Gaghan Goes Native: SYRIANA's Conspiratorial Worldview

Stephen Gaghan's film Syriana has earned considerable attention and acclaim since its release and with some justifaction. It's one of those rare films the Hollywood mass-production factory churns out each year that just happens to speak to the contemporary moment and demands more from the audience member than his $10.50 and his two hours of passing fancy. In theme and ambition, Syriana actually hearkens back to those American movies of the 70's when Watergate, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and the violence of the 60's inspired film that mattered; mattered because they gave voice to all those fraught emotions the era's convulsive changes had unleashed-- the parnoia, the disorientation, the fear and suspicion, the nihilism. The Graduate, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, The Parallax View, Easy Rider, Cuckoo's Nest, and Three Days of the Condor figure among the most notable. (Syriana even pays homage to Three Days of the Condor, evoking Condor's climactic confrontation between hero and villain but altering the result.)

Although Syriana hearkens back to these films, it doesn't emulate them in one crucial and regrettable respect. With minor exception, the 70's films, engaged the Zeitgeist indirectly, with small-scale stories that reflected the period's anomie, but didn't attempt to represent or dramatize the period's contemporary political crises and social problems. Whether conscious or not, the filmakers must have suspected direct confrontation would have to await the deeper reflection only time can afford. Apocalypse Now, the first film to portray the Vietnam War, for example, wasn't made until 1979, and not until the 80's with Platoon and Full Metal Jacket does the Vietnam movie flourish as genre. And even in these pictures, the story assumes a narrow focus on its characters' conflicts, with their individual predicaments adumbrating the larger futility of the War.

Syriana, alas, doesn't heed the risks of premature art, that it too often appears facile or superficial, or worse, smacks of propaganda. Gaghan tries to take on the causes and implications of 9/11, Iraq and the War on Terrorism before he's had a chance to ponder or to understand them. And as a consequence, his story, and the worldview it conveys, succumbs to lowbrow conspiracy-mongering.

Syriana tells the separate but interwoven tale of five principals: a world-weary, renegade CIA agent; a staid but opportunistic Washington lawyer; an ambitious grief-stricken financial analyst; a visonary, Western-educated Arab emir; and a radicalized migrant Pakistani roughneck. A pending oil merger between two colossal multinational oil companies with international implications links the characters and their struggles. And employing the device he used with such success in Traffic's Academy Award winning screenplay, Gaghan, now writer and director, deftly cuts back and forth between them, ranging over locales as incongruous and wide-ranging as Washington offices, Texas boardrooms, Iranian back alleys, Arab deserts, and Mediterranean beaches.

In this respect Gaghan deserves his due: the film is a masterpiece of form and technique. The separate narrative threads each possess the riveting tautness a thriller demands. But interwoven, they spin a dense, finespun tapestry-- a tapestry, in turn, more far-reaching than the combined threads comprising it. As Traffic projected a vision of an interdependent, transnational drug trade and the futility of the U.S. war against it, so Syriana paints a similar portrait of Muslim fundamentalism and the War on Terror. And in each instance, Gaghan would have us believe that we, the American consumer, abet the very scourge we commit to eradicating. Whether its cheap thrills or cheap oil, the fault, evidently, lies in ourselves.

But while it amounts to a brave and astute insight to dramatize how U.S. culture's obsessive pressure to succeed contributes to its people's drug habit, the same moral calculus does not apply to terrorism. What's more, to attribute the violence, instability, and fanaticism that plagues the Middle East, and particularly the Arab world, to the U.S.'s dependence on cheap oil is a rank and woeful distortion of infinitely more complex, multi-causal phenomenon. (A distortion all the more ironic because greater fidelity to the movie's factual source, former CIA agent Robert Baer's memoir, See No Evil, would have avoided it. Baer identifies pusillanimity, not treachery, as the primary culprit. U.S. politician fear of bad press often hamstrings the CIA and impedes its ability to collect intelligence on potential threats.)

This is probably where Gaghan's artistic vision would have benefitted from the reflective nuance and conceptual maturation time and distance usually produce. But Gaghan has rushed pell-mell into the contemporary moment. And worse, he has compounded the sin by claiming the artist's penetrating vision and superior insight. He pretends to see through the Wizard's veil to divine just how the political world really operates; and just why it is that the U.S. finds itself embroiled in the Persian Gulf and pitted against implabably hostile Muslim terrorists sworn to its destruction. But Gaghan, evidently, spent too much time among the Arab demimonde researching his screenplay because he has succumbed to the propaganda and delusion that passes as that world's truth. Syriana traffics in tawdry, paranoid conspiracy theory.

The theory goes something like this. To make the Middle East safe for Big Oil's profit margins, its venal and all-powerful vested interests, and its principal consumer, the American public, the U.S. government, through its ruthless CIA arm, betrays its own agents and citizens, bullies impotent allies, stymies the budding democracy it proclaims to endorse by assasinating Arab visionaries and propping up instead corrupt and feckless but docile monarchs-- who exploit their land's oil resources for personal gain while keeping their societies underemployed, backward, and restive and who, in turn, nurture a class of angry, dispossesed, alienated but otherwise "pure hearted" men ripe for Islamic militancy and eager to sacrifice their otherwise marginal lives in the name of vanquishing the American oppressor. In short, to protect Big Oil, America, conspires against its own interests and begets its own misery.

The theory does have a beautiful simplicity to it, and in Big Oil, it confers a ready-made and popular villain. (Indeed, in the American pantheon of villainy, Big Government rates just above Big Money.) Perhaps that's why creative types cotton to conspiracy theory so readily and Gaghan not alone among them. (Witness Syriana's similarity to Gore Vidal's paranoid worldview: "The conquest of Aghanistan had nothing to do with Osama. He was simply a pretext for replacing the Taliban with a relatively stable government that would allow Union Oil to lay its pipeline for the profit of the Cheney-Bush junta.") Of course the additional appeal the conspiracy theory holds is in its logical corollary: that which U.S. begets, it also controls, or at least, can minimize, provided it summons the necessary will. British scholar Dennis Brogan once diagnosed this as

"the illusion of American omnipotence-- the illusion that we have an almost magical capacity to have our way in the world and that any situation which endangers the U.S. can only exist because some Americans have been fools or knaves."

Alas, neither is the Middle East so amenable to U.S. designs nor its policy so beholden to sinister and selfish interests. Of course, oil interests, their protection and their promotion, sometimes set U.S. policy. Oil, after all, like water is one of those strategic resources the shortage of which would strangle the U.S. economy, imperil its security, and paralyze its citizens. Oil money and corporate interests wield power and influence particularly in those regions of the world to which the U.S. government pays little attention-- like the Central Asian-"stan" nations, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kryzykstan or some of the smaller Gulf sheikdoms. U.S. oil companies often have more actors and agents and experts working and living in these countries than does its government. What's more there are often a number of U.S. government agencies like the State Department particularly sympathetic to the oil industry and jealous of its interests. Agencies, like State, then, also excercise disproportionate power and influence in regions Congress, the President, and the American public tend to ignore. (Incidentally, monied interests have this kind of power on any number of complicated or obscure issues the people or its representatives neglect. Think of how the telecommunications industry eviscerated the laws regulating it right under our noses.)

This is not the case however for the region stretching from the Mediterranean Ocean to the Persian Gulf, where U.S. geo-strategic interests and domestic politics prevail. In this region, the U.S. government, through its multiple agents, actors, and and institutions-- State, the Pentagon, Commerce, the Nat Security Council, the CIA, the President, and Congress-- play a direct part and they're less beholden, if at all, to Big Oil. Were they so beholden the U.S. long ago would have withdrawn support for that tiny pioneer democratric settler nation that has been the bane of the oil companies, and the Arabs, ever since its founding in 1948. But here the American people's affinity for Israel-- and the support its people's most reprentative institution, Congress, gives it accordingly-- trumps the oil interests. In fact, if the oil companies directed our policy, the U.S. would not have waited until Saddam's invasion of Kuwait and 9/11 to invade the Persian Gulf.

Indeed, if the U.S. government was but the Oil Companies' tool, we would have invaded the Arab world back in the 60's after the OPEC nations seized control of their oil fields from the American-English-Dutch cartels and renegotiated the profit percentage ratios and then proceeded to extort America's good will, if not its toadying solicitude, with their '73 and '79 embargoes. The exorbitant profits from which bred gross inequalities, incited an insatiable appetite for Western goods, inspired hesitant experiments with Western mores and institutions, which in turn, destablized the Gulf countries and their governments-- as a sudden and propitious change of fortune so often will disorient even the most anchored of us-- feeding resentment and envy, triggering an indentity crisis, inducing nostalgia for the old, simple, spartan ways, and fomenting the religious backlash we now call militant Islam.

All of which goes to say that the origins and causes of 9/11, the Iraqi war, terrorism, in short, the U.S.'s modern predicament, are a good deal more complicated than the Syriana's portrait of all-powerful, nefarious oil potentates and the treacherous plots and conspiracies they hatch.

But of course, Syriana is fiction, a Hollywood movie, and an accomplished, and occasionally scintillating, one at that. So take its pretensions to inspiration from the actual experiences of a former CIA agent with a grain of salt and pass the popcorn. Just be careful not to take Syriana as seriously as its creator does. For then we would be complicit in a malign conspiracy and the worst of them all, the conspiracy to confuse fact with fiction.

PARADISE NOW: Art and the Suicide Bomber

What makes the suicide bomber tick? How to explain hate so virulent one is willing not just to kill but to die for it?

Of course, some would warn us against even asking the question. Understanding and explanation lead along the slippery slope to exoneration and into the abyss of moral relativism. Terrorism is not to be understood, only deplored.

The problem is that curiosity left unsatisfied will fall prey to ignorance, sophistry and the simpleton's facile reasoning. And so we hear, "They hate us because we're free." "They kill because they're animals." "They murder because they're poor and oppressed." "Their leaders dupe them with promises of Paradise and heavenly rewards." Or worse, we get the simpleton in expert's guise, "Their culture doesn't place the same value on human life," conveniently glossing over gas chambers, assorted mass murders, gulags, slavery, and colonial depredations.

Perhaps only art then can shed light on depravity. Renown literary critic Edmund Wilson suggests why. On the one hand, Wilson wrote in essay on Marxism and Literature,

"In art... a sort of law of moral interchangeability prevails: we may transpose the actions and sentiments that move us into terms of whatever we do or are ourselves. Real genius of moral insight will start any engine." On the other, "In works of the highest order, the purport is not a simple message, but a complex vision of things, which itself is not explicit but implicit."

Only art then-- accomplished and imaginatively disciplined art, that is-- can convey the complex of individual, social, and existential elements which forge the suicide bomber and the conflicting motives from which he acts.

For all its flaws, Hany Abu-Assad's new film, Paradise Now, does precisely this, creating a credible, sometimes compelling, and ulitmately tragic portrait of a Palestinian suicide bomber and his long day's journey into night.

The film begins the day before he embark on his mission. Said and his fraternal friend, Khaled, are two young provincial from Nablus (more tribal desert village than town) where the Israeli Occupation has contained them almost their entire lives. They eke out a living in a auto-repair shop, a job beneath their intelligence, but they're nonetheless fortunate to have. Few jobs exist in Nablus, neither has a work permit to enter Israel, and their families' barely functional poverty depends on their meager earnings.

Suha, the worldy daughter of a prominent local-- his prominence owing to a barely alluded "martyrdom" which his daughter deplores-- emerges as Said and Khaled's foil and the film's conscience and voice of reason. As foil, Suha throws into relief just how provincial Said and Khaled are, how the Occupation has insulated them and cut them off from the modern world. She owns a car; they do not, despite repairing them. She lived in Morocco and speaks French; Said, meanwhile, has spent his whole life, with one minor and significant, exception in Nablus. To Suha's amazement, Said even confesses he's never seen a movie, still less a movie theater, except for the theater he, along, with other residents, burned down years earlier to protest another Israeli closure of the West Bank. And a subsequent trip the two make to the local Nablus video shop may futher explain why. The hottest video rentals, the shopkeeper tells them, are those suicide bombers prepare the day before they kill themselves. The wretchedness speaks for itself.

Later, Suha learns of the suicide bombing Said and Khaled plan and tries to dissuade them. She voices all the practical objections to their operation, that it reinforces Israeli resolve, gives Israel an alibi to continue the Occupation, and leaves the rest of the Palestinian population to endure the reprisals. What makes the film so compelling is Said's rejoinder. Without spoiling the film outcome, suffice it to say, that Said concedes all her arguments, because for him, they're decidedly beside the point. His decision comes from an existential motive pragmatic, worldy concerns do not answer.

Said and Khaled's summoning by the fundamentalist group orchestrating the suicide mission sets the film's mainspring in motion. The leader informs them, they will die tommorrow, together, as they requested. The work permits, the false identification, the transport have been pre-arranged. He tells them they are to eat supper with their families, as they ordinarily would, and to report in the morning. The following morning, they tape their martyr videos; rehearsing a propaganda tract already written for them. They shave their beards and cut their hair to appear as Palestinians travelling to a wedding inside the Green Line and to appear less conscipicuously the provincials they are. And finally, they have the explosive belt strapped and taped to their bare chests, explosives they cannot remove without detonating. The elaborate, time-consuming preparation for which cause Said and Khaled to brood about their impending deaths. And the second-thoughts they begin entertain-- and the illusions they tell themselves to suppress them-- suddenly makes their decision seem naive and pathetic; a sad, pointless waste of life.

Whether Said and Khaled subsequently will remain willing and able to carry out their mission creates what little suspense this so-called thriller possesses. Indeed, for all it's billing as one, Paradise Now is much more a psychological drama. Here, the traditional staple of the thriller genre-- the plot that may or may not succeed; the hero who may or may not unravel or foil it-- is just a contrivance the filmmaker employs to plumb deeper into the plotters' motivations and to debate their mission's moral and political consequence. And this is where Paradise Now's greatest strength, and its most glaring weakness, lies anyway.

On the one hand, we get all the arguments pro and con from the Palestinian perspective-- an accomplishment in itself because it is worldview too often caricatured and distorted by propaganda. We see the Occupation through Palestinian eyes without sentimentality, apology, or glorification. And we learn how and why a Palestinian chooses to become a suicide bomber in response; that he acts from a complex of motives of which the promise of Paradise, martyrdom, or particular political goals number least. That Assad manages to portray Said's decision, given his world, as plausible, even pitiful, but never excusable or justifiable, is the film's great accomplishment.

That it isn't deplorable either though might also be Paradise Now's great weakness. Assad almost forecloses this effect because the movie only dramatizes Palestinians. We see their world alone, a world of diverse classes, opinions, and lifestyles, true, but still monolithic in its fate as Occupied. And on the flip-side, Israelis appears only as a distant, abstract Other-- the Occupier in all his self-righteousness and omnipotence. Perhaps, to do justice to the Palestinian worldview this perception of Israel is inevitable. Still a film that presumes to explore the moral implications of suicide bombing lacks an integral element if it omits or at least, scants, the victims; the victims, that is, who are such by no choice of their own. Then again maybe that was Said's design: he wanted to dramatize the tragedy the suicide bomber represents for Palestinians alone.

If so, the film would have benefited from a wider scope. The thriller genre constrained the director to tell the audience about the ultimate motor of Said's decision rather than to illustrate it. The tragedy of Said's decision would have attained far greater pathos then from a depiction of the past he instead recounts for us.

That we see it as a tragedy, in the end, is an achievement worth celebrating.

Good Night and Good Luck

Good Night and Good Luck: An Appreciation

Henry James once famously wrote, "It's a complex fate, being an American."

And perhaps part of that complexity is the paradox that we remain so susceptible to fits of paranoia and hysteria and demagoguery during which the very liberty, tolerance and free expression we consider our hallmark yield to repression, conformity, and terror.

George Clooney's new film Good Night and Good Luck captures the Republic's most notorious Jacobinic episode, the McCarthy Era. A period that began in the late 1940's with House Un-American Affairs Commmittee, Alger Hiss, the Hollywood 10, it reached its climax with the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. Though even after the junior Wisconsin Senator's reign of terror ended with his censure and death three years later in '57, Joe McCarthy would cast his pall of fear, intimidation, censorship throughout the Cold War; and he would bequeath to American history the ignominious era bearing his name.

Hollywood has sought to dramatize McCarthyism with more and less success over the past few decades. Guilty By Suspicion, One of the Hollywood Ten, and The Front come to mind. But these films suffer their industry's characteristic foible: solipsism, among others. That the blacklists, the naming of names, the loyalty oaths were only symptomatic of terror that permeated nearly every American industry and institution never really emerges in these renditions. Maybe we can't blame the fillmmakers entirely though.

Perhaps the peculiar hyprocrisy of American repression doesn't readily lend itself to dramatization. Perhaps the terrors that periodically grip America elude dramatic form because they're so obscured in denial. After all, we don't declare them, still less acknowledge them when they occur. We don't impose martial law. We don't void the Constitution. The President doesn't dissolve Congress or co-opt the Judiciary. No, instead we investigate, swear oaths, legislate Patriot Acts. Then, quietly, we defrock the dissident; lambaste, stigmatize and banish him; wreck his marriage, alienate his family, deprive him of livelihood and cow him slowly into a docile compliant submission. All the while the demagougues responsible continue to espouse the civil liberties they trammel and profess to act in their name. The schizophrenia is enough to defy narrative.

Still, Good Night and Good Luck somehow rises to the challenge. And it is much of Clooney's accomplishment that he does so paradoxicaly through a story so narrow in scope it borders on claustrophobic. He takes a single, largely unknown footnote to the McCarthy era-- broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow's confrontation with Senator McCarthy and the Senator's response-- and succeds in dramatizing the climate of an era. Through the fate of Murrow, his show; its producers; his colleagues, from CBS's minor employee to its senior executive; indeed of the network itself, Clooney encapsulates the era. Good Night and Good Luck conveys the epidemic fear; the cancerous terror; the cowed silence; the self-serving complicity; the lethal desperation; the suspicion so insidious that it penetrated our most personal relationships, poisoning familes and infecting marriages; and finally, the evil flawed men do when they see persecution and say nothing.

Clooney's technique demonstrates some virtuoso flourishes as well. Not only does Clooney's choice to use actual news footage of McCarthy speak for him-- rather than employ an actor to portray the role as he does with Murrow and evey other character-- not only does this simulate documentary's immediacy and reproduce its realism, the effect actually enhances McCarthy's menace. We watch Murrow, Friendly, and the show's contributors reviewing 16mm footage of McCarthy in a screening room where the Senator's visages assumes the enormity and threat to rival Big Brother.

Of course, the movie has its foibles too. Like any Americam fiction it celebrates our myths, a myth Hollywood, in particular, seems to favor. Good Night and Good Luck enacts the myth of the noble individual's power to fight oppression and prevail if only he will demonstrate the courage and bear the sacrifice. A myth if there ever was one but when, as here, it avoids sentimentality, certainly one well worth appreciating.

This is MSS signing off for the Vanguard, Good Night and Good Luck