Celluloid War

As befits a Hollywood eminence, Spielberg worries about violence. To judge by Munich, his most pressing worry was how to make the violence in Munich thrilling enough to compete with a dozen other Christmas-Chanukah-Kwanzaa-Saturnalia releases. In part, this is done through sforzando, the musical device of abruptly goosing the volume whenever the mayhem starts. One bombing, in particular, will make you jump clear out of your seat.

The next worry cuts deeper. Does violence corrupt the soul, even when its use is limited to an eye for an eye? The Biblical law of retaliation (lex talionis) was originally a restraint: an eye for an eye and no more. When Israel has dispensed with this law, it has done so on the ground that a tiny, vulnerable nation must repay every injury with a greater one: “an eye for a tooth,” the saying goes. While many believe this strategy to have been effective against Israel’s neighboring Arab states, the jury is still out on how effective it has been against the Palestinians. No wonder Spielberg and his screenwriter Tony Kushner claim credit for tackling it.

The trouble is, they don’t. Despite passing references to the airstrikes and military raids that followed the Munich massacre, the film focuses tightly on Avner’s team as they move about Europe, taking pains not to hurt anyone not on their list of approved targets (at one point, they debate the righteousness of shooting two bodyguards). Are their souls being corrupted? An answer is hinted by the subplot in which Avner and Carl (Ciaran Hinds) meet a seductive woman in an Athens hotel. After the woman lures Carl to her room and murders him, the others track her down and, ambushing her in her Netherlands houseboat, pump bullets into her half-naked body.

Some have derided this scene as gratuitous. But that, I fear, is the point. The scene is meant to evoke the deep, dark connection between eros and war. Unfortunately, it succeeds no better than the later sequence that cross-cuts between Avner banging away at his wife (sorry, but that’s the only way to put it) and the Munich terrorists banging away at their victims. After watching these doltish attempts at profundity, I recommend that for their next collaboration, Spielberg and Kushner make a musical about E.T.

Most of the pundits debating the world-historical significance of Munich are seated on such high horses that they rarely lower their sights to the homely medium of television. If they did, they’d find two far more gripping treatments of terrorism and counterterrorism. The first is 24, now starting its fifth season on the Fox Network. The title comes from the gimmick of having each hour-long episode “occur in real time,” and except for a few plodding bits about the personal lives of Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) and his fellow agents at the Los Angeles branch of the fictional U.S. Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU), 24 is addictively suspenseful.

It is also timely. Long before warrantless surveillance hit the headlines, 24‘s geek warriors were monitoring every imaginable electronic communication and sweeping every conceivable database, with nary a FISA judge in sight. In fact, 24 could use a few money shots of the Capitol and Supreme Court because the country it portrays is a California-based dictatorship ruled by an all-powerful chief executive and his trusty head of secret police. If the ACLU hasn’t picked up on this, it is doubtless because, for most of the show’s run, the commander in chief is David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert),

a principled African-American Democrat.

Whenever extra-legal action is required, Jack Bauer performs it (in the resonant phrase often heard on the show) “by direct order of the president.” In the fourth season, Palmer is replaced by a white Republican with no more sense than to work through the bureaucracy, so Jack must become even more of a lone wolf. Of course, not even Dirty Harry could fight 21st-century terrorists without technical assistance, so Jack enlists Chloe O’Brian (Mary Lynn Rajskub), a nerdy young woman whose computer skills are as vital to the country’s survival as any field op’s derring-do. For viewers who spend most of their waking hours in front of a screen, it is gratifying to know you can be a hero without going offline.

But cyber-eavesdropping is not the only extra legal action dramatized in 24. When imagining a nuclear bomb about to explode in L.A., or a weaponized virus about to be released in eleven major cities, we welcome Jack’s Odyssean alertness, courage, and cunning. But it is harder to swallow his readiness to torture. For most of its history, American entertainment has depicted torture as pure evil. So it is jarring to see it routinely ordered, even inflicted, by the good guys.

For those who find torture neither useful nor entertaining, there is Sleeper Cell, the ten-part series now in its second run on Showtime. If 24 was clever to make its president an African-American Democrat, then Sleeper Cell is doubly clever to make its FBI undercover agent an African-American Muslim. And while 24 intoxicates us with sleek facilities and futuristic technology, Sleeper Cell sobers us with tacky FBI field offices and decrepit gear. To sum up the difference: Agent Darwyn al-Sayeed (Michael Ealy) may be a maverick like Jack, but his cell phone doesn’t speed-dial the president.

By the same token, Darwyn doesn’t do torture. On the contrary, it is mental torture for him to witness the cruelty of his cell leader, an obsidian-smooth Egyptian named Faris al-Farik (Oded Fehr) without intervening. One of the strongest arguments against torture was made recently by Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent twelve years in the Soviet gulag: “Torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery. . . . Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one’s sources. When torture is condoned, the rare talented people leave the service . . . and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists.” Sleeper Cell is a ten-hour illustration of the superiority of human intelligence.

When it comes to portraying the terrorists themselves, both programs blink. It took 24 four years to summon the nerve to make the bad guys radical Islamists. In the first season, they were vengeful Serbs; in the second, Islamists fronting for an American oil tycoon bent on war in the Middle East; in the third, Mexican drug lords fronting for a vengeful ex-MI6 agent. Only last year were they Islamists, and even then, their religious convictions were downplayed and blurred. For all its boldness about methods, 24 is timid about motives.

Not so Sleeper Cell. At one point Darwyn says that his parents divorced because his father was Nation of Islam and his mother Sunni: “The two cannot exist under the same roof.” His disdain for his father’s racist pseudo-Islam goes a long way toward explaining his commitment to fighting the infinitely more dangerous pseudo-Islam of Farik, and there are several subplots dramatizing the difference between faith and fanaticism. Yet the price of making the hero a sympathetic American is making the cell an English-speaking experiment in international living. Farik’s motley crew are entertaining (my favorite is Tommy, the son of a neurotic Berkeley feminist) but not very authentic.

For authenticity we must return to the big screen, where three films have recently probed the psychology of suicide bombers. The first is Syriana, whose pretzeled plot begins with an idea so simple, even Michael Moore could grasp it: The root of all evil is the American devil, Big-Oil-Ze-Bub. Serving Big-Oil-Ze-Bub are the usual gilt-edged attorneys, greedy politicians, gimlet-eyed techno warriors, and playboy Arab princes. Opposing him are a burnt-out spy (George Clooney, who else?) and a lone progressive Arab prince (Alexander Siddig).

Big-Oil-Ze-Bub has all the moves, naturally, and as the bodies pile up, they include two young migrant laborers from Pakistan who, after losing their oilfield jobs, get recruited by a charming imam who mentors them in suicide bombing. This subplot is so vivid, one wishes it were the whole film. But then Syriana would not be able to deliver its overall message, which seems to be that justice in the Arab world depends on selling oil to the Chinese instead of the Americans. Presumably, environmental damage, unfair labor practices, and terrorism would not occur under the enlightened management policies of Beijing. (Or is it just that we’d be spared hearing about them under the enlightened media policies of Beijing?)

In one of those odd pairings dreaded by artists, two movies about suicide bombing came out simultaneously this fall: Paradise Now, by the Palestinian director Hany Abu Assad, and The War Within, made by Joseph Castelo, Ayad Akhtar, and Tom Glynn, three recent graduates of the Columbia University film school. In the contest for box office and reviews, the winner was Paradise Now, which is puzzling, because The War Within is both more truthful and more troubling.

Paradise Now has the ring of authenticity, having been filmed with great difficulty in the war-torn city of Nablus. (At one point, an Israeli rocket sent six German technicians packing, and the production relocated to Nazareth.) But the characters, two young Palestinians sent by an unnamed organization on a “martyrdom operation” in Tel Aviv, ring less true.

Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) are semi-employed auto mechanics–ill-kempt, and a bit too fond of the hashish–who clearly fear and hate the Israelis. In addition, Said is ashamed of his collaborator father. But are these reasons enough to turn terrorist? Before being summoned, Said and Khalid never fast, pray, attend martyrs’ funerals, or serve the organization. Their families do not support their mission; on the contrary, their parents seem totally oblivious to it. And if their community is gripped by a culture of death, the film does not give any evidence of it. Why, then, do these shaggy slackers suddenly morph into human bombs?

For answer we get speeches. Said and Khaled argue with Suha (Lubna Azabal), the beautiful daughter of a renowned martyr who was born in Paris and urges a peaceful solution. Khaled videotapes a final statement that, by avoiding religious language and focusing on political grievances, would play at any anti globalization rally. When things go wrong and Said proceeds alone, his motivation is more psychological than ideological. And back in Nablus no one celebrates; they weep. How tragic, say the audience, putting on their coats and heading home for a good night’s sleep.

If it’s sleep you want, then stay away from The War Within, the first film I’ve seen in years that could reduce an entire theater to stunned silence. Instead of Nablus or even Los Angeles, this movie brings it all back home to Manhattan. Hassan, a young Pakistani (Akhtar), is wrongfully arrested in Paris by the CIA and rendered to Pakistan for interrogation. While undergoing torture, Hassan is recruited by his cellmate to the Brotherhood, a radical group that three years later sends him to New York to blow up Grand Central Station.

Like Paradise Now, The War Within is weak in showing how suicide bombers are recruited. (One source at the FBI tells me that torture victims almost never take that path.) But the film is strong in dramatizing our fears–or rather, systematically defeating our hopes. One reviewer accused it of “wearing clichés like concrete boots,” but it does so deliberately. After some initial grimness, Hassan’s arrival is warmed by the welcome he receives from Sayeed (Firdous Bamji), a boyhood friend who is raising his family in the classic hard-working immigrant mold.

“America is a great country,” Sayeed says.

“It’s OK for infidels,” replies Hassan in Urdu.

“What does that word mean?” asks Sayeed’s young son, Ali (Varun Sriram).

Musing, his father says, “I haven’t heard that word in a long time.”

Without a single bugle note, this brief exchange activates a deeply ingrained form of American patriotism: the expectation that, like all those other poor, sick, tired, huddled masses before him, Hassan will soon shed his bitterness and become a loyal citizen. Unlike his former cellmate, whose encounter with New York consists of strip joints, prostitutes, and booze, Hassan gets a job, meets a friendly Jewish family, enjoys the modest comfort of Sayeed’s home, and falls back in love with his childhood sweetheart, Sayeed’s sister Duri (Nandana Sen). We know in our bones that this tragedy will have a happy ending.

But it doesn’t, and therein lies The War Within‘s unsettling power. Instead of opening up to the blessings of America, Hassan rejects them one by one, retreating ever further into his Islamist shell. He even rejects what to Hollywood is the ultimate blessing: great sex with a gorgeous partner. When Duri tries to make love to him, he resists with a spiritual fortitude that is downright anachronistic. Finally, and most chillingly, he draws Ali into his orbit. However we might wish to defend today’s consumer youth culture, it has little to offer a serious-minded child. So, by the genuinely tragic ending, it appears that Hassan has made a convert.

The politics of The War Within are clearly leftist, and conservatives will find much to question in its basic assumptions. But of all the films and programs discussed here, it is the most unsparing and challenging. It is a sad comment on the state of popular culture that it is also the least well known.

Martha Bayles, who teaches in the honors program at Boston College, posts a blog called Serious Popcorn at www.artsjournal.com.