The Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck has devoted his career to investigating the pathologies of the 20th and 21st century and forcing audiences to confront them. His brooding documentaries and feature films have explored economic despair in Haiti, the legacy of Papa Doc Duvalier’s brutal dictatorship there, the Rwandan genocide, the assassinated Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, and Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s creation of the Communist Manifesto. Like the left-wing English filmmaker Ken Loach, known for his naturalistic and bleak dramatizations of the Irish revolution, British poverty, and the Spanish civil war, Peck is drawn to projects about injustice, rendered in unflinching and sometimes disturbing detail. It seems safe to guess that he was not on the short list to direct Fast & Furious 9.
In his choice of subjects and his tendency to circle and revisit them, Peck resembles a prosecutor at Nuremberg or the Hague, with his films as the various drafts of an ever-expanding indictment. His best-known work in the United States, the 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, is a study of the writer James Baldwin, structured as Peck’s attempt to “finish” an unpublished and uncompleted Baldwin work, which he did with archival footage of Baldwin and voice-over readings of his writing juxtaposed with evocative imagery. Released in the aftermath of the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests, I Am Not Your Negro argued for the continued relevance of Baldwin’s critiques of American society. The documentary was polemical, stirring, largely uninterested in grappling with Baldwin’s intellectual complexity, and generally not very nuanced; it was also, on the whole, very good. Of course, it is hard to make a bad documentary when your subject was one of the most electrifying intellectuals of the last hundred years. If the film were simply 1 1/2 hours of random footage of Baldwin, veiled in cigarette smoke, talking, it probably would have been mesmerizing.
Unfortunately, Peck’s latest work, a four-part HBO docuseries that attempts to sum up his entire intellectual project in one damning and definitive argument, is something less than mesmerizing. In fact, it’s a bit of a mess. Partly based on a 1992 book by the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist and drawing its title from a line in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Exterminate All the Brutes is a sprawling, uneven, exhausting, and often ahistorical study arguing that the entire history of Western colonialism and racism has been motivated by a unifying genocidal impulse. If you’ve already noticed possible problems with that argument, this documentary may not be for you.
After viewing it, a very left-wing friend of mine called me to rant for 20 minutes about how much she hated it. She compared it to a four-hour version of the Instagram slideshows that circulate among the newly woke, bringing them up to speed on tendentious historiography. More importantly, she asked, “How can you make a documentary on this subject and almost never mention capitalism?”
That’s a good question. In Peck’s telling, all historic crimes of the Western world are products of whites’ murderous contempt for nonwhites. But while racism is indisputably a huge part of the story, extermination and exploitation aren’t the same thing. Even the most horrific examples of racist violence and cruelty he cites, such as slavery in the United States and the rubber plantations of the Belgian Congo, might be understood as first and foremost the result of sociopathic greed, for which dehumanizing racism served as a useful rationale. One only has to look at the detailed ledgers kept by slave-traders and -owners, in which they meticulously tracked how much they paid for each enslaved person, how much it cost to feed, clothe, and house them, and how much they were worth in resale value, to see that slavery was primarily about making money.
Similarly, Peck’s framing of imperialism as something done by white people to nonwhites is more fashionable demagoguery than history. England’s first real colony was lily-white Ireland. We learn about the U.S.’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but not about the Rape of Nanking or Unit 731’s medical experiments on non-Japanese prisoners or the Japanese army’s use of Korean and Chinese “comfort women.” That’s because Japanese imperialism complicates the idea of imperialism as a white, European phenomenon. In his effort to pin every sin of the Western world on white supremacy, Peck sometimes comes dangerously close to replicating white supremacists’ own logic: In his school of history, white Europeans are the only actors, and nonwhites are only ever subalterns, devoid of individual and collective agency and subject to the capricious whims of vicious but more advanced peoples.
In fact, the documentary jumps between times and places at dizzying speed, in a way that confuses the viewer and cheapens the material. We careen around wildly: the Spanish Inquisition, Nazism, slavery, massacres of Native Americans, Donald Trump, the Rwandan genocide, the Alamo, xenophobia in contemporary Sweden, the colonization of central Africa. Peck is barraging us because he wants to prosecute his argument by association and implication. This tactic is not only exhausting but also intellectually disingenuous: By cycling rapidly through historical episodes, Peck avoids having to open his argument to complication or critique. At one point, for instance, he alludes to an alliance in colonial Florida between Seminole Indians and “maroons” (escaped Africans) against white aggression. He doesn’t mention that the Seminoles, like the Creek, Cherokee, and other Native tribes, had black slaves of their own (albeit, in the case of the Seminoles, in conditions more humane and liberal than in white settlements), and, in some cases, took them with them on the Trail of Tears. Does that lessen the guilt of white slave-owners? Not at all. But it is an interesting wrinkle that a different filmmaker might have wanted to explore.
Exterminate All the Brutes is also hindered by some questionable aesthetic choices. Peck makes generous use of dramatic fictional scenes portrayed by actors or animation. These scenes are unnecessary and, worse, often hokey. One rather maudlin animated sequence shows a group of Native Americans who, having been expelled by white settlers, board boats and drift off into the water; their dogs, which they’ve had to abandon, bay sadly, then jump into the water to paddle after the boats and, presumably, drown. The sequence is gratuitous and embarrassing, like the drowning-polar-bear animations in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, but also simply bizarre. Are we to take from this that the saddest part of the Trail of Tears was the dogs that got left behind?
The actor Josh Hartnett portrays a character who recurs in multiple sequences in different times and places, the archetype of a violent white overseer who stands in for the collective sins of European civilization. Some of the symbolism is so heavy-handed as to be inadvertently comical: In one scene, Hartnett’s character rinses an American flag in a river, as if literally to whitewash it. Peck’s heavy use of artistic license, especially in the stylized fictional sequences, also makes the film all-around confusing. At points, we hear voice-over dialogue the source of which is unclear. Are the words Peck’s? A quotation from a historical document or figure? A quotation from Lindqvist’s book, or from the two other books that Peck draws on? I had no idea.
In I Am Not Your Negro, the effective narrator was James Baldwin, or at least his words, curated by Peck and read by Samuel L. Jackson. In Exterminate All the Brutes, Peck is our narrator, with his gravelly, French-accented voice, like Werner Herzog’s German one, hovering over everything, constantly prosecuting his case, and tying everything, sometimes too neatly, sometimes too messily, together. Peck brings in his own biography: His family fled the Duvalier regime. He grew up in the U.S., France, and Congo. He was educated at a German university, and, at one point, though he does not go into this, he briefly served as Haitian minister of culture. His background is quite interesting and explains why he feels a personal stake in his subject matter. His father, an agronomist, was hired by the United Nations to work in post-colonial Congo, replacing the departing Belgians. In practice, however, many of the personal digressions feel indulgent, and their connections to the material aren’t as clear to the viewer as they seem to be to Peck.
Exterminate All the Brutes is more successful when it sticks to less stylized, more conventional techniques of documentary filmmaking, such as Ken Burns-style pans and zooms on still images. If anything, it is when the camera lingers on these photographs of Native Americans on reservations, of colonized people posed in tableaus for voyeuristic European audiences, of black inmates at an American prison farm, herded through cotton fields by white corrections officers on horseback, that the documentary is most effective. These pictures, stark, visceral, chilling, say far more than Peck’s narration can.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
