This clip has been doing the blog-rounds since someone posted it on YouTube:
It’s Denzel in ’98’s “The Siege“, arguing with Bruce Willis’s stubborn military commander that torturing a suspected terrorist undermines everything they’re fighting for. He loses the argument.
The Siege was an odd movie, even odder in hindsight. Denzel is from the FBI, and as he works to stop a series of terrorist attacks on New York martial law is declared, the military rolls in, everyone who looks like an Arab is rounded up and interrogated, and humanity swiftly goes out the window. Given what was coming, it seems prescient in the way it addressed the way things went out of control so fast. The clip resonates with images we’ve seen of Abu Ghraib and what we’ve heard about early Guantanamo and other outposts of CIA torture.
When I saw it back in Jan ’99 I wrote about it in my journal. I called it then disappointing, because it was obvious that there was an intensely political core to the film that had been watered down by the studio; in essence, Bruce Willis’ military commander was revealed as an aberration, a crazy man, and not representative. The whole movie somehow contrived to wave a figurative flag at the end. I remember being disappointed that the film hadn’t had the courage of its convictions and argued more forcefully that this kind of atrocity, power creating its own logic, was an inevitable outcome of the systems in place and not an exceptional moment of madness, easily corrected by Denzel’s true sight.
(The existence of Wikipedia now makes it trivial to find out more about the screenwriter. Lawrence Wright is, as I suspected then, far from a Hollywood hack – he’s a staff writer at the New Yorker, was the author of Pulitzer-winning Al-Qaeda history The Looming Tower, and earns cred from me for a positive role in the Paul Ingram false memory case.)