There is no mode of expression, no technique of production that will instantly produce truth or falsehood. There is no veritas lens—no lens that provides a “truthful” picture of events. There is cinéma vérité and kino pravda but no cinematic truth.

The engine of uncovering truth is not some special lens or even the unadorned human eye; it is unadorned human reason.

Thus spake director Errol Morris in the pages of the New York Times a mere month ago. And he couldn’t be more right.

There was a time, it seems, when documentaries were generally perceived as Agents of Truth; that is, if you “heard it in a documentary,” you could rest assured that reality had been more or less presented to you.

Then along came Errol Morris’ own The Thin Blue Line, in which he used deductive re-enactments to demonstrate that a man in Texas had been railroaded for a murder he did not commit. And along came Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, which the filmmaker defended not as fact but as creative non-fiction, a form of mythologizing.

Now, it seems, documentaries left and right are being pejoratively tarred with the adjective “propagandistic”—as if that’s somehow a new development. But, as serious students of film know full well, it has always been impossible, with the brain disengaged, to digest cinema of any sort and still expect to find truth.

Kudos to Errol Morris, then, for taking the opportunity, when releasing Standard Operating Procedure, to educate us not only about Abu Ghraib but about documentary filmmaking as well. If you want to learn a thing or two about what makes films (and human psychology) tick, read Morris’ two-part column in the Times (and all of the attached comments)… and then go see SOP.

It’s not that SOP is the best documentary in the world, or even the best doc that Morris, in his stellar career, has made. Heck, I wouldn’t even put SOP in the top ten docs from the last twelve months. But digging into Abu Ghraib while dissecting cinematic technique might be one of the most worthwhile pop-culture exercises you’ll have in a good long time… and it will probably come in mighty handy as the spin doctors get under way and this year’s presidential race wends toward the Big November Letdown.

So what do we have in SOP? Morris sits down with many of the principals of the Abu Ghraib scandal—Karpinski, Graner I, Graner II, England, and others—and walks them through the photographic evidence of what occurred in that prison. In a very methodical and structured manner, Morris demonstrates that much of what we “think we know” based on the “documentary evidence” that we saw paraded on cable news and the Internet is simply the result of wishful thinking.

We might be surprised, for instance, to learn that the photographs we’ve seen came from only a relatively small number of specific incidents. (It turns out that many of the incidents were photographed from multiple angles.) We may be intrigued to know that forensic techniques can place almost all of the hundreds of photographs in evidence into a specific timeline, correlated with concrete knowledge of who was on duty at the time and who wasn’t. We may be shocked to learn that all of the photographs come from a mere four-month window. And we may wonder: What was happening in other parts of the prison? What kinds of things were going on before Graner started snapping photos, and after the evidence purge got under way?

What horrific things were in the photos that none of us, Morris included, have ever seen?

We might also be surprised at how human, if very flawed, Lynndie England, Sabrina Harman, and others come off. “If you consider yourself already dead,” says one of the disciplined soldiers, “you can do all the shit you have to do”—and it’s hard not to empathize with such 20-somethings called on to do the work of the devil when some of them are not even old enough to legally drink. It’s also easy to see that—when you’ve been trained to accept that it’s okay to “degrade” another human being, as Harman puts it, as long as you don’t hit them—there’s an institutional moral failure which trumps private judgment. We can also groan in internal assent when one contractor talks about the daily torment he still lives with.

The great irony of the film is that, while the frontliners see the injustice of being mere leaves of a very corrupt tree, these soldiers express themselves in terms which make it clear that they never considered from which very similar tree their prisoners might have dropped. “Go what I’ve gone through,” says one soldier, for example. “See how nice you’ll be.” Indeed. I imagine there are 10,000 ex-prisoners from Abu Ghraib who know a thing or two about that sentiment.

The downside to the film, really, is that it tells us nothing substantially new about Abu Ghraib. Morris comes up with no smoking gun, no further fuel for conspiracy theories, no startling revelations or new photo troves. If you followed Abu Ghraib closely at all when the story broke, in fact, you might leave the theater thinking you’ve just seen your memory recycled… albeit with very nice editing and a haunting, effective score.

But if you’re paying close attention, and thinking about what Morris has said about the cinema, you might see things in a very different light. You might start thinking more healthily, for instance, about your consumption of mass media.

And that’s very worthwhile. To again quote Morris:

If seeing is believing, then we better be damn careful about what we show people, including ourselves, because—regardless of what it is—we are likely to uncritically believe it.

Standard Operating Procedure is rated R for “disturbing images and content involving torture and graphic nudity, and for language.” This is R material, to be sure—but it’s neither as graphic nor disturbing as I had expected it to be. The material is still plenty disturbing, though. And unless you want to be disturbed (or need to be disturbed, or think those with you need to be disturbed), think very carefully about going to see this film.

Courtesy of a local public publicist, Greg attended a press screening of Standard Operating Procedure.