The philosopher of film Stanley Cavell makes the (somewhat obvious) point that films must come from somewhere. And that somewhere for Cavell is other films (Cavell 1979: 7). That is to say the style and grammar of a particular film is based on its predecessors, whether resting on stylistic precedents or breaking away from those precedents. Additionally, the experience of watching films over time also conditions how an audience reads new films. As basic as Cavell’s pronouncement seems, it has powerful political consequences when one studies a topic such as Islam, terror, and suicide on film. When I was asked to write on this nexus, I realized that one clear (but too well-trodden) path would be to examine Hollywood re-creations of Middle Eastern political and religious complexities via films such as The Siege (1998), Syriana (2005), The Kingdom (2007), and Traitor (2008). Then, after providing a reading of these films, illustrate how Muslims are presented in these tales and investigate the mechanisms of their motivation. To do just this, however, would be to encode a political statement about the singularity of the connection between Islam, terror, and suicide.
Yet I am at pains here to stress that there is a very long history of terror and suicide in films that mainly concern the lives of westerners. We see this, for example, in the multiple versions of Romeo and Juliet (Zeffirelli’s 1968 production, Luhrmann’s of 1996, and Carlei’s of 2013), where the two lovers sacrifice themselves and, in a sense posited by René Girard, bring a new level of peace to the Verona of the playscript. Or we see this in films that use suicide to develop a mystery or aporia such as Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999) or Sion Sono’s Suicide Club (2001) where the plot refuses to explain the ultimate reasons for the suicide. Similarly the sacrifice of these characters can also be read in a Girardian sense if we, as audience members, commit ourselves to these characters only to experience the terror of their demise. Their sacrifice becomes our vicarious spill of emotions. What distinguishes these films from how Muslim suicide is usually depicted is that when a non-Muslim turns to thoughts of suicide, the camera provides them with the time and space to examine their inner life before the fateful decision is made. As audience members, we are given the time to empathize with the character. Conversely, in gun-filled Hollywood re-imaginings of terror, we tend to be presented with Muslims who are inherently suicidal. Here I will demonstrate this point through a selection of Hollywood and non-Hollywood inspired films.
First, however, there is a point to stress. As with many who will read this chapter, my life has been touched by suicide. It is a painful topic for those who have encountered it, but here I hope the reader will permit me to speak of suicide as it operates in the game-space of the cinema. This significantly changes the discourse. Throughout this chapter, we should reflect on the fact that narrative cinema’s first duty is to provide an engaging spectacle and an intense emotional experience. In cinema, we enter a liminal gamespace where cognitive-subjunctive possibilities can be played within a zone that is, by the film’s end, politically and socially restorative and thus ultimately non-challenging to the status quo (Turner 1982: 43). For this reason, suicide provides tensions on screen that must be, in the last count, emotionally satisfying for the audience. Regarding the operation of this sort of engaging emotional rollercoaster, I will argue that René Girard’s ‘victimage mechanism’ is a generally satisfying model. I will additionally suggest that this Girardian approach needs methodological amplification to suit more precisely the realm of death on film, and suicide in particular.
“Extreme fear” is the simplest way of describing terror at an individual level—that is, a fear that may not derive from events simply within our quotidian lives but rather a fear that is generated from events and perceived threats that affect the very basics upon which our quotidian lives progress (Solomon 1993: 253–4). Thus, terror links immediately to political systems and the worldviews these systems maintain. Terror is generated as our accepted reality is threatened, or as our worldviews quickly mutate, particularly through threats of radical change. There is little discussion, however, on the specific differences at a personal level between terror and horror, and I hope to make this more explicit. The continuum between these emotions becomes important when Freud’s writings on horror are considered later in this chapter.
Ortega y Gasset has referred to this worldview threat as the fear of being without a world, for the social topography can change during periods of crisis so radically that individuals in a society can end up with no conceptual map by which to understand that world (Ortega y Gasset 1956: 92–3). Terror therefore remains a major, and sometimes the defining, emotion behind radical political change. The primordial and archetypal example of this in the context of modernity is that stage of the French Revolution known as la terreur. “The Terror” as a historical-political precedent is defined by the period from June 1793 to July 1794 when the Committee for Public Safety considered that the Revolution could only be protected by a state-sponsored reign of terror centered upon mass executions. The number of those executed by guillotine around this period numbered over 16,000, with additional summary executions across the country (Dunn 1990: 350). This is reflected in the growth of language on terror that expanded our concept of its use emotively and politically. In its supplements, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française charts the development of the concept and its derivations. “Terrorists” (terroristes) was in use by 1794, and “to terrorize” (terroriser) was in common usage by 1796 (Académie Française 1796).
These words did not necessarily have a pejorative dimension at the point of their origins in the way they do today. The revolutionary leader Robespierre linked state-sponsored terror with a special kind of virtue that would cleanse the new republic of traitorous elements. His attitude then translates into numerous purgatory stages of revolutions and coups that have occurred ever since, especially where a new regime stamps its control on a community through a period of “white” or “pure” terror:
[Robespierre] became in the 1790s—and has been ever since—a popular personification of terrorist evil. In one of his most important speeches on the policy of terror, he proclaims its adoption with republican pride. He knew full well the resonance of the word used to elevate violence to transcendent significance. In the sense here employed, terror is a manifestation of vertu, a republican quality sacralized in the nation. (Maniquis 2000: 372)
We encounter here a special link between terror and a sense of beauty, as manifest in the virtue of social transformation that Robespierre made in his speech of February 5, 1794. As a severe, inflexible, and sudden form of justice, terror also contains a sense of transcendence that is as sublime as it is political. It is this connection that keeps terror in the zone of political activity and, one might argue, a sort of metaphysical political activity at that (Gauchet 1998: 9–12).
An archeology of political terror, based on the original French terror, may be developed throughout the twentieth century as a major part of the process of political transformation. Episodes in the history of terror can include the manifestation of the Nazi totalitarian state from out of the Weimar Republic (Gellately 1991: 23–38). and the purgation of Cambodia after the declaration of a “Year Zero” by the Khmer Rouge (Um 1998: 131–54). In both these incidents, the dominant power structure sought to radically re-imagine the nation. A similar lineage can be developed to examine the use of terror by colonial powers that employed fear-laden tactics to hold colonized peoples in thrall during the twentieth century (Baker 2009). A final significant lineage outlines movements to counter state terror, built predominantly from the legacy of the anti-Spanish guerrilla tactics developed during the Rif War (1920–26) by Abdul Karim (Courcelle-Labrousse and Marmié 2009). His terrorist strategies had a strong influence on other operatives in the Muslim world, as well as figures such as Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara (Abdelkrim 1927: 59–123). Although these archeologies of terror remain in the background of the following films as real-life sources for various narrative structures, this chapter seeks only to examine terror and suicide in its fictional cinematic field.2 This brings this particular emotion back to a personal register and of how terror is used to problematize the relationships of fictional characters dealing with the problematic of suicide.3
Girard posits that one of the great failures of psychologists and ethnologists is their refusal to comprehend the paradoxical relationship of socialization and mimesis (copying others as we develop as social beings and therefore claiming a competitive stance against them in that need to copy). This mimesis, which is essential to socialization, also encourages a powerful tension that we find against societal prohibitions that prevent us from repeating others specifically. This includes the failure by such scholars to make a “connection between conflict and acquisitive mimesis.” Girard continues:
Inevitably we imagine that the prohibitions covering imitative phenomena must be quite distinct from those against violence or intense rivalries. But this is not the case. What is impressive in imitative phenomena is that those who participate in them never cease imitating one another, each one transforming himself into a simulacra of the other … An examination of our own terms, such as competition, rivalry, emulation, etc., reveals that the traditional perspective remains inscribed in the language. Competitors are fundamentally those who run or walk together, rivals those who dwell on opposite sides of the same river etc. (Girard 1978: 11–12)
We have a perfect picture of Girardian mimetic crisis in the seemingly unstoppable conflict between, for example, the two warring houses of Verona. What breaks—or at least significantly interrupts—such conflicts, Girard argues, is sacrifice.
That is to say, an act of violence that unites rather than divides the warring factions. Girard defines the victim thus:
The community finds itself unified once more at the expense of a victim who is not only incapable of self-defence, but is also unable to provoke any reaction of vengeance … The sacrifice is simply another act of violence, but it is the final act of violence, its last word. (Girard 1978: 24)
Girard states that such a sacrifice becomes most important in societies where a legal mechanism for justice, such as a complex court system meting out finally balanced and socially acceptable punishments, has not developed or is for political reasons non-operational (Girard 1978: 30). This fact is vitally important when describing the world of cinema, which easily gives itself over to vigilantism and a focus on the moral choices of individuals, rather than examining the machinery of extended court processes. Free from such justice mechanisms, this absence of vengeance occurs because the victim has, while still alive, become liminal to his/her/its society. In the world of Shakespeare’s Verona, where justice systems seem barely able to touch the city’s most prestigious families, the sacrifice of the lovers certainly reunites the community. In the final lines of the play, Capulet calls Montague his brother as they plan to build a memorial for the lovers.
What I wish to do, however, is demonstrate how a Girardian sacrificial journey takes place in the gamespace of cinema. Here it may seem as though characters kill themselves. The truth is, the scriptwriter, director, and the extended production process of a film all support the act of suicide as a representational process, ultimately, of entertainment. The self-killer on film is a sacrifice generated by the film coming into being and which presents us both the terror and the resolution that Girard speaks of as happening also in real-world scenarios.
In this chapter, I am focusing the use of clearly identified “Muslim” characters. But I must first acknowledge the work of Jack Shaheen, who focuses not on “Muslim” but “Arab” characters who are, in the eyes of Hollywood, ipso facto Muslims. In Shaheen’s research (and via his Arab/racial paradigm), we find our first and most basic answer as to why Muslims/Arabs kill themselves on screen throughout the history of cinema; it is because they have undergone a century-long process of pseudo-speciation in the cinematic field (Grossman 1995: 156–70). Shaheen demonstrates how Arabs have been “framed” by Hollywood as radically other to the West. If the West is ipso facto reasonable, it follows that Arabs have no sense of reason. Thus their status as complete humans is constantly challenged by their cinematic portrayal. He argues that Hollywood’s attitude to Muslims/Arabs has remained unchanged throughout its history:
When colleagues ask whether today’s reel Arabs are more stereotypical than yesteryear’s, I can’t say that the celluloid Arab has changed. That is the problem. He is what he has always been—the cultural “other.” Seen through Hollywood’s distorted lenses, Arabs look different and threatening. Projected along racial and religious lines, the stereotypes are deeply ingrained in American cinema. From 1896 until today, filmmakers have collectively indicted all Arabs as Public Enemy #1—brutal, heartless, uncivilized religious fanatics and money-mad cultural “others” bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners, especially Christians and Jews. (Shaheen 2003: 171)
It follows that if the Muslim/Arab represents something completely other to the West, then the terror that flows from their suicidal urges is chaotic and without a deep sense of reason or justification.
In opposition to, in particular, the ideal of the western middle classes, Muslims, it is imagined, simply cannot control their emotions in public. As such, they are able to burst into ferocious bloodthirsty action on any sort of emotive whim. This accords with Edward Said’s paradigm of Orientalism. A system of “truths in Nietzsche’s sense of the word [where it is] correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, [is] consequently a racist, and imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric” (Said 1991: 204).
Said is talking about a grand tradition where westerners appropriate the Orient by means of descriptions that are intertwined with political and societal assumptions and esthetically this is very much the case in the following examples.
An entertaining proof of this is a short film inspired by Shaheen’s research, which consists of edited scenes of Arabs from a range of Hollywood films and is called Planet of the Arabs.4 The unsophisticated ease with which Muslims/Arabs are roused to raging emotions is such a definite dimension of their character as to be beneath understanding for a westerner. This fits nicely into Shaheen’s paradigm. In western films, suicide victims tend to be the main characters, or suicide tends to deeply affect the main characters of a plot. In films by Hollywood that address Muslim suicide, often very little narrative focus is given to the Muslim characters, as if suicide is not a personal or social tragedy in itself, but an intrinsic part of being Muslim. It is a characteristic that needs no deep explanation or consideration on the part of a western audience. Thus our chances of examining a character’s mental state, as Zunshine suggests in her exposition of theory of mind (Zunshine 2006), can be blatantly truncated by the focus of the camera away from the Muslim character. This lack of focus is determined by the way previous films have been made (again Cavell) and, of course, the cultural biases of the plotmaker and the director.
This attitude is very much the case in The Kingdom (2007) where the director’s focus provides us with significant screen time to consider, and seek to understand, the motivations of the Americans in the film. The camera dwells with them as they plan, it stays with them on their flight to Saudi Arabia, it “hangs out” with them as they wait in their quarters after they have landed. We are given, however, very few opportunities to guess at what the Saudi Arabians may be thinking, for the camera gives them very little time at all.
“The Kingdom” of the title refers to Saudi Arabia, and the film opens in a semi-documentary style by addressing the strange relation that exists between this feudal state and the United States. It gives an overview of the development of the country after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the discovery of oil. It hints at the internal fighting for oil resources and links the 9/11 bombings to Saudi nationals. Such an opening suggests that it will be a semi-factual documentary-style examination of the geopolitics of the United States and the Kingdom. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.
The film then switches to a group of Saudi terrorists sitting on the top floor of a tall building. From here they have an expansive view over a foreigners’ compound. An older man (who we later discover is the terrorist mastermind Abu Hamza) tells a young boy (his grandson) to watch the carnage that is about to erupt. In the compound, the westerners are playing softball. Operatives disguised in police uniforms storm the compound and start shooting the westerners. A suicide bomber, again in police uniform, calls confused westerners to him as if offering protection before blowing himself up. Finally, the carnage brings emergency services to the compound, including a random FBI investigator. Another bomb, hidden inside an ambulance is then exploded, ripping the front off a residential apartment block and killing many more. The message is clear: playing softball in Saudi Arabia can be lethal.
The film has some history behind it. In May 2003 in Riyadh, a series of western compounds were attacked. Thirty-five people, many of them westerners, were killed and a further 160 were injured. The Kingdom makes no attempt to recreate these attacks per se, but the Riyadh attacks lurk as a real event backgrounding the film’s plot and adding to the possibility that The Kingdom is partially a documentary. What we get up front in this film is a significant dose of suicidal horror. Once the bombing is over, there is a chance to direct our thoughts to why these suicide bombers may have done what they did. But no. Instead, the film rips our attention back to Washington and onto the distress that FBI agents are going through because of the loss of one of their own. The film is not particularly interested in the Arabs, or even in exploring the emotions or reactions of those westerners who were killed or injured in the blasts.
What is compelling about the direction of the narrative is that immediately after this overture of carnage, director Peter Berg turns the film into an FBI police procedural, one that just happens to take place on foreign soil. In fact, the screenwriter, Matthew Carnahan, summed up the film by posing the question: “What would a murder investigation look like on Mars?” (Cielty 2007). This is a statement that, in its own special way, links Saudi Arabians to Martians. A film that is billed as being about “The Kingdom” suddenly switches to become an exploration-cum-celebration of the corporate mystique of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
As a police procedural, The Kingdom thus operates in a form made famous by the television detective shows like Columbo (1968–2003) and Cracker (1993–2006): the initial crime is committed and the perpetrators are shown to the audience. The tension lies in whether or not the superior intelligence of the insightful detective/police psychologist will work out whom the perpetrators are before, as the tired cliché has it, “they kill again.” This comparison falls down in one powerful respect. The television dramas of Columbo and Cracker were powered by the slow, and dramatic, unveiling of the motivations and psychologies of those who had committed the murders. Here the focus is quite different and yet the culture of what a Hollywood film has become means that this difference can go mostly unexplained.
Much of the running time following the opening scenes of the film are spent dealing with the problem that the FBI is a homeland policing organization and has nothing to do with on-the-ground actions outside the US. In fact, why would the Saudis invite operatives of a foreign police force into their country? Why would the US government allow an organization not trained in geopolitics, or the local culture or language, into that foreign land? This issue is solved when lead investigator Special Agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) jumps the Saudi ambassador to the United States in Washington and blackmails him into letting his team access the blast site. We then move into another cliché of the police procedural as Fleury and his team carry out their investigation despite the prevailing power structures; in this case, both the Saudi and the US governments remain reluctant to have the FBI team at the site.
Fleury’s team know no Arabic, but this is almost beside the point. The FBI has the universal language of scientistic forensic reason and justice. The film seeks to demonstrate that this process of investigation and justice remains superior to anything culturally connected that the Saudis might achieve. The cast list announces that Fleury’s team consists of Special Agents Grant Sykes (bomb technician), Janet Mayes (forensic examiner), and Adam Leavitt (intelligence analyst). These agents have brought their evidence bags, their autopsy kits, and their police crime-scene tape. Because of their science, they do not need to connect with the local culture, and thus do not need to problematize reasons for why suicide bombers may have attacked the compound.
Arriving at the destroyed compound, all four watch in anguish as the Saudi forces march back and forth across the crime site. If anything in recent popular narrative structures defines sacred space, it is the space of the crime scene. Roped off and minutely investigated, the crime scene is the start, the locus, and font of the detective’s journey towards a (sacred but truly rational) explanation of “whodunit.” The Saudis’ desecration of this scientistically sacred site is another sign of their barbarity, as is the scene where Special Agent Janet Mayes is only permitted to carry out autopsies on the western bodies, not the Muslim ones. Only after long negotiation is the team finally allowed to gather evidence and piece together a scenario. They do this by slowly winning over the local police agent, Colonel Faris Al-Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom), who is assigned to be their babysitter. He is the only Saudi who gets to see and appreciate the rational efficiency that the American agents bring with them. Only he is elevated to the same status as family man Agent Fleury, when we watch a short scene of Al-Ghazi at home with his son.
In order to return the film to a spectacular action ending, the four agents are ordered out, but have their road convoy attacked as they proceed to the airport. In chasing the attackers, the FBI agents and Al-Ghazi are forced to fight an OK Corral-type shoot-out in an unknown town. This conflict brings them face to face with Abu-Hamza, the terrorist mastermind we saw at the start of the film coordinating the initial attack. While attempting to arrest this man, Colonel Al-Ghazi is fatally wounded. That is, using Girard, although Al-Ghazi does not kill himself, he is nevertheless a liminal figure sacrificed by the plot for our emotional satisfaction. He may remain an Arab (albeit one that the film has sought to humanize/westernize), yet he has also seen the “scientific” ways of the foreigners. He has grown to be like a westerner, thus the audience can be shocked at his death, which “retards” him and those around him back into an un-scientific “Arabness.” His death is thus terrifying because it ends the possibility that he may bring something of the FBI ethos to “Mars” as it were.
At the end of the film, the four agents return to America, their heroic immortality reconfirmed.5 The sacrifice of Muslims, however, occurs in two distinct registers. They self-sacrifice at the start of the film, yet we are given no space to consider why. Their deaths are not presented as aporias, but rather, as a consequence of something that Muslims just do. The other register of sacrifice, as in the case of Al-Ghazi, allows us to see the victim sacrificed by the plot. He is killed for being pseudo-American, yet remaining, in the end, intractably Arab.
It is by a rather unbelievable plot twist (an FBI agent successfully blackmailing a Saudi ambassador) that The Kingdom seems to address issues in Saudi Arabia, but soon becomes an American film about Americans. It is not surprising then that the film was shot in Arizona, thus obviating the need to negotiate with Middle Eastern or North African communities about the weirdly American content of the film. The Kingdom assumes, without giving space for contemplation of their motivations, that Saudi Arabian Muslims kill themselves because they are Saudi Arabian Muslims. It re-affirms a worldview in which western rationality in detective work overrides the sort of connected community policing that locals may carry out. The Kingdom is in the end a film that uses suicide and terror, as it uses Islam, to demonstrate that reality as constructed by FBI agents, is far superior to how the locals on Mars may conceive of their own worldview and their own terrain.
In 2006, Monica Eng from the Chicago Tribune wrote, “The tagline for the critically acclaimed film Syriana was: ‘Everything Is Connected.’ But for those who saw it flash by in theaters, it was more like ‘Everything is confusing’” (Eng 2006). The film weaves together four plotlines (the script proposed a fifth plot which was deleted, perhaps for the sake of clarity). Although a single viewing gives a particular image of United States-Middle Eastern relations, the impression remains hazy. The film is inspired by episodes from former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case manager Bob Baer’s memoir See No Evil. Roger Ebert sees the confusion as a part of the powerful political message of the film:
Syriana is a movie that suggests Congress can hold endless hearings about oil company profits and never discover the answer to anything, because the real story is so labyrinthine that no one—not oil company executives, not Arab princes, not C.I.A. spies, not traders in Geneva, understands the whole picture. (Ebert 2012a)
Ebert declares the film to be his second favorite of 2005 (Ebert 2005b), and additional critical responses agreed that the film was noteworthy. There are aspects of the film that are only understandable because they function in the field of cinematic cliché. The CIA operative Bob Barnes (George Clooney) becomes a morally ambiguous figure who, by the end of the film, seeks to save the life of Gulf State Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig). He does so despite the US government ordering Barnes to kill the prince.
In a reflection of Barnes, Prince Nasir is revealed as a “good Arab” who declares his wishes to bring democracy and liberalism to the totalitarian state his father the emir operates with the US’s blessing. As these two figures become liminal to their home cultures by seeming to be too deeply engaged with the culture of the other, it is not surprising to find them both sacrificed in one of two bomb attacks at the end of the film. In this case, a drone attack by the American military hits a motorcade in which the prince is traveling and which Bob Barnes is approaching in order to deliver his warning to the prince. Barnes dies in the film, despite the fact that Bob Baer is still alive and well today: the present rules of plot-making dictate that the character based on him must die as he becomes liminal to the worlds in which he operates. Barnes and Nasir are sacrificed to cancel out the hope that change may come to this region. In this way, the film provides us with an emotional punch and leaves the political order ultimately unchallenged.
The second bomb attack in the film is carried out by a Pakistani guest worker, again somewhere in a Gulf State. The storyline of this character called Wasim (Mazhar Munir) begins when the oil refinery he works for lays him off because of a change in ownership. Here we come face-to-face with the concept that “everything is connected” as global company politics result in local staff cuts and immediate political consequences. Told he needs to learn Arabic to get a new job and stay in the country, Wasim begins attending an Islamic school where he meets a fundamentalist cleric. I found this storyline to be the weakest of the four. Although the film pays some attention to the relationship between Wasim and the cleric, there is simply too much going in the rest of the film to allow us into this character’s mindset with any depth. We do not know enough about him to intuit his motivations (theory of mind). We are not sure why he becomes a devoted disciple of the cleric, nor why he does not return to his native Pakistan and carry out his terrorist plotting there. We do not know why he agrees to martyr his life by sailing a fishing trawler armed with a missile into a natural gas tanker. By leaving this aspect of the story undercooked, writer-director Stephen Gaghan unfortunately falls back once more on the Hollywood trope that a Muslim is more likely to kill himself than not. For all the critical acclaim heaped upon it, Syriana has a little too much in common with The Kingdom, although its hectic flow of multiple plots may, at first, obscure the connection.
When we move away from Hollywood and consider how directors in the Muslim word represent the suicide of Muslims on film, we find, in at least two significant examples, the phenomenon being treated with a care and consideration that westerners apply to the subject when it is westerners who are killing themselves. Taste of Cherry (1997) is a masterwork in minimalism by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Its slow pace almost makes it a visual meditation on the last days of a man called Mr Badii (Homayon Ershadi). He drives around a city asking various men if they will come and cover his body with earth after he has committed suicide. The tension created between Mr Badii and the three men he asks is potent. The first man, a young soldier, flees from the car. The second, a seminarian, reminds Badii of religious proscriptions against suicide and refuses to help. The last man, a taxidermist with an ailing daughter, accepts the money Badii offers, agrees to cover his body with earth, but nevertheless tries to convince him not to kill himself. The story he tells of his own suicide attempt is deeply touching and, in the end, life affirming. Mr Badii, however, will not be swayed.
The care that Badii displays for the posthumous state of his body is fascinating. That he requires his body to be covered with earth links his death to a general monotheistic apocalyptic scenario. It may be that Badii simply does not want to be found, but with the presence of the seminarian, we are reminded of the Last Day, the Resurrection of the Dead, and the Final Judgment. It may be the case that Badii believes in these things, but believes that when he is called before Allah on the last day, he will be able to justify his suicide. The film is an aporia, but Kiarostami never lets the camera stray far from Ershadi’s fascinating face, as viewers look for hints, and build on their own theory of mind as to why he might want to die.
The final scenes of the film are compelling and terror-filled because of both the simplicity and the monumental nature of his act. Badii takes pills in his bathroom, closes his apartment and takes a long taxi ride to the gravesite at the back of the city. On the edge of his own grave, he smokes a final cigarette. He then lies in his grave. In one sense, because we know so little about him, he becomes an everyman figure. Which is to say that, to some extent, it is ourselves who are in the grave. Here is the source of the terror we feel from this movie. A thunderstorm approaches. In one flash of lightening, we see him alive; in the next flash, his eyes are closed and he seems to be gone. Having been sacrificed by Kiarostami to make a compelling film, once the character of Mr Badii is dead, the film ceases to exist. A low-quality camera shows Kiarostami and crew packing up the film in the area of the grave. The actor Ershadi is standing about. A troop of soldiers marches by. Are the soldiers a hint to Badii’s reasons for killing himself? Or are they simply there?
The power of Taste of Cherry comes from the ample time the film gives us to try to understand how the world might seem to Mr Badii. As he seems justified in leaving this earth, is it love that compels him? Is he doing his best to escape from Iran in a political sense? As we ask these questions from our own subjective position, the film also provides us time to contemplate ourselves, and those things that hold us to life, or which would justify our departure in such a way. At a deeper level, the film also works as a corrective to Hollywood’s serious anti-Islamic biases; Badii kills himself not because he is a Muslim, but because of his humanity and the complexities that come with being human. Although we might not know what they are, after seeing Taste of Cherry, we have no doubt that Badii has his own complex, rational, and sophisticated reasons for wanting to die, Muslim or not.
The first film to be accepted for competition at the Academy Awards as a Palestinian film, Paradise Now received nomination in 2006 for Best Foreign Film. It won a Golden Globe award in the same category. Directed by Hany Abu-Assad, the film is shot in Nablus on the West Bank and in Nazareth. It tells the story of two childhood friends who agree to be suicide bombers in Israel: Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman). The plot is built from a number of transcripts of interrogations carried out by the Israeli Army upon suspected suicide terrorists, and with people who had known successful suicides. Thus in locality and in research, the script seeks to draw out human qualities and thinking from a deep understanding of the reality of life in this troubled area.
The film gives us a great deal of time to consider the depths of Said’s and Khaled’s convictions as we see them prepare for their attack. They are washed and cleaned by their fellow operatives, given a final meal and asked to record a declaration of purpose into an aging video camera. The scene with the video camera is most stark. At one stage, the camera does not work and Said must repeat his declaration. As he does so, the others nibble at their lunch. While on tape, Khaled reminds his mother about some shopping. That is, even in this moment of heightened political drama, the real world is ever-present, even comically so. These sorts of details go a long way to humanizing Said and Khaled. They are not robots, their suicide is not a given, they doubt until the end. The terror from this film comes not from the illogical emotions that power the two potential killers, but that their reason would lead them in this direction. As Dan Glaister in The Guardian put it:
Paradise Now’s depiction of the bombers has generated powerful positive and negative reactions, although neither as harsh as Abu-Assad expected. For some, it does not treat the two characters with the respect suicide bombers should be afforded; for others it humanises them, even glorifies them. “They are human, like it or not,” says Abu-Assad. “It’s a human reaction. It’s not that these people are different genetically.” (Glaister 2006)
Moreover, this care links the motivations of the characters to some of the saner academic investigations of suicide bombing.
As Robert Pape in his powerful examination of suicide-terrorist motivations writes:
Most suicide terrorism is undertaken as a strategic effort directed towards particular political goals; it is not simply the product of irrational individuals or an expression of fanatical hatreds. The main purpose of suicide terrorism is to use the threat of punishment to compel a target government to change policy, and most especially to cause democratic states to withdraw forces from land the terrorists perceive as their national homeland. (Pape 2005: 27)
In stating this, Pape is seeking to redress the sort of myths and misconceptions that the West, and Hollywood in particular, have been perpetrating against the reality of terrorism and suicide. Instead of a wildly emotive other moved to unreasonable acts of violence, Pape reveals the rational and mundane strategies behind suicide terrorism. So it is not surprising that practical political concerns form a significant part of Said’s and Khaled’s motivations as well. What separates these two friends’ overall worldviews comes back to the history of their fathers. Khaled’s is still alive and, we assume, a respected member of his Palestinian community. Contrariwise, Said’s father was killed by operatives within the community for working as an Israeli informant. The camera lingers on Said enough that we can see he is tortured by the shame of this execution and is powered by the additional motivation to prove himself in the eyes of the community. The issue of fatherly prestige is elevated by the presence of Suha, to whom Said is attracted. She doubts violence can be any sort of answer, but ironically, she speaks with the authority of one whose father was extremely prestigious in the fight against the Israeli occupation. Unlike Khaled, Said has something very particular to prove and this motivation seems both practical and personal to us. Moreover, he is a figure that will remain forever on the outskirts of his community because of the actions of his father. He fits the victimage model of Girard.
Said and Khaled make a first attempt to enter Israel. It is thwarted. Said makes it to a bus stop just inside the boarder, but cannot find the will to get on the bus. He returns and ends up on his father’s grave, angst ridden and about to kill himself by triggering the bomb he has been wearing all day. He is discovered by Khaled and, after a long discussion, they decide to return to Israel. The drama reaches its climax as the two have a second chance to detonate the bombs they wear. This Hamlet-like delay in the action of the film also allows us to further consider the tenuousness of their resolve. The final scene gives us a shot of Said sitting on a bus in Israel. Having made his objective, the camera slowly focuses on his eyes as Israelis sit around him talking. The screen then whites out. We assume, but do not know, that he has pulled the trigger on his explosive belt. We do not get to see the dramatic events that follow his suicide/sacrifice. Said is in one sense not sacrificed at all, we are left in some doubt as to what he does indeed do.
The aim of the director, Abu-Assad, was to focus on the humanity of the characters and the mundane atmosphere behind the terror they seek to create. In this he succeeded, although he felt he lost sight of his artistic intent in the heady moments during his acceptance speech for the Golden Globe Award, as he explained in an interview to the Guardian,
While he doesn’t regret his words at the celebration, they have given him pause for thought. “I believe I made my film artistically less important when I said the Palestinians need their liberty. But that was my feeling at that moment. I turned the film into a kind of political statement, which it is not. The film is an artistic point of view of that political issue. The politicians want to see it as black and white, good and evil, and art wants to see it as a human thing.” (Glaister 2006)
It is this “human thing” that makes Paradise Now a particularly valid investigation into the motivations of suicide bombers, and puts in sharper contrast the strange assumptions Hollywood continues to make about Arabs, Muslims, suicide, and terror. As Brym and Hamlin observe:
The decisions that Khaled and Said make are fascinating because they are shot through with ambivalence, as decisions often are when real flesh-and-blood men and women make them. Khaled and Said think their action will bring political benefits—but they are not sure. They clothe their decision in terms of religious rectitude—but they are not very religious themselves, fear death, and are uncertain they will enter paradise when they complete their task. They seek revenge—but the inhumanity of their plan troubles them and causes one of them to experience a change of heart. Above all, Khaled and Said understand that they can choose how to act. They know they can change their mind. Their plans are in effect only until further notice, as it were. (Brym and Hamlin 2009: 95–6)
What Said is about to do at the end of the film is not presented as esthetically beautiful, nor is it framed as virtuous, but simply as the point at which the film refuses to follow his character any further. If there is terror in the final scene of Paradise Now, it is the message that individuals under extreme pressure will react, after much thought, in an extreme way.
It is here that Freud’s theory on the uncanny becomes useful. In his article on the uncanny, Freud examines the feelings of horror and terror put forward first by Jentsch where they were linked to a de-familiarization of the homeland:
The German word unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning “familiar,” “native,” “be-longing to the home”; and we are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar … so that the uncanny would always be that in which one does not know where one is, as it were. The better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it. (Freud 1919)
This theory returns the schema of this chapter to both Ortega Y Gasset and Pape, who examine remedial actions that an individual and a society can take to ensure that in times of crisis the familiar space of our dwelling area conceptually operates as such. When it does not, when we feel un-homed and un-powered, we feel the uncanny through both horror and terror. It is this feeling of unease that Said attempts to reconcile through his own sacrifice.
The clearest conclusion we can draw on motivations to suicide by Muslims on screen is deeply effected by an Orientalist perspective through Hollywood. Muslims on screen are easily depreciated as a radical and overly-emotive “other,” less than human, due to a very long tradition of treating them in this way in the tropes of plot making and film making in the West. When attention is directed to films outside of this racist and pseudo-speciating bias, I have argued here that to understand suicide motivations amongst Muslims, it is most sane and fair to examine how various cinemas deal with suicide. Girard’s victimage model becomes a very sustainable framework for examining why plot makers and film constructors sacrifice characters on screen: for a sense of resolution and also emotional affect. It is in part because suicide works to heighten the horror and confusion that a film might seek to have us experience. As audience members, we accept the validity of the lives of fictional characters and when we see some of these characters die, their sacrifice becomes a point where we can exercise our emotional distress, and occasionally terror. I have argued that Lisa Zunshine’s exposition of the theory of mind approach shows how we do deeply intuit the motivational possibilities of characters and that their deaths can lead to deep considerations that are horror and terror-laced. It is a terror that at its most basic level threatens how we understand the world. For when our worldview does not operate in the way that we hope, we can develop a sense of terror-filled unhomeliness as Freud describes it. This sense of unhomeliness is not only the site of motivations for figures across cinematic history to sacrifice themselves, from Juliet to Said, but it also stirs the deepest senses of unhomeliness in ourselves. Yet, as I have stated throughout this article, it is the cinema’s ability to stir these deep emotions that lays at the heart of its power as a vehicle of overwhelming and challenging entertainment. In order to remain aware of the political dimensions of that entertainment we should constantly consider what it is about the terror of watching suicide on screen that, ironically, gives us the sort of pleasure that it does.
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1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as Christopher Hartney, "Why Muslims Kill Themselves on Film," Journal of Religion and Violence, 1(3) (2013): 276-302.
2 I cannot make the same boundary blur that Brym and Hamlin make by confusing the field of cinema with the field of real human action. After a sociological reading of suicide motivations in relation to terrorism, they provide a reading of Paradise Now (2005). The article suggests the film highlights the theory they expound. I maintain that narrative film operates under its own rules of engagement and should not be appreciated for its possible documentary dimensions and its ability to highlight real human behavior (Brym and Hamlin 2009: 83–96).
3 I carry out this task in the knowledge that between 1981 and 2008, 1,840 suicide attacks claimed the lives of more than 21,000 people. See Wright (2008), “Since 2001, a dramatic increase in suicide bombings,” as quoted in Brym and Hamlin (2009: 83).
4 Accessed 30 September 2012. At http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi1ZNEjEarw. Planet of the Arabs is done very much in the style of film artist Tracey Moffatt who edits together scenes from Hollywood productions to reveal startling biases in the constancy of cinematic tropes. See Smith (2007).
5 Whereas heroes and heroines in non-Hollywood national cinemas will give their lives in an act that they hope will improve their society, Americans, as they are represented on film, increasingly want to risk their lives to achieve a boon for their communities and to come away with their lives, as though they are immortal. This feeds into much research about the denial of death in the West. See in particular Becker (1997).