From Word To Word

I held my monthly Dinner and a Doc event last night, screening Laura Poitras’ My Country, My Country (Independent Television Service / Praxis Film Works, 2006). The film follows an Iraqi doctor as he prepares to run in the 2005 Iraqi elections, providing both surprisingly intimate footage of the doctor’s family and more general footage of the election preparations among local Iraqis, private security contractors, coalition forces, and UN election workers.

Poitras’ representation of the complex questions raised by the occupation and the elections is sincere and thoughtful. There is no defense of a particular politics, either Iraqi or American, only a sense of living alongside a family and a nation as they experience how democracy will emerge in their own situation. The fear and anxiety of the people living through these events is clearly portrayed, but so is also is the courage and even the humour, like when the Doctor’s teenage daughter asks that he pay her for her vote, or when a scene of a military administrator casually handing out $80,000 in cash to a contractor is followed by a shot of a helicopter gunner’s helmet, the camera clearly focused on the words “panic button” printed on its side.

One of the themes that Poitras emphasises particularly throughout the film is that of the election as a “show”. She includes several scenes where American or international officials openely use the word ’show’ to describe the election, and uses one such instance to draw attention to the word directly. The scene is of an American officer training Iraqi police in how to respond to the potential security issues that the election might pose. The officer begins by telling the trainees that “policing in a democracy is different,” and then, referring to the election, he explains that they will have “front row seats to the greatest show in the world.” One of the trainees questions him about his use of the word ’show’, asking whether the election will be “just a show.” The officer assures him that it will be for real, that it will be “real history,” but the trainee is still clearly confused as to why the word ’show’ is being used.

What is at issue in this scene, I think, is a difference in understanding about the nature of spectacle. The officer understands the staging that any election entails, the international interest and investment in this particular election, and the degree of mediatization that this particular election is likely to generate. He understands that, to a greater rather than to a lesser degree, the election is a show. Even so, this understanding does not pose a problem to him. His understanding that the election is a spectacle does not prevent him from believing in the election as an election. He may not have believe that it will necessarily produce a good government, but he still believes in the idea of the election as such, despite its spectacular and mediatized nature. He sees no paradox in calling the election both “the greatest show in the world” and a “real history.”

The Iraqi trainee, however, does not understand the nature of spectacle in the same way. He may suspect that the whole election is just a show. In fact, this is his first suspicion when the officer uses the word. However, he does not see how it can be both a show and a real history. The two ideas are separated for him; their coincidence is as strange for him as it is natural for the officer.

Yet, I think that the officer is preparing his trainees more fully than he knows when his first lesson in democratic policing involves the dismantling of the line between spectacle and reality. While all political power, whether democratic or otherwise, is essentailly staged, it is perhaps unique to democracy to admit this and to insist on its validity despite the fact. Where other forms of political power tend to conceal the ways that they are staged, democracy presents itself precisely as a show, but demands that we believe in it nevertheless.