. . . a term coined by the inimitable George Carlin*, is a good description of how through-the-looking-glass I feel watching "The Siege,", the eerily premonitory 1998 movie starring Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, and Bruce Willis, and directed by Edward Zwick (much better than his "The Last Samurai").** I won't bother trying to untangle its convoluted plot; at bottom, it's a thriller about Islamic terrorist attacks on New York City. Each of the attacks foreshadows something that hadn't happened yet in 1998. Within days, a city bus [Jerusalem], a crowded Broadway theater [Moscow], a schoolroom [Beslan], and a downtown federal building are targeted -- the last (by suicide van) leaving a pit of wreckage so September 11-like that you almost wonder, hairs on end, who got whose ideas from whom. To make things even more chilling and disorienting, the intact twin towers twinkle in the background in more than one establishing shot.
The best thing in the film is Bening's riveting performance as a despicably corrupt yet somehow poignant CIA agent. But all that gets overshadowed by the weird resonances between prior fantasy and subsequent reality, the ways life imitated art and the many more ways it didn't. Although the attacks are smaller than 9/11 -- after all four, the death toll is in the hundreds -- the fact that there are four in quick succession makes the city seem in a way even more helpless before the terrorists than it felt in 2001. And of course in the film the government reacts far more Strangelovingly, imposing martial law within days, with Willis's mad patriot general putting tanks in the streets and innocent Brooklyn Arabs behind razor wire. This is a Hollywood movie, after all: the initial terror caused by the attacks, which seems so devastatingly real to anyone who's lived through 9/11, is quickly swept away (oh, for the good old days when the blood was fake!) by the far greater menace of our very own government, while in a weird switcheroo the terrorists come to seem almost sympathetic, the pure products of broken American promises; after all, the Annette Benings of the CIA trained, seduced and then abandoned them! To clear the way for sympathy, the filmmakers make sure to have the terrorists let all the little kids out of the bus before blowing it up (awwwww!), and we are spared fully confronting the horror of the bomb in the schoolroom when Denzel somersaults through the door and kills the terrorist before he can detonate it.
In "real life," it is equally unimaginable that Arab-Americans would have been herded en masse into internment camps (the real civil-rights picture is much spottier, with some innocent Muslims detained incommunicado for months while we bend over backwards not to racially-profile airline passengers), and that, in the terrified days and weeks after 9/11, New Yorkers could have marched en masse in the streets with signs saying . . . "NO FEAR." The realest thing in the movie is the way, after the attacks, everyone hits the ground when a bus backfires. Just like New Yorkers look up whenever a plane goes over.
- amba
*Do you ever get that strange feeling of vuja de? Not déjà vu; vuja de. It's the distinct sense that, somehow, something that just happened has never happened before. Nothing seems familiar. And then suddenly the feeling is gone. Vuja de.
-- Napalm & Silly Putty (2001)
Oh! I completely forgot why I was blogging on this film in the first place: because it also relates to the discussion of torture. There's a scene where Denzel Washington bursts into a men's washroom lined with urinals and finds Annette Bening (small, short-haired American woman) and Bruce Willis (officer in beret and cammies) getting ready to torture a naked Arab, for all the world as if they were the prototypes for Lynddie England and Charles Graner. Washington declares, "If we torture him, then everything that we have bled and fought and died for is over. And they've won. They've already won."
See? This movie is as goose-walked-over-your-grave as the one in which Chris Reeve played a paraplegic before his accident, or as "The China Syndrome" in the light of Three Mile Island. I don't know how "The Siege" did at the box office, but it gives new meaning to the word "bomb": the film was an unwitting time bomb, packed with deadly shards of Things To Come.
**"The Siege" does feature the same homoerotic buddy-film cliché at its center as "The Last Samurai," but with an interesting twist: this time the hero is black, and his noble sidekick is Arab-American (an FBI agent played by Tony Shalhoub). The twist isn't as interesting as it looks, though, once you realize that in films like this Denzel Washington or Wesley Snipes only looks black. They're generic action-hero leading men; they've completely crossed over. Which in my opinion is a good thing: such actors, who neither dissemble nor flaunt their ethnicity, are forerunners, making sneaky inroads into everyone's consciousness, breaking ground for the future. It's ironic, though, that in Zwick's Hollywood cornfield, Arabs, who used to pass for white, are the new Other, at once menacing and soulful.
You are definitely right about The Siege. I remember seeing that movie and when 9/11 actually happening somehow, in my Hollywood programmed brain, just expecting everything to happen just as in that movie. I expected martial law, I expected the Constitution to be shredded, the internment camps. Then it didn't happen (whatever insane anti-Bush types want to allege about civil liberties, I always think it could be worse).
It was that aspect of 9/11 that really amazed me, how America got more timid, but never did we go through a freakish reaction of the like at home. Though I would say the torture parts of that movie are interesting in the context of Iraq.
Posted by: MrProliferation | January 11, 2005 at 01:56 PM