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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
 MEMORIAL DAY
One half teen-horror film setup, one half dramatization of the Abu Ghraib scandal, Memorial Day is on the surface a potent collage of sickening, tantalizing imagery that simultaneously repels and attracts. On leave in Ocean City, Maryland, a young army battalion performs the ritual of spring break, an altered state of perpetual catharsis, which, of course, includes the three F’s—fightin’, flauntin’, and fornicatin’. A vérité-style DV camera “documents” the escapades (though we are soon aware that this avant-garde feature is a “not-umentary”), and the sad images arrive in familiar sequence—public sex acts, drunken driving, and violent gay bashing. Strangely, like the opening of a drive-in slasher flick, we recognize at once the limitless freedom and the apparent lack of authority anywhere. We are similarly lulled into a state of increased vulnerability, enjoying the ride along with these twentysomethings, even as they get closer and closer to the knife. The second half, though, jars our intellect back into activity, with an uncompromising re-creation of the notorious prison camp. The totally wasted GI’s are now back at work, and when they’re not confused and blindly sorting through the quagmire of finding insurgents, they are tending prisoners. Touching on many of the infamous details of the scandal, director Josh Fox brings us perhaps as close as we’ve ever been to Abu Ghraib. The proximity of his hand-held lens notwithstanding, the second act initiates a prior relationship with the soldiers, and suddenly the prison feels scarier and more intimate. Fox has made the majority of his work in experimental theater, and the colloquially familiar Memorial Day feels less like a change of venue and rather an extension of the same psychological exploration and political commentary that characterizes his critically acclaimed stage work with the International WOW Company. The spring break sequence is a stream of consciousness experiment, without an overseeing authority, ostensibly the cops, and through inebriation, Freud’s superego is removed as well. What remains is terrifying. It’s an unchecked primordial stew of lust and rage, tempered by the angst of inexperience and the fear of responsibility. Fox subtly and provocatively includes the irritating voice of former president George W. Bush, several ironic messages posted on church marquees, and the endless horror that is strip mall architecture. It’s a fearsome tableau of Americana that could be a harsh indictment if it wasn’t so much a psychiatric assessment. Suddenly, though, we’re in the basements of Abu Ghraib, and, again lacking authority figures, the soldiers are in control of chained prisoners with bags over their heads. “Nature will look at this and say it’s good,” confesses one private to Fox’s probing camera, in a kind of a Manifest Destiny speech, inferring that there is a tendency in nature for more powerful things to destroy what’s around them. It seems, though, to prove more convincingly that nature’s powerful feel a need to intellectually justify the misuse of that power. There’s a narrative that came out of
Iraq about the command chain of the military system and the violence it
produced at the bottom—that
the prisoner abuse was not a few “bad apples,” but a systemic
problem, i.e. it came from higher up. Josh Fox’s take is slightly
different, though he similarly rejects the “bad apples” notion. Perhaps
our American lifestyle is a part of the system as well, encouraging the
strong to take advantage of the weak every step of the way. If we
condone (and justify) senseless violence and exploitation on the beaches
of Ocean City, how then will we behave any differently at war?
Michael Lee
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