One question that I asked Sidney Lumet and Tom Fontana was: Does the artist have a duty to be patriotic in a time of national crisis and emergency? “Strip Search” is a deeply complex film, but it is mostly a cautionary film–the Patriot Act and the erosion of civil liberties are examined as morally destructive. But in asking that question, I wondered whether the opposite conclusion is also possible: The moral corrosion might be necessary, at least for a temporary time, because the business of national security demands it. And if that is the case, if terrorism threatens us more than the loss of all of our freedoms–applied to some people and hopefully for only a short time–then shouldn’t the artist sign on and assist in the war effort? Artists very much did support America’s involvement in World War II. Why are so few artists unwilling to get behind the war on terrorism?
Artists are generally on the left of the political spectrum, taking positions of anti-war and anti-violence. For this reason, “Strip Search” is not a surprising film. Artists are drawn to radicals, as we discussed in the E.L. Doctorow/Tony Kushner Forum, but not all radicals are glorified. For instance, anti-abortion protestors are not depicted as righteous, redemptive figures in our cultural landscape.
But in a way, both President Bush, and Sidney Lumet and Tom Fontana, are saying the same thing, but applying it completely differently. Everyone claims to be fighting on behalf of freedom, but the President’s solution has ultimately compromised civil liberties, and in effect, freedom. And yet what “Strip Search” proposes–not fighting terrorism with all means necessary–might also result in the end of what we once knew to be American freedom.
The Chinese interrogator in “Strip Search,” toward the end of the film, proclaims with great regret, “It is not my fault that we don’t live in a perfect world.” He says this–by way of both lament and justification–just before he begins to strip search the American graduate student who is studying in China and who is suspected of having ties to terrorism.
We don’t live in a perfect world, but what licenses are now granted on account of that realization?
