On Costa Gavras' film 'Missing'
The deportation of innocent citizens who have not been accused of any crime puts us in the same political nightmare depicted in the 1982 political thriller
I saw Costa Gavras’ 1982 film Missing on cable television when I was sixteen, so I suppose it’s “old” now. Watching it today would be like my 1982 self watching the 1939 version of The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn. It’s one of a few films that have come to mind recently as reactionaries take a chainsaw to the U.S. Constitution.
Missing is based on the true story of Charles Gorman, a journalist who in 1973 went missing in Chile. The government there, backed by the CIA, killed him. His father, Edward Gorman (played by Jack Lemmon) teams up with Gorman’s wife Beth (Sissy Spacek) and is given the run-around by American bureaucrats before the ugly truth finally becomes obvious. The country is never mentioned.
The U.S. Government, of course, backed the Chilean coup of 1973, which deposed the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. As a high school student, I didn’t know anything about that stuff. It wasn’t until college history classes, where I read Jonathan Kwitney’s Endless Enemies and Loren Baritz’ devastating history of the Vietnam War, Backfire, that I learned about the predatory character of American foreign policy and how it’s baked into capitalism.
So Missing was an eye-opener. Curiously, the only thing I remembered about the film was a powerful image about halfway through: A bloody corpse floating along a river, right through the city. “Another one!” the locals shout, racing to get a peek. In hindsight, I think the implication of American culpability didn’t land as hard as it should have. For my young eyes, Missing was about the horrible shit that governments in other, less “developed” nations do when horrible people assume power.
Today one watches Missing under markedly different circumstances. Horrible people have assumed power here, and people are going missing.
I watched shortly after Americans learned that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a legal resident of the United States, was “mistakenly” deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration. Incredibly, he has been returned, and now faces trial. One is justifiably suspicious that the charges brought against him were made in good faith, or that there’s a shred of evidence to support them.
Earlier this month, the administration’s ICE thugs, mercilessly whipped into meeting white supremacist Stephen Miller’s deranged deportation quotas, grabbed a fellow out of my neck of the woods: Moises Sotelo-Casas, a respected figure in the wine industry here, a regular church-goer and a business owner, was hauled away in chains June 12. He was taken to an ICE facility up in Seattle, nearly four hours up Interstate 5.
ICE released a statement to a local TV station alleging that Sotelo “first entered the United States illegally in 2006” (other reporting has indicated he’s lived here since the late 1990s) and that he has a “criminal conviction for DUI in (italics added) Newberg,” the second-largest city in Yamhill County; the county DA replied that they can find no evidence of DUI charges in their system.
In other words: When Miller and border “czar” Tom Homan claim they’re going after the “criminals” (in the sense of violent, drug-running, gang-tattooed, literally dangerous-to-society thugs) they are doing exactly what the American bureaucrats in Missing do to Beth and Edward Gorman: Blowing smoke up our asses.
Lemmon’s arc in the film is not unlike that of the people who voted for Trump and are now experiencing buyer’s remorse: At first he believes in his country, believes that the officials who say they’re trying to help him. By the end, he sees the naked lunch on the end of his fork, he sees what’s really going on. And he is horrified by it.
