One of the most chilling lines in Nineteen Eighty-Four is O’Brien’s ‘We shall meet again in the place where there is no darkness.’ Julia and Winston interpret this as meaning life after they have destroyed the Party but in fact O’Brien means it quite literally. The place with no darkness is a cell with a blinding light which bores into your skull and is never switched off. And sometimes at 4 am I know how Winston felt, because every day just after sunrise I wake up. It doesn’t matter if it’s sunny or cloudy, the light assaults me like a blow on the head. I have a face mask; last night I even tried putting an eiderdown up over the curtains; it makes no difference. OH reckons it’s to do with the pineal gland and I don’t know what I can do about that but it’s the same every year and I just have to put up with it until I get used to it. Right now I’ve reached that stage of fatigue where I just feel spaced and everything seems unreal.
I’ve often wondered how I would stand up to torture. Very badly, I suspect; I don’t have a high tolerance for pain at all – which made last night’s film all the more horrifying. As it was our last night of Netflix (we periodically cancel it to save money and then start up again) we trawled through to see if there was anything unmissable. We’d already seen the much-trailed series Eric about a boy who goes missing on his way to school; it’s excellent though I didn’t think it was quite as good as the reviews said. But Benedict Cumberbatch was thoroughly compelling as a New York puppeteer who tries to get his son back by making a new puppet in the shape of a monster called Eric and ends up talking to the monster. And the series conveys perfectly well the atmosphere and culture of a 1980’s drama.
Cumberbatch is everywhere right now and he turned up again in the film we eventually decided on: The Mauritanian.
I hadn’t heard of this film but it turned out to be the true story of Mohammedou Slahi, a Mauritanian Muslim arrested on the slenderest of evidence and taken to Guantanamo Bay without charge. There he is put in a cell alone and interrogated for 18 hours a day. His only friend is a man in the exercise yard who he never sees and who he calls Marseilles because that’s where he’s from. Slahi is visited by US lawyer Nancy Hollander played (none too convincingly in my opinion) by Jodie Foster. She doesn’t necessarily believe in his innocence but is concerned that he should get a fair trial and begins a long battle to get hold of the relevant evidence. For the prosecution Stuart Couch, played by Cumberbatch, is your full-on Southern military type desperate to catch the guys responsible for 9/11 particularly because his own brother in law was killed in that attack (to my ear at least Cumberbatch’s deep southern growl is absolutely perfect.) But after many attempts by the authorities to withhold evidence and Crouch’s discovery of Slahi’s story he begins to have doubts.
His superior says at one point, ‘We need to get someone for this.’
‘Someone,’ he replies. ‘Not just anyone.’
When the interrogations fail to produce a confession Slahi is taken to another cell and tortured. The cell is freezing cold; they play loud garage music and flashing lights and there are frequent beatings and waterboardings. It is horrendous. Mo eventually gets his trial and is released but – this is the most shameful part of the story – the Obama government appeals and he is given 7 more years, albeit without waterboarding. Eventually he is freed and publishes his diaries. Again these are heavily redacted but the publishers printed every page, including those blacked out by the censor, which is quite a statement in itself. Guantanamo is one of the most shameful events in modern US history – and it’s still going on. Men are still being held there without trial and without being charged, and in my opinion the biggest failure of Obama’s regime was that he didn’t close it. Here’s the film:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761112/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt
and here, should you choose to watch it, is Eric:
https://shorturl.at/4Fb2lt/4Fb2l
Kinda puts my early mornings into perspective, don’t it?
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 