It’s too bad Eugene Jarecki already used
the title “Why We Fight” for his breakout 2006 documentary about war
profiteering, because he could so perfectly have applied it to his
newest movie, “The House I Live In.”
It’s an examination of the drug war that does more than testify against
America’s overtly racist drug laws or the justice-industrial complex of
private prisons and the overtime-hungry cops who help fill them. The
documentary, which won this year’s Sundance Grand Jury prize and will
arrive in a handful of theaters this month, dares to suggest that human
beings have a thing for destroying one another.
Jarecki makes a very compelling argument
with the help of many interview subjects, but none more important than
David Simon, a former crime reporter who created “The Wire,” a beloved
TV show that may itself be confused for a documentary on the drug war.
Simon spent a lot of time reporting on and dramatizing this conflict and
its exhausted combatants, and he, along with historian Richard Lawrence
Miller, ultimately express the documentary’s hidden thesis with brute
force. The drug war is, they say, a “holocaust in slow motion.” The
director reveals his climax like the denouement of a great mystery. It’s
his Keyser Söze moment, and I won’t spoil it by elaborating further.
Long before then, Jarecki presents many
perspectives of what he calls “a tragically misguided system that preys
upon those least fortunate among us to sustain itself.” From the drug
dealers to the judge, most of the director’s subjects agree that the
system isn’t good for much, other than the mass transfer of poor people
to jail.
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