Rendition, Disorder, Affliction

"Rendition" casts Jake Gyllenhaal as a CIA analyst confronted with the process of extraordinary rendition. Supervising a secret torture of a terror suspect, Douglas Freeman (Gyllenhaal) questions whether this practice even works to get information. Since all of this goes on in secret, Gyllenhaal didn’t have any real CIA agents with whom to research.

Gyllenhaal on Rendition: "I never talked to anybody who I don’t think would admit or say they were involved in any sort of extraordinary rendition situation," said Gyllenhaal. "I only talked to CIA officers for fact checking. I think I found that when you talk to someone who has a job like that it's very technical and the questions you want as an actor are a little bit more emotional, but I think that’s a real key into a character anyway. A lot of it was actually watching movies of people who played CIA agents and officers, and then a couple of movies of a couple of people who have played alcoholics".Since the movie is designed to provoke debate on issues, Gyllenhaal hopes that practicality can enter the discussion. "I think that as a culture, I think that the hope in watching this character, that there can be people who can make these decisions, I think it takes you out of the present of what is actually going on. I think there is a lot more muck than we think that there is. I think hope is the wrong message right now. I think really working at it is the right message. I don't know how successfully that was portrayed. I don't know if we did. That's an audience's decision to make that decision but I just wanted to say that." Source: www.canmag.com

"The humdrum corruption of political machinery, the passivity of screen- addled citizens, ignorant pedagogues, job-gobbling immigrants, malevolent divines, greedy corporate grandees, the timidity of bourgeois journalists, the sinister conniving of neoconservative and liberal intellectuals, and homosexuals living in holy matrimony have all been adduced as causes of the national decline. Proximity cannot be denied, yet none of these putative causes appears to be sufficient to the magnitude of the disorder. What can be said with some certainty, however, is that we are now exiles in a strange land; America is no longer America.

In one domain of our national life after another, the old American ideals and liberties have been replaced by their opposites. Torture, once a reliable attribute of Nazis, Communists, and Eastern despots, has become official government policy.

The disease manifested itself almost everywhere at once, but the superficial effects were most spectacular in our national mirror: the Media, which absorbed and digested the once proud opposition of the Press and made of it a mere legitimizer of horrors.

[...] Aggressive, ill-informed, irrational, and largely unsupported opinion predominates in our age of infectious autosatire (on millions of blogs, yes, but also on television and radio talk shows, in op-ed columns, news analysis, and “expert” commentary) and threatens, in a corollary of Gresham’s law, to drive out all other modes of articulate human expression. And by far the greatest number of opinions expressed by any given SSS host concern the doings of celebrities and other by-products of the publicity stream. The relative merits of Denzel Washington’s or Russell Crowe’s latest performances are discussed and analyzed with the same insipid vocabulary applied to the fund-raising prowess and speaking abilities of Barack Obama and John McCain.
What we need is an experimental subject, an “I” sufficiently armed with narrative powers both literary and historical, gifts of irony and indirection, and the soothing balms of description and implication, to go forth and find stories that might counteract the unhappy effects of our disorder. What distinguishes such dispatches is what might be called the radical first person: the individual consciousness of the writer becomes paramount. The reader is thereby privy to the writer’s experience and receives direct confirmation of its truth value. What results is not mere consumable opinion, the mystical commodity of mediated capitalism, but the raw material of a considered judgment, whether aesthetic, political, or ethical. In that judgment lies the cure for our affliction".
Source: www.harpers.org