REDACTED

DUMAS: So let's start by asking what we just saw.

HAYNES: Well, it's no Wise Guys.

[laughter]

LABARTHE: But if you look closely you'll spot cameos by Joe Piscopo...

DUMAS: ... and Danny Devito, yeah.

HAYNES: And even if he weren't there in the flesh, it's indisputable that the shadow of Joe Piscopo hangs over the film.

[laughter]

DUMAS: Okay, then. Well, onward into the valley. Personally, I found Redacted a lot less... assaultive, I guess, less combative than I was expecting it to be.

LABARTHE: Yeah.

DUMAS: From all the media coverage, all the blogging and whatnot, I just assumed it was going to be ferocious--

LABARTHE: -- a pure horrorshow, like something Tony Kaye or Michael Moore would have done. And it wasn't at all.

DUMAS: No, it wasn't.

LABARTHE: I actually found myself really deeply affected by the montage at the end. Really, really affected, out of nowhere. And I think that colors the entire experience of the film, retroactively -- it makes talking about the film more traumatic. And I think the people who -- the ones who claim that "DePalma has gone too far this time," or "the montage was utterly unnecessary" --

DUMAS: Like J. Hoberman.

LABARTHE: Yeah, "the montage is superfluous because the film really expresses what's going on in a very comprehensive and emotionally affecting way without the montage" -- I'd say, uhhhh, no, it doesn't. I think without that section at the end, it's not much of a movie. And it isn't much of a movie with those photographs at the end, although it has an effect.

HAYNES: Oh, I completely disagree with that. I think this is the most effective movie he's made in, oh, 30 years. In the sense that he really -- that this was a real thinking-through of the material in images, plugging back into the Godardian mode, which as you [Dumas] point out is really his lifeblood. I'm thinking of Notre Musique, which begins with a similar kind of montage, a twenty-minute montage of war atrocity footage in the Histoire(s) style, mixed up with movie clips and found footage and things like that.

LABARTHE: I haven't seen that one.

HAYNES: All of this atrocity footage is incorporated into this, say, Night of the Hunter-type cinema detritus -- so that all of this horror is passing through Cinema itself, in some sense. And I'd say the similarity isn t accidental. I think I'd even say that -- DePalma wouldn't agree with this, but I'm relieved that the images at the end of this were redacted, because it liberates or emphasizes their quality as image.

DUMAS: I agree. I think it's much more powerful with the redactions, with those Sharpie marks over the eyes and noses. The dehumanization is really forceful.

LABARTHE: It adds a frame to them that you don't have otherwise.

HAYNES: Yeah. And the Casualties of War comparison is fascinating -- the specific way he's repeating that narrative, the refraction to which he subjects that story, through all of these different modes and points of view --

DUMAS: Well, the number of specific beats from Casualties that show up here is really suprising, or maybe not at all surprising. Literally down to the dialogue. "Soldiers like me and Meserve, man, we need to be out there in the field, because if you lock us up, the only people you're helping are the Viet Cong."

LABARTHE: And the aggressive military interlocutor. Whole chunks of dialogue are picked up and only slightly changed.

HAYNES: Yeah. I think it's clear that he expects people who have seen Casualties to feel an intense deja-vu --

DUMAS: Even above and beyond the simple here-we-are-in-a-Vietnam-situation-again parallel.

LABARTHE: Yeah. And there's the "Here endeth the lesson" from The Untouchables, which acquires, like, three extra levels of referentiality, since that's a line that people quote anyway.

DUMAS: The scorpion and the ants from The Wild Bunch -- I thought that was by far the most disturbing film reference he gave us. Totally unexpected.

HAYNES: And again, that's something that validates your thesis about Vietnam as a blockbuster movie --

DUMAS: That thesis is not original with me, of course.

HAYNES: No, but there's maybe a sense that Redacted had to include something from The Wild Bunch in order to make that point.

DUMAS: Well, there's that bit of dialogue -- I don't remember who says it, perhaps it's from one of the website insertions, perhaps the angry punk girl at the end who says "we've all seen the movies and we know that the soldiers went crazy over there, because that's what they do."

LABARTHE: I was disappointed that he didn't have someone say, apropos of Coppola -- he should have had Salazar say, "this movie isn't about Iraq -- it IS Iraq."

[laughter]

DUMAS: I have this feeling that all of the talk around the movie -- all the Bill O'Reilly-ing, all the bloviating around the movie -- all of that IS the movie.

LABARTHE: Yeah, it's the intent of the movie.

DUMAS: Because all of the debate accomplishes what the movie sets out to do and perhaps doesn't succeed in doing.

LABARTHE: Right.

HAYNES: Here's where The Black Dahlia comes in -- I was wondering about this going into it, and perhaps I feel differently now, having seen it -- but it seems to me now that what he's doing, that what he's interested in accomplishing, is considering the problem of telling history as a purely grammatical problem. Last time, we were talking about the transitions, the wipes and dissolves and how they were used, and how The Black Dahlia was the first time he had used those kinds of outmoded, old Hollywood transitions. And here you have a lot of ostentatious transitions between shots --

DUMAS: Yes, the Macintosh, iMovie transitions, like the spiral wipes or the pixellizations --

LABARTHE: The plug-and-play transitions.

HAYNES: Yeah. And he says that he's making an anti-war film, but it seems to me that the larger concern is this purely formal, narrative problem. How do we tell the story of the Black Dahlia murder that we've already received from a thousand true-crime collections or A-and-E specials or from James Ellroy? We can't conceive of the murder apart from these tropes inherited from films of the 1940's.

LABARTHE: I hear what you're saying with that, but that may just be an elaborate way to excuse the really clumsy editing in these two movies. I think Redacted is one of the most badly edited movies I've ever seen.

HAYNES: Actually, I don't think so. Maybe this isn't something DePalma has articulated for himself, but I think he's right to think that the problem with telling stories from the Iraq war is a problem of context. He jumps from, say, this pretentious French documentary about checkpoint procedure to the soldiers' video diaries to YouTube and so forth --

LABARTHE: See, I don't think that was conceptualized at all. I think the problem is definitely there, but I don't think DePalma is doing anything about it.

HAYNES: I think he is. Maybe it's something that he doesn't know how to talk about, but I definitely think he has grasped that the narrative structure, the Casualties of War structure that's being repeated here, and to an extent the World War II movie with the pointedly diverse combat unit -- what's different is that this structure has to be refracted through all of these modes that are historically new, that figure action differently. How about you, did you like it?

DUMAS: I don't know. I really don't know. I haven'[t really worked through my impressions of it yet. It's clear that he's not really concerned here, as he was in Dahlia, with making a good movie. Aesthetics is not his main concern. I mean, he says in interviews that he made the movie to stop the war. I'm sure he's speaking in hyperbole --

LABARTHE: He shouldn't have worked with Pankow again. He should have hired [David] Fincher's editor, or something, someone under 30 --

DUMAS: Well, the entire crew was composed of 25-year-olds, and maybe he should have hired some hotshot kid to edit this one. Maybe.

HAYNES: All the students in the documentary class I teach, when they make films, they always, almost invariably demonstrate this amazing fluidity with certain kinds of technology -- digital cameras, Final Cut Pro, prepping clips for the web and so forth. It's almost a genetic thing with them. They know how to do that, how to make movies in this new digital way. And maybe DePalma's choices here are wrong, but he really brings out the seaminess --

LABARTHE: As in seams, visible seams.

HAYNES: Yes, the visible seams that the technology forces you to accept. You know, the only scenes that I thought were really wrong were the scenes taken by the surveillance camera in the military base --

DUMAS: Yes, they were too demonstrative.

HAYNES: And yet, it occurs to me that perhaps those were the scenes that were most directly referencing Casualties of War.

DUMAS: You know, all the reviews, or some of them, the negative ones, are all kind of insistently pointing out the inadequacy of the performances, which is what people were saying about Josh Hartnett in Dahlia. And DePalma's response has been, "well, of course they're overacting, they're on camera, and this is how people, real people, act when they know they're in front of a camera, they ham it up for their buddies" --

HAYNES: I was waiting for that -- I was watching for the overacting, having read all of those reviews also. And it's true that when you watch clips that teenagers have posted on YouTube, there's not -- how do you say this -- there's not much of an attempt to achieve anything like what we think of as naturalism.

DUMAS: Well, the thing is that there's nothing, and I mean nothing, in Redacted that isn't false. Every single aspect of it, the performances, the dialogue, the way that the situation -- the historical situation, the actual rape, the way that the rape is narrated -- everything about the movie is completely theatrical and false. So much so that you wonder how it is that these critics don't stop and ask themselves, "was this, perhaps, deliberate? Could it be that maybe the effects that this movie manages to achieve are the ones that were intended?" I mean, it's the Showgirls problem -- everyone assumes that that movie is completely accidental and terrible, whereas it doesn't take much close attention to see that Verhoeven was going for this kind of heightened, bipolar film experience, that maybe he cast Elizabeth Berkeley precisely for those qualities that she exhibits --

LABARTHE: Well, in this instance, I'm not sure that Redacted is fully the product of advance theorization.

DUMAS: But DePalma has said that when the movie was in the can, he himself wasn't sure how it was going to turn out -- it was an experiment in several different ways. And if he's experimenting with the technology, why not with performance and realism as well? I mean, it's clear that he's really going for broke here. There's not a single moment in the film that's even trying to suspend your disbelief -- that's not what he's trying to do. And DePalma has said as much, hasn't he? He's said in several interviews that -- he's referenced that Godard dictum about film being the truth 24 times a second, and he's referenced it negatively, as in, "no, film is falsity 24 times a second." I think he even quotes that directly in the movie, doesn't he? And that's especially true with this war in particular. He really goes to such extremes here to keep you disengaged --

LABARTHE: -- until the very end, when it just comes flooding in. In support of your argument, perhaps it's because of the artifice that the actual war photographs at the end are so -- well, so devastating. Maybe DePalma hasn't formulated it this directly, although perhaps he's been hinting at it, but -- perhaps the entire film is an excuse to show those photos.

DUMAS: Yeah.

LABARTHE: And it's an excuse to show these photos within a framework where they actually have emotional affect.

HAYNES: Alternatively, he could have - when he was making The Black Dahlia and he was shooting those screen tests with Mia Kershner, perhaps he was thinking "You know, I want to make a whole movie like this." The whole movie is someone offscreen shouting at someone onscreen about how they're performing --

LABARTHE: Which is a trope going back to Murder a la Mod.

HAYNES: Yes. There's that extended scene here where the guy -- Reno? Reno was talking about Vegas, his brother, which is so baffling --

DUMAS: It is strange.

LABARTHE: I liked it. I thought that scene was really well written, really well acted --

HAYNES: I did, too.

LABARTHE: It's this big chunk from elsewhere, maybe from -- I always forget what he was going to call his film about the union murders, the Yablonski murders --

DUMAS: Act of Vengeance.

LABARTHE: Right. He's finally done Act of Vengeance, and he did it in a single shot in the middle of another film.

DUMAS: Yeah.

LABARTHE: I wonder if that's how the Yablonski murders were actually committed.

DUMAS: What, you mean the specific details, with the guys coming to the front door and backing down and asking the guy for jobs --

LABARTHE: Right, and then coming back after a few beers with a crazy man in tow, the quote-unquote "wild card."

DUMAS: I don't know.

LABARTHE: At this point, I'd be surprised if it wasn't.

DUMAS: Am I recollecting correctly that that character, Vegas, actually refers to himself as a "bad apple?" Am I just misremembering that?

LABARTHE: I'm not sure.

DUMAS: Because that would go a long way towards, you know, anticipating certain arguments against the film and folding them into the movie itself.

LABARTHE: Of course now I'm going to spend the next two days how Fire was referenced here, in this movie, but...

[laughter]

DUMAS: But back to the question of the performances. Now, it seemed to me that all the actors were fine, they're good actors, and they're delivering this dialogue that's just impossibly elocutionary. Even the one who has the Minor Threat poster so you know he's straight-edge, and who's reading the John O'Hara --

HAYNES: Which is itself a kind of strange intertext -- that parable, the parable he recites, seems to sort of work against the political exigencies of the moment, or something. There seems to be this kind of fatalism that isn't -- Zizek talks about how one is continually hurtling towards your appointment with death --

LABARTHE: -- but you continually have to convince yourself that you're hurtling towards something else.

HAYNES: Right. And it seems very strange in this context, except for the serendipity of the fact that the movie takes place in Samarra. It seems like John O'Hara -- that's the kind of book that someone would be reading in a Korean War movie --

DUMAS: But DePalma has said before that Appointment in Samarra is his favorite novel, or one of his favorite novels, and the reason for that is that it's about someone who chooses his self-destruction simply because that's the only option he can imagine. There would be any number of books that would be specifically apropos for this, for the Iraq war... although I can't bring any to mind. Maybe "Prozac Nation."

HAYNES: But going back to this point -- it seemed to me that maybe the evidence that there's a more fertile imagination at work here than in The Black Dahlia is the fact that the movie keeps reinventing itself from scene to scene. A case in point is that final scene, where DePalma himself is off camera and he's telling the guy to "tell us a war story," and the guy responds with this incredible --

DUMAS: Yes, and it's almost verbatim the speech from Casualties of War -- really the very best scene in Casualties of War, the most heartrending -- where Erikssen is in the bar with the chaplain --

LABARTHE: Right --

DUMAS: "We went out on patrol, sir, and the other members of my squad kidnapped... and raped... a girl. And they murdered her. And I failed. To stop them." The moment where he gives us the log line for the movie we've just watched, and it's the first moment where the full weight of what happened sinks in --

HAYNES: But, see, it's the fact that this soldier would choose to tell this particular story in this particular circumstance, at a coming-home celebration, where we'd expect someone to relate any story other than the most traumatic one. And his wife coming back from the bathroom at that exact moment, when he's all teary-eyed -- at the moment it seemed very stagy, very Arthur Miller to me --

LABARTHE: Right.

HAYNES: But then, when he says "okay, enough already, let's take the picture," and the couple try to smile, and we get the freeze-frame -- there was a terrible frisson for me there --

LABARTHE: Oh, yeah, that was a great moment because you know that -- well, it's hard to come into this movie not knowing that there's going to be a climactic montage of actrocity photos. And I was curious how he was going to transition into that. And the frisson I got from that moment was the sudden knowledge, the precise moment when you think, "oh, THIS is how he's going to bring us into those photos, with this other snapshot" --

HAYNES: But this is what I was talking about earlier, the problem of syntax.

LABARTHE: Right, okay. Well, and specifically in regards to that, I was both pleased and kind of disappointed that he didn t use a flash there -- signalling the flash of his own camera. Not necessarily that he could have chosen not to do a freeze-frame at that moment --

HAYNES: But it's also the organizing principle of the whole film -- you know, how all of these moments are specifically chosen and organized, and in some cases redacted, for our understanding. There's that scene where Salazar is in the psychiatrist's office, and the shrink says, "is this part of your daily life?"

DUMAS: "Is this part of your war experience?"

HAYNES: Yeah, and I think that's exactly the question that interests him -- as opposed to Casualties of War, where it's much more a question of complicity, the complicity of voyeurism or something like that. The question here is more about what counts and what doesn't count, what's falling through the cracks, in terms of narrative organization -- what's shown and how it's organized. He's positing that it's a protest movie, but it seems like it shares this concern with The Black Dahlia, and certainly with Snake Eyes --

LABARTHE: Yes.

HAYNES: -- which is also concerned with filling in these gaps, or rather the impossibility of successfully recovering what's missing. It just seems that maybe that's where he is now.

LABARTHE: I don't think that DePalma is -- and this is part of [Dumas's] thesis, is that one of the crucial misunderstandings of DePalma is that DePalma is always trying to fill in the gaps in The Conspiracy, or in conspiracy stories. He's stated in all but so many words that you can't.

HAYNES: Right.

LABARTHE: From early on, with the Gerrit Graham character [in Greetings], he makes a joke out of it.

HAYNES: I don't mean that he's trying to fill in those gaps, to elaborate or fulfill the narrative or something like that. I mean that he's interested in the problem of selection--

LABARTHE: Right. Yeah. He's concerned with the futility of it.

DUMAS: Well, he talks about that in regards to JFK, not only the assassination itself but also the Oliver Stone movie and, you know, others like it --

LABARTHE: Executive Action.

DUMAS: Yes, Executive Action especially, that would be a perfect example of that Left tendency to want to understand exactly how and exactly when and by whom democracy really got assassinated. As if it were reducible to events.

HAYNES: I haven't seen that one.

DUMAS: Oh, it's crap. But this is what Zizek talks about, the drive to want to fill in the gaps in the Other, the grande autre. What DePalma does is to narrativize how that drive works, mostly politically. You can labor mightily to create a narrative, and -- It's the problem that Blow Out presents. Let's say you get your hands on a copy of Newsweek that just happens to contain, you know, 35 seconds of footage of an assassination, conveniently broken down and reproduced as 24 still frames per second, in its entirety. And you also happen to have a professional-speed recording, on a Nagra, of that assassination. And so you're going to go to your animation stand and put it all together, and then you'll have this proof, this godlike perspective on events that proves what really happened. But of course --

LABARTHE: It's going to get recuperated instantly into some other, previously existing generic form --

DUMAS: Yeah, the truth of that perspective won't get integrated and understood, whether it gets destroyed or simply ignored. And the only truth that s left is this generic trace, the scream of the woman in the shower. One of the things that I find especially weird about [Redacted] is --you know, we've been warned since [the film's premiere in] Venice, I guess, we've been warned by everybody that the film is incredibly brutal, and you walk out of it feeling as if you've been hit in the face with a wrecking ball. But, again, I walked out of this thinking --

LABARTHE: What movie did those people see?

DUM AS: Yeah, what -- Saw 4? I don't mean that the film isn't violent or shocking --

LABARTHE: It's a film by Brian DePalma.

DUMAS: Yes. I mean, like Casualties of War, it's built around a rape-murder. And I don't mean to -- I'm not ascribing this to DePalma's, you know, famous skills at suggesting violence that's happening offscreen, letting you fill in the gaps, like that beheading scene, with the guy bending down out of frame and then these awful sounds --

HAYNES: Which is a perfect recapitulation of the Nicholas Berg video.

DUMAS: Yes. And those hideously over-, or hyper-realistic sounds, like the body hitting the tile in the Vertigo restoration. That Verhoeven crunch. But it's not the kind of blockbuster film that the kids are going to see nowadays, with women hanging upside-down above, you know, a cement floor with a drain in it and getting sliced up. Can you imagine if DePalma had shot the central rape sequence with the kind of, you know, erotic attention that the Saw movies give to that kind of thing? Now, I haven't seen Saw so maybe I'm having exactly the same reaction to the unseen that Bill O'Reilly has to DePalma.

HAYNES: Well, that's a really good example of -- I'm sorry to invoke Fredric Jameson here, but the --

LABARTHE [suddenly shouting}: That's it! Out! Out!

[laughter]

LABARTHE: We drum you out!

HAYNES: I forgot it's in the bylaws.

[laughter]

HAYNES: But the guy who's out there getting sound effects for the -- he happens to be out there recording sound effects for this movie, at the same moment that, we find out later, there's this other guy out there taking photographs. This kind of accidental moment where all these things converge, and it just happens that those photographs fit, 24 frames a second --

LABARTHE: Well, and [Dumas] has said this before, the bit with the photographs is really overstating the case --

DUMAS: It goes way above and beyond anything like realism --

LABARTHE: It's utterly -- it's ridiculously implausible.

DUMAS: But plausibility is never DePalma's concern. Only in Casualties of War is he really attempting to establish, you know, the capital-R reality of an event.

HAYNES: But the thing about that scene in Blow Out -- okay, what if he had been able to make Redacted the way he originally intended to, as really a montage of found footage, all YouTube clips and news feeds and whatever that could reconstruct this story. Because now, we do live in this kind of media environment, where something like that would be possible, and that media environment was only a promise in 1981, when he was shooting Blow Out.

LABARTHE: Right.

HAYNES: And as for the idea of conspiracy, or The Conspiracy -- we're in this [unintelligible], with daily political scandals floating by like the ice floes in Nanook or something like that -- you know, Watergate-level scandals, or worse, appear in the newspaper every single fucking day, and there's absolutely no way to get any purchase on it, because it's constant.

DUMAS: Well, A.O. Scott, when he was reviewing [Redacted] in the New York Times, he said something like, "DePalma has misdiagnosed the problem. It's not that the American public doesn't have an awareness of what's happening. The real problem is that the whole country is in a state of real moral paralysis." The problem isn't that these images aren't available -- because they are and they aren't --

LABARTHE: Right. Right. Because we're all Jack Terry now. Anybody could reassemble all of this, and create a --

DUMAS: And yet, there's the fact that we've had seven years now of this administration, and every day we look at the papers and say, "why isn't this or that person in jail, I don't understand why they're not all in jail," and yet they don't go to jail, and they won't go to jail. And the Democrats will wave documents in the air, and then capitulate, and then wave more documents in the air and then capitulate. And it will continue. And here we are, sitting outside Peet's, talking about movies.

HAYNES: Yeah. But again it's a problem of assemblage. We have all these different -- and I'm sorry to keep hammering on this, but I really feel like this is where DePalma has shifted over the last twenty years or so -- even though he's saying that the pictures will stop the war, really it's the collection and the meaningful assemblage of those pictures that --

LABARTHE: Right. It's not the pictures that will stop the war; it's the narrative that will stop the war. And we haven't assembled one yet.

DUMAS: No, we've assembled a thousand of them. A thousand. How many documentary films about this administration have gotten glowing reviews from --

LABARTHE: Yes, you're absolutely right. I meant, more in the larger sense [Haynes was] just talking about -- Nancy Pelosi doesn't have a narrative to stop the war.

DUMAS: But...

LABARTHE: Only the narrative of Wise Guys can stop this war.

[laughter]

DUMAS: Well, but twenty years from now, kids will ask us, and I mean each of us -- they'll say, "well, what did YOU do?"

LABARTHE: Right.

DUMAS: "Didn't you know what was going on?" And we'll say, "of course we knew what was going on. The whole country knew." "Why didn't anything happen to stop it?" "I don't know. We just don't know." "Did you protest?" 'Well, no. But no one else did, either." I've encountered a few protests, small ones -- you know, fifteen people with yellow signs walking through the Panhandle chanting "No War For Oil!"

LABARTHE: Right.

DUMAS: I was here in San Francisco the day the war broke out. I had to fly back to Indiana that day, at the end of a week's visit. And I had to get in a cab to go to the airport four hours early because the streets were choked with angry people. The city just shut down. Thousands and thousands of people. But [the war] was just a fait accompli, and everyone simply rolled over, and now it just doesn't even matter that so many of us knew exactly what was going to happen, that it would be a terrible disaster. The loss of... I mean, I don't know that there was ever a...

LABARTHE: Democracy?

DUMAS: No, I mean -- [the three of us] were all born in or after 1970, after the Sixties, and we're all familiar with the narrative, the idea that the media has a determining, or I guess constructive role in public discourse --

LABARTHE: See, this is why I always tear up at the end of All The President's Men -- or for that matter Dick, which actually has a much more satisfying ending than All The President's Men. Seriously, I tear up at the end of both of those movies, because the narrative works, in both -- in all the senses of that phrase. Because that's what -- the message that everybody takes from All The President's Men and from quote-unquote "Watergate" is that "the system works." But it's not that the system works; it's that the narrative works.

DUMAS: Right.

HAYNES: I read an interview -- I suppose it was a whole article -- about protests and protesters, interviews with people who were active in the 60's and then younger people who are active today. I think it was in the East Bay Express. And the thrust of the article was that it's not that there are fewer protests now -- the problem is that it's totally dispersed, maybe because it's really difficult to get people to rally behind a single cause. Maybe the last time was the civil rights --

DUMAS: The last time was the release of Dressed to Kill.

HAYNES: And now there's a total dispersal [unintelligible]. When the Mexicans walked out a couple of years ago, there were parallels being made to Palestine, drawing correlations between these situations, but basically these groups are distinct from one another and they don't conceptualize their role as activists that way -- everything takes place within the horizon of their --

LABARTHE: I have to say, though, there's also -- I think that argument, that everything is more dispersed now, and we can't stop the war because all of the left-handed vegetarian anti-orthodontia splinter groups can't get together and -- well, that in and of itself is a very hardy Boomer trope about the fracturing of our society.

DUMAS: We've heard that before with the death of the 60's --

LABARTHE: Which is not to say that it's not true. But it's hard for me to take it terribly seriously --

[wind noise; unintelligible]

HAYNES: -- but only in the sense that -- well, the Washington Post at that point had a certain kind of prestige. And there was a certain kind of sanctity around journalism as an institution. But the way in which media outlets have changed and view their roles as providing entertainment, or as purely informational --

DUMAS: But one of the ways in which the Bush administration has operated is by discrediting the institution. That's what they did to the New York Times in the runup to the Iraq war, with the whole Judy Miller thing, the total cooptation and then flushing her away, right down the toilet. It's not just that the media is complicit -- it's that the Bush administration plugged right into them.

LABARTHE: And they did the same thing to the Democrats. The combination of the way the Bush-Rove-Cheney cabal managed to -- co-opt is the wrong word -- the way they managed them into irrelevance, combined with the fact that they realized that, electorally and procedurally, they needed exactly fifty percent plus one of whatever it was and no more. The whole Trent Lott management of the Senate, where any effort on votes number 52 through 100 is wasted effort -- I think it's something to link up with what you were saying, Jonathan, about this sort of fracturing and this sort of loss of institutional prestige, that I think there's a real slip-- none of these institutions are really responsible to anybody anymore.

HAYNES: And with the Patriot Act and all the subsequent maneuvering, they've managed to subject the Constitution to a kind of interpretation that it's never really suffered before, and suddenly it's now a matter of point of view, or personal opinion.

DUMAS: This is how Bill O'Reilly can sit there and say, "Redacted is chock full of photographs of dead American soldiers," even though that's manifestly not the case -- you could get a jury of twelve people to look at the film and testify that no, there are no photographs of dead American soldiers in it. But there won't be a tribunal to determine the truth of these statements. You can't -- what the Democrats don't understand is that you can't do battle with these people that way. Because truth is irrelevant. And it may be that truth really IS irrelevant now. The entire edifice -- the process of public discourse that worked so well in Vietnam just doesn't exist anymore.

LABARTHE: If it even existed at the time. I mean, that would be a really interesting thesis, to go back and look at the mechanisms and dynamics of all of that, of the intersection between journalism and public opinion and awareness, and to ask, "what was it, exactly, that really DID achieve that tipping point?"

HAYNES: Taylor Branch does that in his Martin Luther King books -- the role of churches, for example, which were loci of social activity and political discourse in black communities in Alabama and so on, how instrumental they were in making someone like Martin Luther King even possible.

DUMAS: Well, DePalma has been saying in interviews that, when we were in Vietnam, we saw the images and we were horrified and we stopped the war. But when did they start seeing the images -- 1967 or 1968? Or earlier? And when did the war end -- 1975, eight years later? What was the date of the Saigon evacuation?

LABARTHE: 75.

HAYNES: Our friend A_____ says that that's actually a misremembering, something that people have read back into the past in some ways. Hearts and Minds, for example, was the first time that people saw certain images. And the war was more or less over at that time. And the television news was under the same kinds of restrictions about showing American soldiers when they --

LABARTHE: Right. Because you can't -- we have the same arguments how about how all these images of warfare are redacted --

HAYNES: It's the draft. The absence of the draft.

LABARTHE: Yeah. That's the signal absence --

[wind noise, unintelligible]

DUMAS: But in 1974, how many television channels were there? Four? PBS and the three majors? And how many are there now -- 75,000?

LABARTHE: But paradoxically, the network news has become even more important, because that's where-- in terms of imagemaking, from the political standpoint -- that's how Bush captured enough of the center.

DUMAS: Or convinced us that he had captured enough of the center.

LABARTHE: Yeah.

DUMAS: Two things strike me. One is -- regarding Redacted and the script of Redacted -- the soldiers alternately act like soldiers and then explain their own meta-positions. They're constantly, you know, "I'm the wild card." "I'm the bad guy." "I'm the intellectual who will refuse to participate in this atrocity." "I have no conscience and I'm just trying to get into film school." It's like those thesis plays by Brecht, where people walk on and say things like, "I'm the commander of this revolutionary unit, and my function is X, Y, and Z," and it immediately dismantles any possibility of emotional engagement, at least theoretically. And that probably accounts for the quote-unquote "high school drama class" effect that this movie seems to be having on critics. One of the reasons it's so different from Casualties of War -- he did the version of the story where there's a linear narrative, and characters who resemble people, and a style that's -- not invisible, but more or less straightforward, and the characters don't necessarily have self-awareness in that particular way. It's not that [Redacted] is a totally new way of dealing with cinematic form, it didn't come out of nowhere --

LABARTHE: Yeah -- the most ill-informed shot in the entire movie to me was the point-of-view shot inside the car approaching the checkpoint, because you don't see a documentary cameraman climb out of the car in the next shot. Where did this shot come from?

DUMAS: But we already know that DePalma's intention is to show how false and constructed everything is, and that's just one of the more obvious instances of that strategy.

LABARTHE: I would be hard-pressed to buy that that was any sort of Brechtian move. I think that was just a mistake.

DUMAS: No. Those are the kinds of mistakes that DePalma simply does not make. DePalma makes all kinds of other mistakes, but that sort of mistake is not one of them.

LABARTHE: Well, but they put this whole thing together in just a couple of weeks --

DUMAS: But so what? You think he wasn't in control, just because he was working fast?

HAYNES: And that scene takes place within this French video documentary, which as DePalma knows is all about collecting beautiful images and not necessarily about any kind of Hollywood concept of shot continuity.

DUMAS: Before this movie came out, we'd all been talking about how DePalma, with his comments in interviews and so forth, how he just kept shooting himself in the foot -- sometimes he sounded naive about what he was doing, and then in the next interview he's on the defensive, and he just makes himself look like an idiot, because he's poor at articulating what his movies articulate so well. And he makes choices in the moment of the interview that just aren't particularly helpful to the cause of getting people to take him seriously and to take his movies seriously.

LABARTHE: But he could have done that thing he did after Snake Eyes, going on Good Morning America and sort of apologetically explaining that his original ending was incorrect, and that this new, lopsided, ungrammatical studio ending is much better.

HAYNES: Here's something. My brother sent me a text message recently saying "G. Gordon Liddy is a crazy asshole." Just out of the blue. And I thought, oh, he must be watching The U.S. Versus John Lennon, which is this really kind of tendentious documentary. And in it G. Gordon Liddy holds up the right-wing end of things, so you can tell where that's going. And so I called up my brother and we were talking about it, and he was talking about John Lennon at that time, or the way he's represented in this movie as being someone who has a real ingenuousness to him, and we were agreeing that there's something incredible in seeing this footage now, because he's so passionately convinced of the correctness of his point of view and his commitment to peace and all that. And my brother said, "you know, there's something kind of similar about DePalma."

LABARTHE: Right.

HAYNES: It's manifesting itself in a different way, but his exasperation is really the key thing. It's not necessarily that he's shooting himself in the foot -- it's not so black and white. It's that Redacted is about the moment where you go, "oh my god, here we are in Vietnam again, why are we so fucking stupid?" And what's important to him, at that level, is something we just can't intellectualize about, simply because... well, because you can't intellectualize stupidity.

DUMAS: "Why are we in this war? Why do we have these piles of bodies again? Why are these women getting raped again?"

LABARTHE: "Why the hell do I have to go and make Casualties of War again? Didn't you people get it the first time?"

HAYNES: Yeah, and so one of the things that's interesting [about Redacted] is not only that these characters are typing themselves in this Brechtian kind of way, but it's also how these soldiers are falling into these combat-movie tropes, and they see themselves almost instantaneously in terms of these film narratives.

DUMAS: Well, but where else are they going to learn these modes of behavior but from the movies? From their leadership? And where do the leaders get these modes of behavior but from the movies?

HAYNES: So you take all of these new-media iterations and you put them all together and you get the same story we ve been telling since 1945.

DUMAS: It boils down to the same irreducible thing.

HAYNES: And at the center of it is this, you know, heavily symbolic rape.

DUMAS: I remember when the news of this rape broke, whenever that was, and thinking, "wow, it's Casualties of War again." I mean, it was uncanny. And all three of us were joking that DePalma would go out and make a DV movie, Godard-style. And then --

LABARTHE: And then he did.

DUMAS: Since that is his Vietnam film, it would make sense that he would just shrug and pick up that particular machine again.

LABARTHE: Well, if we step back from everything -- we all agree that The Wild Bunch is about Vietnam. That's received knowledge, OK. Well, so what are Vietnam movies about?

DUMAS: Well, yeah.

LABARTHE: What is Casualties of War about? If you apply any kind of intellectual rigor to looking at movies, then -- Look, we know what Casualties was about for DePalma, or we've got a pretty good guess. That's [Dumas's] thesis.

DUMAS: We have a pretty good triangulation of it.

LABARTHE: But what is it about, as an object in circulation?

DUMAS: Didn't I read somewhere, probably on the Geoff Songs site, that there are soldiers who have seen, and felt passionately about, Casualties of War? I mean, I don't want to get too simple and talk about narratives and counternarratives, but that one --

HAYNES: What is Platoon about? What is Apocalypse Now about?

LABARTHE: Well, Apocalypse Now is plainly about American Zoetrope.

[laughter]

LABARTHE: "This war isn't about filmmaking! This war IS filmmaking!"

[wild laughter for 20 seconds, then long moment of silence]

HAYNES: Listen. We should convene again in a couple of weeks, and in the meantime we should watch every DePalma movie from Mission: Impossible on.

DUMAS: Is it time for us to start to conceptualize "late DePalma"?

HAYNES: Yeah, I think so. I really do think that maybe the last time we met, we were, and maybe we still are, all committed to an earlier version of quote-unquote "DePalma" -- The Black Dahlia in terms of Dressed to Kill and all of these grandiose cinematic gestures -- and maybe we missed that there is something very new, or different, going on.

DUMAS: Well, it's possible. Cronenberg, you know --

LABARTHE: There has been a radical shift in Cronenberg.

DUMAS: Yeah. The first new one was Existenz --

LABARTHE: Which, oddly enough, is a recapitulation of an earlier --

DUMAS: But whenever a director shifts, there's always a recapitulation, isn't there? It always begins with a restatement. Spielberg, part two, began with The Lost World. Because Schindler's List is the horizon, and once he reaches that, he's -- there's a loop that he gets caught in. And The Lost Worldtakes Jurassic Park, which is one of the most representative Spielbergs -- I mean, it's Jaws --

LABARTHE: Yeah. And the second time around he's no longer willing to throw the switch on the kid on the fence. Because that switch is now connected to Zyklon-B.

HAYNES: Over the last couple of months, [my girlfriend] and I have been channel-surfing and twice we've come across DePalma movies. One of them was Greetings, which I never expected to see on TV, but it was showing as "Robert DeNiro's first movie," so it was... you know. And the other one was Carrie. We tuned in right as the prom scene was beginning. And of course that's one of the most lushly conceived scenes in his whole oeuvre. But it occurred to me that he's just so careful in that scene, in the setting up of the various spatial relationships, and the way he uses the slow motion, which allows you to see each person's reaction and where they are in the room at that particular moment. Whereas now, it's almost the opposite. Now it's this totally fractured, Mr. Arkadin kind of world.

LABARTHE: And it's also, to go back to what we were talking about with cultural narrative and the way that objects in circulation are used -- the Carrie narrative, the revenge narrative, just isn't an option anymore.

HAYNES: Yeah. "Trauma" is an overgeneralized category now, but I would say that -- you were talking about how we all expected to feel totally devastated and speechless at the end of Redacted, and we didn't, exactly. Whereas [my girlfriend] saw Casualties of War twenty years ago and she can't stop thinking about it, to the point where she can't bear it if anyone even mentions the movie. Whereas I think maybe some of his more recent films are, I guess, postulating the possibility of a place beyond that experience, somehow. These are very imprecise formulations.

LABARTHE: Well, if you want to take an auteurist and psychoanalytic approach, and then tie in what you were saying about Spielberg and Cronenberg -- when these directors punch through their own final and originary narrative, then they're healed, but they're no longer decent filmmakers. Or are at least different filmmakers.

DUMAS: That's important, an important distinction, because Cronenberg, for instance -- his skills have become almost supernatural now.

HAYNES: I think there's a tremendous amount of richness in these recent DePalma movies.

LABARTHE: Oh, I agree. I agree.

DUMAS: Even if they're not often particularly good.

LABARTHE: Right, even though there are always moments. Personally I don't think DePalma has made his Schindler's List.

DUMAS: Yeah. I don't know what that movie could be.

LABARTHE: Neither do I. You would almost want to say that Casualties of War could have been it, but then again it couldn't have.

HAYNES: It almost makes me think that -- well, the Godard comparison is unfortunate in some ways, but it makes me think of what Pauline Kael was saying in the mid-60's, that Godard clearly doesn't have the sensibility to make masterpieces. He's not going to do Bergman or Fellini and consolidate his body of work into one of these great summary kinds of statements, and I think that's true about DePalma also. It's really intriguing that he's caught between doing Capone Rising and, you know, Shoot the Messenger or whatever. You really have the sense that he doesn't quite know what he's doing anymore.

DUMAS: But I don't think --

HAYNES: No, no, I mean that it's productive in some ways, as opposed to Spielberg, who has to pretend that he always knows exactly what he's doing.

DUMAS: Exactly.

HAYNES: Spielberg says that he couldn't make Duel now because he knows too much about class.

[laughter]

HAYNES: That's exactly what Spielberg says.

LABARTHE: Really?

HAYNES: Yes. Or, with Close Encounters, he says "I couldn't make that now because I know what it means to be a father."

LABARTHE: Right, right. And likewise, he couldn't make Jurassic Park now because he knows what it's like to be a dinosaur.

[laughter]

HAYNES: That's right. That's right. He couldn t make Jurassic Park anymore because he knows what it's like to be Richard Attenborough.

[laughter]

HAYNES: The YouTube stuff in this movie I thought was phenomenal, actually.

DUMAS: The punk girl.

HAYNES: Especially the confession, where the guy is wearing that weird mask and his voice is so distorted. Really grotesque.

LABARTHE: And the Dutch angle on it.

DUMAS: Very strange. Well, but again, there's not one single moment of --

LABARTHE: Or the insurgents.

DUMAS: Yeah, where they cut the guy's head off. There's not one moment in the movie that's not... MOVIE. And yet the movie is just not... MOVIE.

LABARTHE: Right.

HAYNES: Well, but that's another thing he has in common with late Godard. That's the way Notre Musique feels in a lot of ways, this way in which everything is passing into cinema, and so that makes it difficult to understand what it even means to make cinema anymore. That scene we were talking about from The Wild Bunch is really hilarious, because not only does he include the reference, but then the soldier who's standing above it picks up his camera and starts filming it.

DUMAS: Giggling.

HAYNES: Yeah.

DUMAS: "I'm shooting you and you're shooting me, and we're shooting each other, and now we're watching you filming me filming you filming me."

HAYNES: That's a great moment, too, when Salazar is kidnapped.

DUMAS: Yeah. It's like a Blake Edwards gag. It's a comedy moment -- they pull up behind him, and then they yank him into the truck --

HAYNES: And the camera just sits there.

DUMAS: And then immediately the other guy appears in the corner of the frame and walks in, obviously sees the camera, and comes at it. Well, it's the Blow Out problem again -- the mixture of tones is so unstable, and from moment to moment you don't know if you're laughing, or --

HAYNES: It's certainly a lot wittier than The Black Dahlia. Which is not what I was expecting.

DUMAS: Except for Fiona Shaw.

LABARTHE: Speaking of DePalma shifting roles around and recapitulating things -- formally, it's the same as those Mia Kirschner scenes, with DePalma offscreen lecturing her, but he's serving a really different narrative function -- because in Redacted, DePalma is playing essentially the woman at the other table in the dinner scene in Dressed to Kill.

DUMAS: Mary Davenport.

LABARTHE: Yeah. Because it's entirely just suggested, obviously, since you never see him, but you're just imagining his horrified to reaction to this. And in the same way as the end of Dressed to Kill, he's indexing his presumption of your presumption of his presumption of your reaction to what you're watching.

HAYNES: Yeah, that's right. A really troubling moment in Redacted and one that I think is really key is the one in which Salazar is called upon to hold the woman down, and he does. Which thwarts expectations in some ways, because you don't expect the guy who's making a visual diary to participate --

LABARTHE: Right. And then there's the very odd assonance of naming the feeble conscience-stricken character after the Tom Hanks figure in Bonfire of the Vanities.

DUMAS: And the fact that Salazar, who gets killed, is nicknamed "Sally" --

LABARTHE: Like Sally Bedina, yeah.

HAYNES: This is really obvious, and I feel weird saying it, but just so we have a lot of things on the table for the next time we meet -- one of the things that Redacted makes really clear about this war, what makes the Iraq war unique -- as opposed to Vietnam, even -- is the way that certain images, like the beheading, are functioning like bombs, like IED's. They're planted and they're out there, and each time a clip is played it enacts a certain kind of violence all over again.

DUMAS: Well, the Viet Cong didn't have DV or YouTube.

HAYNES: That Nicholas Berg thing -- one guy gets killed, and the ramifications of it are impossible to assess. Given how quickly Redacted was made and given how little money they had, it's amazing how structured it actually is.

DUMAS: Well, we were speaking of the idea that it's a badly edited film, and yet that amateurishness is exactly what sets it apart from Casualties. No artifice, or all artifice. And yet it's a classically conceived film in certain ways, visually -- all long shots, establishing shots, none of the shattered editing that seems to predominate right now. Which probably would make it unreadable in certain ways to people of a certain --

LABARTHE: Hey. Does anybody else think he watched Starship Troopers pretty carefully?

DUMAS: I'm sure he has. He watches everything. I'm sure he pays attention to Verhoeven.

LABARTHE: That movie handled the intertextuality, and the Web-ification of images, I thought in a much more visually sophisticated and narratively sophisticated way. But a lot of the transitions were very similar. And it seems that a lot of the thinking-through of the way to get from one image to another owed a lot to Verhoeven's work in that movie.

DUMAS: Possibly. Hey, we've got to stop now. Are we agreed to convene again in a couple of weeks?

HAYNES: And we'll all watch Mission to Mars again in the meantime.

LABARTHE: Hey now, that might be going a little too far --

[laughter]

HAYNES: Yeah. But Snake Eyes and some of the others. And there's probably more to be said about Redacted. Anybody else going to see it again?

DUMAS: Maybe in a couple of weeks. I'd like to sit with it for a while first.

LABARTHE: Yeah, perhaps later. I'll see if [my girlfriend] wants to go, but I don't think she will.

HAYNES: I'll see it again this week if I can.

DUMAS: Okay. Motion to adjourn.

LABARTHE: Seconded.