Strip Search portrays two precisely parallel situations: an
female American in China being questioned by the state police, and
an male Arab in the States being questioned by the FBI. The "hook"
of the film is that the dialogue is almost exactly the same in both
situations, with both interrogators using an arrogant attitude and
cruel tactics to humiliate the prisoner.
Most of the people who saw the film misunderstood the point. The author
of the film is not presenting a case that the FBI agent in the film
is following actual FBI procedures, nor even that a rogue FBI agent
could do so. Nor is he making a case that China treats American
prisoners or any other prisoners in this manner. It's not a
documentary. The point is that
it is possible for a viewer to see the exact same fictional scene,
one time feeling sympathy for the prisoner, the other time not. In
other words, the film isn't about the characters at all. It's about
your reaction to them. It is intended to provoke your thinking about
this matter. If you watched the FBI agent interrogate the Arab
without having seen the parallel story, would you have felt any
sympathy for the Arab? Perhaps not. That is probably because you
feel that the embarrassment of a few individuals is a small price to
pay to defeat terrorism. Then why do you feel sympathy for the
American woman in the exact same situation? After all, what's wrong
is wrong, isn't it?
To make the point even more dramatic, the two interrogations
produce different results. The Arab man is innocent. The American
woman is really guilty of the action she has been accused of. This
offers us one more dose of shame if we sympathized with the woman.
Once more, the film is about us, and our reactions.
There is another point as well. Showing the American in China
drives home the point that when we take away the rights of the Arab
man, we take away our own rights as well. In two ways. (1) We cede
additional powers to our own government when we allow them to abuse
prisoners. The unjustly accused prisoner may someday be one of us.
(2) We assure that American prisoners will be treated with
equal disrespect by their governments. If our government uses
torture, it tells the world that the United States does not consider
itself subject to the international agreements on this matter. That
means Americans will be tortured when the shoe is on the other foot.
When we take away rights, we give up those rights in parallel. This
point is emphasized by the film's prologue, in which an American
teacher asks his students whether they would be willing to give up
their rights for a day in order to assure that terrorism would be
defeated. After they agree, he asks whether they would do it
for ten years. The real questions are, of course, how many rights
can be ceded, which ones, and for how long? The film doesn't really
offer any answers; it merely poses the questions. You have to admit
they are good questions.
The film is very short - only 55 minutes long with some framing
devices at the outer edges, so the interrogation section is only
about 50 minutes long, meaning that it's a 25 minute movie shown
twice. In other words, Strip Search is really more of a single
provocative idea than a fully-realized script. Even at its existing
length, I felt it was a bit too long. After all, the point is made
instantly, and then the script has nowhere else to go, since the
characters are basically undeveloped archetypes and not real people
with whom we have established any connection. It doesn't help that
the dialogue is just basic hack work and that there are heavy-handed intercuts of American Presidents making idealistic speeches about
freedom.
Oh, well, if you get bored with the manipulative gimmick after
fifteen minutes, you can always enjoy the full frontal and rear
nudity.
The Strip Search project underwent many changes, and I don't know
all the details. It was originally intended to be a full-length
Sydney Lumet film. The HBO site originally listed it at 120 minutes,
and published a cast list which featured Ellen Barkin, Rashida Jones, Oliver
Platt, and others who didn't make the cut. I suppose those actors
did perform in some scenes, because IMDb lists them as having been
in "deleted scenes," but I don't know why the network decided to
pare the show down to just the 55 minute version.
Strip Search was the subject of considerable controversy in 2004
since it aired in the May of a Presidential election year. There was
a substantial brouhaha after its first airing, and the second airing
was cancelled. The film is rarely shown, and it has yet to come to
DVD. I just don't know the full story behind it. I can guess, but it
would be all speculation. There had to have been substantial
pressure exerted on HBO to persuade them to pull the film from their
schedule, because they are independent and tough-minded. In turn,
there must have been a substantial viewer outcry when they made the
decision. I suppose we will have to wait for the disc to hear the
details and see the deleted footage. I for one will get the disk if
it includes all a commentary, deleted footage and the complete
history of the project, because all of that is far more interesting
than the good but underdeveloped idea which finally ended up on
screen.
