viz.

This comment actually responds to Nate's and Jill's.

Nate, I like your point about graphic novels, and I had not thought of it before. However, nether Children of Men nor Pan's Labyrinth were adapted from graphic novels, as far as I know. Those are two of the films I was thinking of when I mentioned the black bags; the third was V for Vendetta. And in fact, the latter was written between 1982 and 1988, so if it is a maturation of the genre, it tool place a while back. Nonetheless, I think your argument that a lot of these films are emerging from "visual formats" is compelling--especially given the glut of comic book movies we've also seen recently. But what is more interesting to me is that in many cases, these dystopic aesthetics are drawing pretty extensively on the Abu Ghraib images. Those images have really been taken up by the culture (or at least the culture-makers) as emblems of what it means to live in an age of "extraordinary rendition" (I like Orwell's word for it better: vaporization).

Which brings me to Jill's point: there is another absent presence for Klein, specifically the writings of Giorgio Agamben. These videos were actually first pointed out to me in the context of a discussion about Agamben (and in fact, a colleague deserves credit for pointing out their relationship to Agamben's work). Agamben writes a lot about the "state of exception" or the state of emergency that is everywhere becoming the norm. He sees the "camp" as the epitome of the localization of this "state of exception": it is the place where the subject is stripped of all her "rights" and "just lives bare life." That is, it's the place where the primal organizing factor of state power--the power of the sovereign (or the state) to decide who lives or dies--is most evident, i.e. is the rule rather than the exception, and where the welfare of the prisoner is solely dependent on the good or bad will of the camp guard. (In Klein's argument, the "Green Zone" in Baghdad falls into this category; and the recent debates about the role of Blackwater emphasize how much, in such situations, depends on the will of individuals with the power to decide who lives and dies.) The concentration camps of Nazi Germany are for Agamben the primary example of this phenomenon, but in Homo Sacer he argues that "we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there" (174). Abu Ghraib would be another example; so would Guantanamo Bay.

All of which is to say, in response to both Nate's and Jill's comments, that the aesthetics of Guantanamo (if you want to call it that) are becoming the primary dystopic aesthetics of our time (and in the best dystopic tradition, the truth is that the nightmare is already here), and furthermore, to ask whether the images of Abu Ghraib are replacing the "older" images of concentration camps--and to ask if this replacement indicates that Agamben is right when he says that places like Guantanamo are "of a piece" with the political thinking that produced the camps as such? (V for Vendetta is clearly relying on images influenced by both: black hoods and scenes of torture and juxtaposed against gruesome shots of mass graves.)