Stories of dignity and complexity

Called by some—and I wouldn’t disagree—one of the greatest living writers of short stories, Alice Munro, who is 81, keeps producing fiction of the highest quality.

Dear Life (Knopf, 2012, $26.95), the Canadian writer’s 13^th story collection, includes 14 stories, though the last four, she writes, introducing a section called “Finale,” “form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.”

Yet even these last four each have a structure, a pace and an epiphany that make them good stories, even Munro stories, despite her comments in “Dear Life,” the final story, that “this is not a story, only life,” and, “It wouldn’t do in fiction.”

As I and others have noted, Munro’s stories have the feel of novels. They often encompass a character’s lifespan. And while they develop through a series of scenes played out in both physical and psychological detail, she suddenly will often move the narrative forward or backward several years or even decades.

For example, in “Train,” one of the book’s better stories, though it’s difficult to rank one higher than another, after following Jackson and Belle through many years of living together in a nonsexual relationship, he abandons her, and we’ve moved years ahead. Then we suddenly go back several decades to when Jackson was in high school. We’re in a different, though related narrative that provides insight into the one we were reading. Then we return to the present, and the entire story now makes better sense.

Munro often uses trains in her stories, including three here. Trains involve movement, provide means of escape and often lead to encounters with strangers.

In “To Reach Japan,” a woman leaves her husband in Vancouver and gets on a train with her daughter to go to Toronto, where she hopes to find a man she met at a party. She sends a message to the newspaper where he works that reads, “Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle—and hoping it will reach Japan.”

In “Leaving Maverley,” another of the better stories, Ray, a night watchman, is asked to walk a girl home from the movie theater where works on Saturday nights as a ticket taker. These two end up leaving the town of Maverley for different reasons. Leah, the girl, runs off with the minister’s son, a saxophone player. Years pass, and scandal follows Leah, who leaves the minister’s son for a minister, who eventually leaves her for another minister. Meanwhile, Ray marries and, years later, goes to visit his wife in a hospital, where she lies in a coma. When she dies, he carries with him “something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.”

Many of the stories are set in the 1950s, while often spilling forward into the 1970s or beyond. And Munro punctuates the stories with comments from the narrators about how things were back then. Greta, in “To Reach Japan,” notes that “feminism was not even a word people used.” And in “Amundsen,” the narrator mentions butter and comments that “it was called butter but it was really orange-streaked margarine, colored in the kitchen as was the only legal way in those days.”

Her women characters often face a world in which their options for work are limited to housewife, office worker, teacher or nurse, but they tend to find ways of fighting these limitations.

Munro’s language is so accessible and engrossing that it disguises the complexity of her stories. She also captures characters with apt descriptions. In describing Greta and her husband, Peter, she writes: “She avoided anything useful like the plague. It seemed he did the opposite.” And later: “His opinions were something like his complexion,” which was light-colored, never flushed.

In “Pride,” a story about two sad, lonely people who move into a sad, lonely old age, the unnamed narrator, a man with a harelip who has cut himself off from friendship, describes Oneida: “She was laughing almost soundlessly, a laugh that might even indicate that she was in pain.”

We as readers are sure that these two will end up together, but in the end his pride keeps them apart. Munro wrests the story from being depressing by ending with an arresting image of baby skunks playing in a birdbath in the backyard. Oneida says, “Have you ever seen such a sight?” The narrator says, “Never. I thought she might say another thing, and spoil it, but no, neither of us did. We were as glad as we could be.” 

This is what Munro does in all her stories. She takes us into characters’ lives so that they feel real. She takes them through various experiences that don’t usually go where we expect. And while she refuses to concoct happy endings, her characters often come to places of deeper understanding that also bring readers a greater sense of the complexity and dignity of people’s lives.

Torture doesn't work, in spite of what movies say

For years it’s been common knowledge that the CIA practices torture but won’t admit to it. Officials in the George W. Bush administration, notably Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA director Michael Hayden, have defended the use of torture in investigation of terrorists.

Then, on Dec. 13, 2012, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved a report concluding that “harsh interrogation measures used by the CIA did not produce significant intelligence breakthroughs,” writes Greg Miller in the Washington Post (Dec. 14, 2012).

The Democrats on the committee adopted the 6,000-page document over the objections of the committee’s Republicans (big surprise), even though the CIA’s use of water boarding and other severe interrogation techniques were banned four years ago.

The report is significant, nevertheless, because it is independent and details the agency’s efforts to “break” dozens of detainees through physical and psychological duress.

Some question the relevance of the report because, writes Miller, “the agency abandoned its harshest interrogation methods years before President Obama was elected, and the Justice Department began backing away from memos it had issued that had served as the legal basis for the program.”

Still, the report is important because it confronts a popular perception, predominant in many movies and TV shows, that such torture does produce helpful information. The recent film Zero Dark Thirty is a case in point.

The film chronicles the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May 2011. It shows torture in its graphic horror. Yet it also depicts CIA agents obtaining information from detainees who have been tortured, though the information comes when the detainees are being fed or treated kindly.

Steve Coll in the Feb. 7 issue of The New York Review of Books goes further and calls the film "disturbing" and "misleading." While acknowledging artistic license and the need to condense actual events, he says "the filmmakers cannot, on the one hand, claim authenticity as journalists while, on the other, citing art as an excuse for shoddy reporting about a subject as important as whether torture had a vital part in the search for bin Laden."

Evidence shows that useful information rarely comes from torture. Treating detainees kindly and building trust has been shown to be much more effective in obtaining accurate information. For example, read The Looming Tower: Al-Quaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (Knopf, 2006), which shows an FBI agent obtaining information after developing a relationship with a prisoner and gaining his trust.

While CIA activities are largely secret, there is evidence from FBI agents present at "black sites" where CIA conducted "enhanced interrogation," i.e., torture, that they found these techniques "counterproductive and morally wrong," writes Coll.

The film also depicts the use of secret prisons around the world where detainees were sent to be interrogated, i.e., tortured. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chair of the committee, issued a written statement that called the decisions to use these secret prisons “terrible mistakes.”

While all but one of the Republicans on the committee opposed the report, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, issued a statement saying the committee’s work shows that “cruel” treatment of prisoners “is not only wrong in principle and a stain on our country’s conscience but also an ineffective and unreliable means of gathering intelligence.”

No one knows when or if the report will be made public. For now, it has been turned over to the Obama administration and the CIA to provide a chance for them to comment, writes Miller.

Miller reports that “earlier this year, the Justice Department closed investigations into alleged abuses, eliminating the prospect that CIA operatives who had gone beyond the approved methods would face criminal charges.”

While any final report may not have much impact on government practice, it could help counter the public perception, based mostly on fictional treatments, that torture is effective.

The deeper truth is that, whether or not torture is effective, it's just plain wrong.

My top 10 films of 2012

It's that time of year again. Each year I develop a top 10 list for MediaMatters, a website I write for, mostly film reviews. My list is limited by being in a market where some major films--I'm thinking Amour--have not yet come to the theater. That film may be like this year's A Separation, too late to appear on this year's list but perhaps appearing on next year's.

There were many good films in 2012. I could easily make a top 20 list. Narrowing it to 10 was not easy. And to decide on a No. 1, I turned to a film that won last year’s Oscar for best foreign film but wasn’t released widely here until well into 2012.

1. A Separation. This outstanding film from Iran tells of a married couple faced with a difficult decision—to improve the life of their daughter by moving to another country or to stay in Iran and look after a deteriorating parent who has Alzheimer’s disease. They decide to separate and put off divorce. Their separation leads to a succession of events that disrupt several lives and show the painful consequences of our decisions.

2. Lincoln. This political drama about President Lincoln’s struggle to get the 13^th Amendment, abolishing slavery, passed before the Confederacy surrendered is one of the best-written films of the year. And Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln heads a stellar cast as he reveals the human Lincoln behind the icon we tend to exalt.

3. Zero Dark Thirty. This riveting film chronicles the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May 2011. It uses an intelligent script and an outstanding performance by Jessica Chastain to follow the trail of clues and tenacity required to find bin Laden. While its depiction of obtaining information from torture is misleading, it shows its horror.

4. Argo. This film recounts the true story, with white-knuckle suspense added, about a CIA “exfiltration” specialist who concocts a risky plan to free six Americans who take shelter at the home of the Canadian ambassador after Iranians take other U.S. embassy workers hostage in 1979. Director Ben Affleck captures the context of Iranian hatred of the United States for its support of a ruthless dictator.

5. Beasts of the Southern Wild. This mythic tale is told through the viewpoint of Hushpuppy (6-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis in an amazing performance). She lives with her father, Wink, in the Bathtub, a southern Delta community at the edge of the world. He has a mysterious illness and tries to prepare Hushpuppy with tough love. A storm hits, and the ice caps melt, unleashing an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. Hushpuppy goes in search of her lost mother. Likely you’ve not seen a film like this.

6. Life of Pi. This fable based on the popular, Booker Prize-winning book is about storytelling and belief. It tells the amazing story of a teenage boy surviving a journey across the Pacific on a lifeboat in the company of a 450-pound Bengal tiger. This magical film is one of the most religious released this year.

7. Moonrise Kingdom. This sweet, funny film follows two 12-year-olds who fall in love and run away on an island off New England in 1965. Various factions of the town mobilize to search for them, and the town is turned upside down. Director Wes Anderson has crafted another of his fables, but he includes telling though eccentric detail and shows respect for all his characters.

8. Cloud Atlas. This amazing adaptation of David Mitchell’s intricate novel melds six stories from six different time periods, including two in the future, and shows how the actions of individuals, often against repressive systems, reverberate through time. Despite some miscues, the editing here is often ingenious. Those who haven’t read the book, however, may have trouble following the narrative.

9. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This gem of a film captures the feelings of Charlie, a high school freshman who is not only an introvert and smart but has lost his best friend to suicide and suffers from a mental illness. Two seniors, step-siblings Sam and Patrick, adopt him into the “wallflowers,” their group of outsiders, and help him adjust to the real world.

10. The Invisible War. This gut-wrenching documentary explores the preponderance of rape in the U.S. military. The film uses interviews of victims of sexual assault with cases going back to the 1960s and up to the present and reveals the unjust military system that provides no accountability to rapists.

Rape in the military

Kirby Dick’ gut-wrenching documentary The Invisible War explores the preponderance of rape in the U.S. military.

The film uses interviews of victims of sexual assault with cases going back to the 1960s and up to the present. While each story has its particular differences, all reflect the double horror of not only being raped but seeing their perpetrators walk away.

In addition, many are injured in the assaults and can’t get proper medical care for the long-term effects of those injuries, physical and psychological.

The film reveals the unjust military system that provides no accountability to rapists. There is no court these victims can appeal to. Instead, each unit is under the authority of a unit commander, who serves as judge and jury in such cases. At times, this person is the perpetrator, and the victim is left with no recourse but to resign, often with a dishonorable discharge.

Those interviewed for the film joined the armed services (whether Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines or Coast Guard) out of a strong patriotism. Many had other family members who had military careers.

The statistics, which, the film notes, all come from the Department of Defense, are alarming:

• more than 20 percent of women in the U.S. military have been sexually assaulted;

• in 1991, over 200,000 had reported sexual assault;

• 80 percent of assaults are not reported;

• 15 percent of recruits have committed rape before entering the military;

• 40 percent of homeless female veterans have been raped;

• women who have been raped have a higher PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) rate than men who have been in combat;

• 1 percent of men (20,000 per year) in the military are sexually assaulted (and not by homosexuals);

• the average sex offender has 300 victims.

The film also interviews military counselors in the film who point out that when there is no accountability for sexual assaults, that is an invitation for sex offenders to do as they wish.

Congress has tried to address this travesty, and each time, spokespeople for the military insist they have a no-tolerance policy. Yet it continues without abate. And since the military is outside the civil court system, victims have no recourse. The courts have ruled that rape is an occupational hazard of the military.

The military does acknowledge some cases. In 2010, it cataloged 3,158 cases of sexual assault, but only a sixth of these came to court-martial, and only 175 men, one in 20 of those charged, did any jail time.

Major General Mary Kay Kellogg, director of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, tells the camera that assault victims should petition the Defense Department’s Attorney General. But of the 2,994 cases forwarded to the AG, not one was investigated.

We learn that one woman’s assailant “is still in the Air Force and was awarded Airman of the Year during her rape investigation.” Another assailant “became a supervisor at a major U.S. corporation and sexually assaulted a female employee. He was never charged and lives in Queens, N.Y.”

Last April 14, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta watched the film. Two days later he took the decision to prosecute away from commanders.

It’s something, but it’s not nearly enough. 

Today, The Invisible War received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary. I hope this means more people will see it and that action is taken to address such injustice.