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.
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