down and talk about their behavior, and I don’t see how it would in any way encourage them to speak anything other than the truth—except for the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, this compensation was not openly acknowledged, as it should have been since this is a documentary that purports not to have any agenda other than seeking the truth, and in my estimation does not. I worry that because Morris did not do so, those who wish to disparage SOP, for whatever reason, may latch onto this as evidence of some secret agenda, just as they do in response to the use of re-enactments in his films, including this one.

Emphasis added. I don’t want to disparage SOP, but I don’t think it’s right for journalists to pay for interviews. But the question here is what Morris meant. A post by Jeffrey Wells, on Hollywood Elsewhere, muddies the waters. He includes the following statement from Morris, one that he apparently solicited:

“As documentaries have become more and more mainstream entertainment, people are aware that there is money involved. The more successful documentaries become, the harder and harder it is to get people to do them for nothing.

“People [are] aware of my success and respond accordingly. I never paid people for the interviews in The Thin Blue Line, but Stephen Hawking was paid a lot of money for the rights to his book and his participation in A Brief History of Time. Fred Leuchter was paid when I asked him to appear in several scenes, e.g., the scene of him riding up and down in a van de Graff generator at the Boston Museum of Science. I did not pay him for the interview, but if he had insisted I might have done so. McNamara was not paid a fee for The Fog of War, but of course we paid his travel and hotel. Why wouldn’t we?

“The professor who asked the question at Brandeis is a print journalist. I don’t know if she has ever done a seventeen-hour interview over two days, as I did with Janis Karpinski. I didn’t pay Karpinski, but we paid for hotel, travel and per diem. It is customary in the motion picture business. To do [otherwise] would be (I believe) unconscionable. It is difficult to ask people for such an investment of time without taking care of them in some way—and that may involve paying them.

“I paid the ‘bad apples’ because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise. Without these extensive interviews, no one would ever know their stories. I can live with it.”

Emphasis added. I find this statement odd. There’s nothing wrong with paying for people’s travel expenses, of course, and if that’s all he did he would have said so. But it certainly looks like he’s clouding the issue by conflating different things. For example, it appears he did pay Leuchter, who was the subject of Dr. Death; I don’t really understand the distinction Morris is making about paying him only for one scene, when Leuchter’s in the entire movie. And then, at the very end of a long response, after yet again making a big deal of paying only for expenses, Morris seems to acknowledge that he did flat-out pay some of his interview subjects.

Even if you’re not as rigid as Hitsville on this issue it’s certainly true, as Feinberg said, that the fact should be shared with viewers.

The NYT did a slavering piece on Morris and his new film last week. Morris has been writing a blog for the paper on its web site. In the story, we were told:

That Mr. Morris was able to wrangle Ms. England—as well as Janis Karpinski, Abu Ghraib’s former commanding officer, and Tim Dugan, a contract interrogator, among others—came about through a careful and persistent cultivation of their subjects and their lawyers.

It seems that some checkbook journalism may have been involved as well.

Morris’s filmic charms have always been slightly opaque. Looked at one way, his work can seem profound; rearrange your mind slightly, however, and the films can be suddenly trite and vaporous. Morris has a knack, too, for the gnomic utterance that doesn’t really hold up. For example, this, from Feinberg’s piece:

What spurred him to make a film about these particular iconic images, he explained on Thursday, was his amazement that although everyone has seen these images, nobody really knows anything about them.

After that Feinberg asks about thirty questions we supposedly don’t know the answer to, most of which I could pretty much answer off the top of my head. (”What sorts of punishments did the soldiers depicted receive? … Would the public be as enraged about the acts depicted if we had never seen visual evidence of them?”) We know an immense amount about the photos; they created one of the bigest news stories of the year and there were multiple criminal trials held.

Similarly, here’s Morris in the Times story:

“One of the incredibly deep ironies,” he said, “is that the photographs could serve as both an exposé and as a cover-up. That they would encourage people not to look any further and make them think they had seen everything. And that is very interesting.”

That’s not “interesting.” It’s just wrong. How did they encourage people not to look any farther? How did they make us think we’d seen everything? Didn’t they provoke a half-dozen trials and a worldwide scandal?

In this month’s GQ, he’s less evasive:

Morris is fascinated by why nearly every interview in Berlin began with a variation of the same question: How did you get them to talk to you?

“Why is that such an interesting question?” he wonders.

I tell him that I am more fascinated by the question that they didn’t ask. For all their curiosity in this area, not one single journalist asked, “Did you pay them?”

“It is interesting,” he agrees. “I don’t know if it’s a great idea for me to talk about it. I’ve always felt that if someone specifically asked me, I wouldn’t lie about it, because I think that would be incredibly stupid.”

It is not the first time he has paid a subject of his films. When he returned to find Fred Leuchter, the subject of Mr. Death who fecklessly becomes a hero in Holocaust-denial circles, several years after first interviewing him, he paid him to continue the project—payments he rationalized in an interview at the time on the basis that he paid actors to act out scenes for his documentaries and he was asking Leuchter to re-create certain images from his life as an actor.

For Standard Operating Procedure, the first of the five “bad apples” Morris interviewed, Javal Davis, asked for a fee and Morris agreed. “The rest just followed in due course.” (Only the bad apples. If other subjects refused to be interviewed without payment, Morris didn’t pay them.) “In this instance, I justified it—I think that’s how the contracts were written—that I was paying them as consultants or advisers to the project. Yes and no. I was essentially, for all intents and purposes, paying them to be interviewed.”

Here again you can see that tic of asking a question that seems to be deep but really isn’t: “Why is that such an interesting question?” He’s even “fascinated” by the question.

Well, because it’s hard to get people to do stuff like that if you don’t pay them.