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.
