Alex Gibney: I Want to Know Why Good People Do Bad Things
Alex Gibney has exposed corruption from Enron to the CIA. He tells Husam Sam Asi why power corrupts, why the end never justifies the means and why drama can tell the truth.
Over the years, Hollywood has presented white American and European characters as heroes of high morals who defend what is right and protect humanity from its villains. In documentaries, which record reality, the same characters often turn out to be corrupt and empty of moral values and human principles. One of the most important documentary-makers is the American Alex Gibney, who has exposed moral corruption rife in most official and unofficial institutions in the United States, from the army, the government and the Catholic Church to Scientology, sport, banking, the food and car industries and the courts.
Gibney, whose production company in New York employs nearly 200 people, has made more than 40 films since the start of the century. His latest is the series Dirty Money on Netflix, which shows that corruption in the United States is still rife at every level and in every industry, and that the American government has been either complicit in it or powerless to confront it.
Among the scandals he has exposed are Volkswagen’s rigging of its engines to cheat tests for polluting nitrogen oxide emissions, the laundering of drug cartels’ money by HSBC, one of the world’s biggest banks, and the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.
When we spoke in Los Angeles, he admitted to me that he had found flaws and moral corruption in every institution he had investigated. “I tend to expose the abuse of power in terrible ways in many cases, but along the way you find many heroes who resisted it, and that is where I find hope,” says the 64-year-old director.
Yet even the heroes of Gibney’s films have proved corrupt. Eliot Spitzer, the subject of Client 9, was idolised for his fierce campaign against corrupt big business as New York’s attorney general, and went on to become the state’s governor. Then it emerged that he was a client of the kind of prostitution ring he had once prosecuted. Gibney puts such behaviour down to a flaw built into human nature.
“I think one of the big mistakes, especially among Americans, is that they tend to divide people into good people and bad people,” Gibney says. “But I think people are a mixture of good and bad. Sometimes, when people do terrible things, there are sides of them that are also very good.”
In Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, nominated for the Oscar for best documentary feature in 2006, Gibney shows how the bosses of the energy giant plundered the company’s funds and their employees’ savings, and gamed California’s electricity supply at enormous cost to its people and its economy, while selling power to other states at exorbitant prices. Ironically, the company’s boss declares in the film that they were the good guys, on the side of the angels.
“It fascinated me that some of those electricity traders, who actually shut down California’s power grid to make a profit and laughed hysterically at people’s suffering so they could make huge amounts of money, when I followed them into their personal lives, I realised that in their local communities they were very active in charity work and donations,” he says. “They were considered good citizens. They had long marriages. That is why it is very hard to generalise about people and about how and when they do good. I am very interested in why good people do bad things.”
What Gibney discovered is that circumstances lead some people to justify the harm they do to others. “The people at Enron, as they saw it, wanted to create a free market in energy, free of government restrictions, and that was their conviction about their purpose. If some people were hurt in the process, they called it thinning the herd.”
When I pointed out that terrorists use the same justification, Gibney agreed. “I think they are terrorists. When you believe in a higher ideal and believe that it entitles you to do something terrible, you have started to cross a line. That is why I think there is no philosophy more dangerous than the end justifies the means. That is wrong.”
Power, the Source of Corruption
The corrupt characters in Gibney’s films are powerful from the start, or upright people who fall into the trap of corruption once they reach the summit of power. “I think power enabled them to sin in bigger and bolder ways,” Gibney says. “They could not have done it without that power, because power makes them feel entitled to it. Whether it was Eliot Spitzer or the heads of Enron, they felt they were pursuing goals that were important, so they were excused.”
Even the guardians of morality are not immune, as Gibney showed in Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, his investigation of child abuse by Catholic priests. The priests, he says, saw no contradiction between what they preached and what they did. “They see it, in some way, as a strange balance between the good angel and the bad angel on our shoulders.”
This immoral behaviour extends from individuals to states, above all the United States, which preaches high morals it does not itself observe.
In Taxi to the Dark Side, which won the Oscar for best documentary feature in 2008, Gibney tells the story of an Afghan taxi driver who died under torture at the Bagram detention centre, and exposes America’s violation of international law and its widespread use of torture in its war on terror and in Iraq. In the film, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney justify those practices as a way to teach the terrorists a lesson in American justice so that they stop attacking the United States.
“I believe that was a manifestation of the corruption of the American soul,” says Gibney. “And I think that is an absolute truth. I think that over time the United States has used its power in some ways to do good. So there is a mixed record, and I think you can see that this comes from that arrogance, that idea that the highest principles are ours. The principles are indeed high, in my opinion, but you have to live up to them in pursuing democracy. We support regimes that are not democratic at all, that kill and torture people and produce terrorism.”
Although he acknowledges that America’s immoral foreign policy helps terrorism spread around the world, he holds terrorists responsible for their crimes. “You cannot absolve a terrorist of blame and forgive him because an outside power pushed him into terrorism. But I do acknowledge that when a democratic power behaves barbarically, it opens the way for terrorists to recruit new people and new supporters.”
Drama and the Truth
This year Gibney co-created his first drama, the television series The Looming Tower, which shows how the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI stopped them uncovering the al-Qaeda cell that carried out the attacks of 11 September 2001. The moral corruption it exposes in American institutions is on a scale that is hard to believe, which made his decision to tell the story as drama all the more surprising. Documentary records events as they happen. Drama draws on them to create a fictional reality, with actors playing the real people.
“I don’t think drama diminishes the credibility of events,” says Gibney. “I think there are different kinds of truth. Even in a newspaper article, you make a pact with the audience, and in the end it rests on trust. Drama can create essential truths just as a documentary can. I think one of the great things about The Looming Tower was that we traced the path of very important events that we should know about, but that many people don’t. You put it in front of people to watch. You do it knowing that it will become part of the public debate and the public conversation. It is the beginning of a serious debate, and that is what you hope for.”
Gibney’s films usually stir controversy in the United States, and the institutions and figures whose corruption he has exposed have often campaigned against him, accusing him of bias and slander. The Looming Tower is no exception. It portrays the CIA as no more moral than the terrorists it was hunting, and indirectly holds it responsible for the attacks of 11 September.
“Everyone has their own morality,” Gibney says. “But in the end, that is why we are in the business of telling these stories: to understand that, and to raise questions. Is it acceptable to imagine that your morality and your humanity stop at the borders of the United States?”
Moral corruption, then, is an innate human disease, rife in every society however advanced its thought and civilisation. It cannot be cured as long as its definition differs from one person to another and from one civilisation to another, and as long as the corrupt can justify it as a necessity. These days Gibney is working with Steven Spielberg on Why We Hate, which explores another human disease: hatred.
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