Nick Flynn’s The Ticking is the Bomb and “Exposure” by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris approach the torture at Abu Ghraib in two distinct ways as described in Bill Nichols’ Introduction to Documentary.
Flynn’s text operates mostly as a Social Issue Documentary. He is drawing parallels between the events at Abu Ghraib and his personal life by exploring the torture at Abu Ghraib as part of a larger trend of apathetic attitudes towards violence enacted by the American Government. In keeping with the mode of a social issue documentary, Flynn “interacts with subjects in relation to the social issue” (Nichols 192). The plural is important there. He interacts with multiple people despite putting attention on some more than others. The instance of him interacting with detainees stands out particularly.
His style and structure are important as well. A social issue documentary “may rely heavily on rhetoric to engage or persuade the reader” (Nichols 192). Flynn’s poetic style and non-linear narrative structure act as rhetorical tools to engage the reader. He is exploring two topics: his family life and the Abu Ghraib torture and both are emotionally intense and thus, demanding of the reader on an emotional level. However, they are different and he balances them by switching from one to the other.
As opposed to Flynn’s piece, Morris and Gourevitch’s “Exposure” takes the form of a personal portrait documentary. As such, this piece “stresses embodied, situated knowledge, enduring importance of specific moments and individual experiences” by providing the reader with detailed narratives of specific moments in the story of Sabrina Harman at Abu Ghraib (Nichols 193). It starts with a letter she wrote to her wife on her very first night (Morris and Gourevitch). One of the most vivid instances of this is the incident with the cat:
The cat’s head was one of Harman’s gags. She had a kitten that was killed by a dog, and since it had no visible wounds she performed a rough autopsy, discovered organ damage, and then an M.P. buddy mummified its head. They gave it pebbles for eyes, and Sabrina photographed it in various inventive settings: on a bus seat with sunglasses, smoking a cigarette, wearing a tiny camouflage boonie hat, floating on a little pillow in the wading pool, with flowers behind its ears. She took more than ninety photographs and two videos of it. The series, in its weird obsessiveness and dark comedy, has the quality of conceptual art. At one time or another, at least fifteen of Harman’s fellow-M.P.s posed for photos with the cat head; several senior officers and a number of Iraqi men and boys also took the time to have their pictures taken with it. The cat head had become a fetish object, like Huckleberry Finn’s dead cat, which Tom Sawyer admires—a scene that Norman Rockwell illustrated in a folksy print captioned “Lemme see him, Huck. My, he’s pretty stiff!” (Morris and Gourevitch)
Flynn, and Morris and Gourevitch are exploring the same torture but with different approaches. Flynn is looking at the general topic of torture and the American practice of ignoring it when perpetrated by its own government and he might use specific individuals involved in the issue as rhetorical tool. Morris and Gourevitch’s approach is diametrically opposed. They are looking at a specific individual and making only indirect or implicit references to larger issues.
Marking Up The Margins 