Indiana’s work is abundant and motley: there is video art, poetry, plays, a monograph on Andy Warhol, several years’ worth of art criticism for The Village Voice, a memoir, and of course, the novels. If one cared to assign all this an overarching theme—the exercise is dubious, but no less so than reviewing in general—it might be, put bluntly, bullshit. Concretely, bullshit in America: the way clichés from the media, pop culture, so-called high culture, and self-help books are grafted into conversation and seep into awareness, obstructing the possibility of an individual understanding of the world and oneself, and, in the process, perverting any human drives that might be called authentic, bending them in a direction consonant with that weird amalgamation of capitalism, rapacity, entitlement, egotism, and whininess that forms the marrow of what passes for moral awareness in much of the United States. The contempt inspiring this vision was well in evidence in such early dramatic works as The Roman Polanski Story, with its grotesque shifts from hyperbole to euphemism, all phrased in a kind of détourned Leave It to Beaver-ese that disarms any programmed sanctimoniousness the audience might bring to the appalling highlights of the director’s life:

What is fascinating, if at times baffling, in Depraved Indifference are the complex financial arrangements of the wealthy, the murky amorality of which eases the transition from licit to dubious to unprincipled and vile. Evelyn’s husband, Warren, apart from his properties, keeps money in an offshore account in the Caymans thanks to his connections with a licentious Saudi sheik; together, he and Evelyn sign over their assets to a series of cutouts to avoid paying penalties in a civil litigation suit. They file insurance claims for fake burglaries and damages from fires they set themselves; they even cook up a scam for America’s Bicentennial that gets them briefly into the White House, with the justification, “it’s a country full of morons, we really owe it to ourselves to make some money off them.”

In a profoundly outré but very suggestive 1935 essay on mimesis and entomology, Roger Caillois coined the term “teleplasty” to suggest the way bodily forms might migrate across space. Indiana invoked this same notion several decades later in one of his Village Voice columns, concluding that “some mimetic creatures fool their own kind well enough to eat each other.” His three crime novels are an exhaustive consideration of such creatures, and they show the monstrous side of the American ideal of the self-made man: what we might call the self-making man, stripped of any abiding attributes, shedding his skin at will to suit his surroundings. The traits he appropriates are pulled prêt-à-porter from the utopian pornography of mass media, with its perfunctory and hence readily imitable models of success, sophistication, intelligence. He is a response to a peculiar condition of our era: the hardly realizable sense of possibility that capitalism gives rise to as it multiplies the quantity and luxuriousness of its temptations. All the things one might own, all the fun one might have, are a spur and an affront to the pure egotistical potency that is the only thing left when generosity and compassion are either absent or burned away, as they easily may be in a culture where “winning” is the ne plus ultra.

On Day 1, the photographer walks into camp
and immediately starts shooting. She shoots us

at breakfast eating our C-rations, in our hammocks
reading Stars and Stripes. She shoots us in her sleep.

Winston Churchill described Iranian oil as “a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams.” The British in Iran were extracting oil from the country and paying back to the Iranian people only 16 percent of profits after taxes—taxes they paid to themselves, since British Petroleum was then a subsidiary of the Crown. When Iran had had enough and expropriated the oil industry, the British were outraged. They appealed to the United Nations in New York, the International Court in the Hague, and the Truman administration in Washington, losing in each, on all counts.

Truman was on Mosaddegh’s side. A Brit from the coup interviewed in the film says it was because “Americans like to talk to a man who has charisma,” inadvertently implying something about the British at the time. Churchill waited for Eisenhower to be elected, then convinced the new administration that Mosaddegh was a pro-Soviet threat, and the coup became a coproduction of the U.S. and the UK. To front it, MI6 and the CIA enlisted a pro-Shah general who’d been imprisoned by the Allies during World War II as a Nazi sympathizer and who in retirement was spending most of his time with prostitutes. The general’s son, a fancy relic living in Swiss exile since the 1979 Iranian revolution, explains to the camera, with a bare minimum of conviction, that no, it was actually Mosaddegh who had syphilis.

After the coup, the CIA set up Savak, the Iranian secret police, and taught them how to arrest, torture, and execute leftists. The oil companies moved in, and the Shah got $45 million in aid from the Eisenhower administration. Ike became convinced coup d’etats were better than real wars, because they were cheaper and Americans didn’t die in them, and that democracy in the developing world was bad for natural-resource extraction. The United States tested that theory in Guatemala the next year. It worked there too. Twenty-five years later, however, in Iran, it was Long Live Khomeini, Death to Shah, Death to America the Great Satan, etc., with fifty-two American hostages held at gunpoint for 444 days. It’s outrageous that this important film—which many have already seen because it was a film festival hit—is now being suppressed under the threat of further censorship.