The Real Message of ‘Closet Land’

My film “Closet Land,” which deals with human rights, freedom of expression, child abuse and other issues, has provoked a predictably polarized response: Some love it, and some hate it. One of the film’s harshest critics, The Times’ Kevin Thomas, has completely missed the point of the film.

“Closet Land” doesn’t attempt to literally depict the physical reality of political interrogation. I’m more intrigued by the psychological experience: the disorientation, the absurdity, the terror. That’s why “Closet Land” unfolds in a Kafka-esque environment grounded more in nightmare logic than gritty reality.

A number of torture victims have told me that “Closet Land” truly captures the psychological reality of their experience. Amnesty International has strongly supported the film. If “Closet Land” had been “pretentious,” the former victims who so strongly identify with the film would have been able to smell it a mile away. And they would certainly never have responded to a movie that degraded their harrowing life experience to the level of “porno chic,” a fashionably flippant characterization by Thomas that deeply offends me.

Thomas misunderstands, among other things, my analogy of political abuse to child abuse. I am not, as his simplistic analysis would have it, trying to mix a “protest” of child abuse with a “protest” of political abuse. If all I had to say was that torture and child abuse are bad, I wouldn’t have bothered making a film.

“Closet Land” springs from my belief that all forms of aggression are organically linked. Most who have grown up in the sheltered West have no direct experience with the pathology of political abuse and consider it alien. By likening political abuse to something more accessible to Westerners, child abuse, I can give people a better feel for the paternalistic power dynamics of political abuse.

And there’s a larger point: Though the Western democracy is the antithesis of the police state, Western society harbors psychological pathologies that, under the wrong circumstances, can form the basis of a police state.

If none of this is new, so what? Political movies rarely have anything new to say to the informed viewer. Their value is the ability to make an emotional connection that deepens understanding.

Thomas complains that my failure to name the specific time and place of “Closet Land” lets the audience off the hook.

He’s gotten it completely backward.

Thomas would no doubt have me set the film in El Salvador or some other politically correct target so that Western viewers could all sneer at how rotten things are in the Third World. It’s probably because “Closet Land” isn’t safely placed in someone else’s territory that the film leaves no one off the hook.

The logic of Thomas’ review is consistently baffling. He makes the preposterous assertion that there’s no need for anyone to see “Closet Land” because anyone who’s aware of world events knows that political prisoners are subject to torture. But, by the same token, anyone who reads the newspaper knows that racism, drug abuse, poverty and other ills plague our society. So why depict the harrowing aspects of any social problem on film? Why don’t we all just make romantic comedies?

Thomas claims that the film’s implied violence “punishes” the audience, yet also claims that the violence can be easily dismissed as “artificial.”

Artificial movie violence is never punishing.

People merrily cheer as Rambo massacres scores of men. That’s artificial violence.

If Thomas was disturbed by the implied violence in my film, it must have struck a genuine emotional chord. And, after complaining about excessive violence, Thomas complains that the female prisoner didn’t look sufficiently victimized!

Given the many logical contradictions in Thomas’ review, I’m convinced that his objections spring not from a violent emotional reaction to the film’s disturbing nature. Perhaps “Closet Land” deals too frankly with torture. But to sugarcoat the issue would be to insult those who have inspired the movie. Still, “Closet Land” mostly conveys the implication of violence without showing it. There is more on-screen violence in “Home Alone” than in “Closet Land.”

I suppose I could have given “Closet Land” a specific setting, made it more literal and pulled my punches. But then “Closet Land” wouldn’t be the intense, original and uncompromising film that I struggled so long and hard to make. Let me be judged on the film that I have chosen to make, and not on the film that someone else would have wanted to make. “Closet Land” is my film, and I proudly stand behind it.