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Amnesia at the Cineplex
by Lakshmi Chaudhry
" For all the pain and loss that The Kite Runner depicts, it is still a film of exhilarating, redemptive humanity, conveying an enduring sense of hope," gushed Ann Hornaday in her Washington Post review of the cinematic adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's literary blockbuster.
While other movie critics were less enthusiastic, almost all emphasized the "universal" appeal of a story of childhood friendship, betrayal and atonement, set against the backdrop of three decades of recent Afghan history.
[Republished at PFP with express Agence Global permission.]
That's entertainment: Two films address US adventures in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, with big doses of historical amnesia,
political pandering, moral superiority, and outraged innocence.
The release of The Kite Runner at the height of the holiday movie
season no doubt showed a certain amount of chutzpah on the part of
Hollywood, given its unfestive subject and cast of unknown Afghan and
Iranian actors. Sadly, such marketing brio isn't matched by the movie
itself, which is yet another dismal example of Hollywood's predilection
for historical amnesia and political pandering, especially when it
comes to stories about the Muslim world.
Released in 2003,
the novel emerged as a literary dark horse that made its way to the top
of the New York Times bestseller list based almost entirely on
word-of-mouth marketing by enthusiastic readers and book clubs. Critics
and commentators widely praised Hosseini for "humanizing" both
Afghanistan and its people at a time when, in the wake of 9/11, they
were more likely to evoke fear than empathy.
"If The Kite
Runner's early adopters picked up the book to learn something about
Afghanistan, what kept them reading (and recommending it) is the
appealingly familiar story at the heart of the novel: a struggle of
personal recovery and unconditional love, couched in redemptive
language immediately legible to Americans," wrote Slate critic Meghan
O'Rourke in 2005 of its equally successful paperback edition, which
currently enjoys fourth place on the Times bestseller list. "It's
clearly such messages of redemption that prompted one Amazon reviewer
to observe that The Kite Runner 'remind[s] us that we are all human
alike, fighting similar daily and lifelong battles, just in different
circumstances.' "
It's a message Hosseini emphasizes in
interviews promoting the movie: "This film is going to bring, in a way,
Afghanistan into the living rooms of people around the world. In a
positive light, in a human light. This is a story about these Afghan
Muslim characters that does not begin with terrorism, does not begin
with fanaticism. It's a story about ordinary human beings."
The
"story," however, is more than a little suspect. Both the novel and its
faithful cinematic adaptation rely on a carefully edited version of
political reality that enables Western -- or, more specifically,
American -- empathy with the other by absolving the self of all
responsibility.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education,
Fatemeh Keshavarz, author of Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than
Lolita in Tehran, makes a case for what she describes as the "New
Orientalism," which merely replaces the age-old Orientalist dichotomy
of West versus East with that of the good Muslim versus bad Muslim. The
updated version views the Islamic world as a universe of victims and
villains, where the right kind of Muslims, i.e., standard-bearers of
Western values of secularism, democracy and freedom, are pitted against
cruel, barbaric, backward oppressors.
Rather than humanizing
the other, the narrative allows us to maintain our favored state of
moral superiority and outraged innocence. We are free to pretend not
only that the problems of the Muslim world and its denizens are
entirely of their making but also that our enlightened values offer
their best hope for the future.
It isn't a coincidence that
at a time when most Americans feel tremendous anxiety and uncertainty
about our relationship with the Muslim world, the publishing industry
has witnessed a boom in Islam-themed books that shift the attention
away from "us" to "them." Books like The Kite Runner, The Bookseller of
Kabul and Reading Lolita in Tehran painstakingly re-create details of
native culture and history, and yet conveniently omit a long history of
US involvement and intervention. "Indeed, the way this literature
navigates its way through the Middle Eastern mess without running into
the US presence there is astounding," writes Keshavarz.
While
haunting scenes of Russian- and Taliban-inflicted violence abound in
both the novel and the movie, there is not one mention in The Kite
Runner of the US role in arming and promoting the very militants who
would go on to enslave an entire nation. On the big screen, America
serves instead as a haven of freedom for the narrator, who flees to
this country on the heels of the Russian invasion, and again at the
very end for a young boy rescued from the Taliban.
Unlike
the novel, the movie avoids dealing with the 9/11 attacks and the war
against Afghanistan that soon followed -- events that Hosseini
air-brushes over in the most egregious fashion in the book: "One
Tuesday morning last September, the Twin Towers came crumbling down
and, overnight, the world changed. The American flag suddenly appeared
everywhere.... Soon after the attacks, America bombed Afghanistan, the
Northern Alliance moved in, and the Taliban scurried like rats.... That
December, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras gathered in Bonn, and
under the watchful eye of the UN, began the process that might someday
end over twenty years of unhappiness in their watan [homeland]."
There's
nary a word about dead civilians, unsavory alliances with warlords or
the escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment -- including the desire to bomb
their homeland back into the proverbial Stone Age -- that surely made
life uncomfortable for the average Afghan immigrant in America.
Hosseini's
brand of humanism is carefully tailored to confirm our most
self-indulgent preconceptions about ourselves and our role in the
world. But at least its sins are merely those of omission, committed
perhaps with the best of intentions by an author intent on persuading a
largely hostile, or at best indifferent, audience of the value of his
people and their culture.
Besides, The Kite Runner's crimes
against historical integrity pale in comparison to that other movie
about Afghanistan to hit theaters this Christmas. Released a mere week
later, Charlie Wilson's War manages to recast shortsighted hubris and
rabid anticommunism as patriotic virtue, and this in a movie created by
a team of self-identified Hollywood liberals, no less.
Written by Aaron
Sorkin and directed by Mike Nichols, it makes a hero of the flamboyant
Texan Congressman who engineered a $1 billion covert CIA operation to
arm the mujahedeen resistance to Soviet occupation back in the 1980s.
This operation entailed, among other things, secretly funneling arms
and money from Israel to Pakistan without Congressional oversight;
getting in bed with Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq, a man widely
credited for transforming Pakistan into an Islamic state and building
its nuclear arsenal; and last but not least, nurturing the very jihadis
who would later become foot soldiers of Al Qaeda.
Yet six
years after the 9/11 attacks, in the midst of a disastrous military
intervention stoked by the same kind of patriotic fervor, even as an
armed-to-the-teeth Pakistan struggles for political stability, all this
self-styled political satire has to offer by way of acknowledging that
pesky little thing we call blowback is an ambiguous quote about how we
"fucked up the endgame."
"Is this admirable restraint or
cold feet?" asks David Ansen in his Newsweek review. "Are they afraid
of spoiling the feel-good uplift of Charlie's victory with the harsh
downdraft of history? It's as if 'Titanic' ended with a celebratory
shipboard banquet, followed by a postscript: by the way, it sank."
Maybe
it's just good old-fashioned denial, both of history and of our role in
shaping it. While its big-screen adaptation is unlikely to do as well,
the paperback edition of The Kite Runner is still flying high on the
New York Times bestseller list. Meanwhile, Charlie Wilson's War has
already snagged itself five Golden Globe nominations, including one for
Sorkin's screenplay.
Denial may be bad for the soul, but it's undeniably good for business.
Lakshmi
Chaudhry is a contributing writer for The Nation magazine and co-author
with Robert Scheer and Christopher Scheer, of The Five Biggest Lies
Bush Told Us About Iraq, published by Akashic Books and Seven Stories
Press.
Copyright © 2007 The Nation
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Released: 31 December 2007
Word count: 1,311
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Released: 31 December 2007
Word Count: 1,311
Rights & Permissions Contact: Agence Global, 1.336.686.9002, rights@agenceglobal.com
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