Para-militarization of Universities in Iran
By Cyrus Bina and Hamid Zangeneh
Open Letter to Academic Colleagues and the Academic Community At Large
The 16th of Āzar (December 7th) marks the commemoration of the 56th anniversary of student protest against the Richard M. Nixon, the then Vice President of the United States, who visited the Shah’s government of the post-CIA coup d’état in the late 1953 in Tehran. This is also an occasion for the continuation of protests against June 2009 post-election bloody crack downs against the Ahmadinejad administration and its benefactor, Ayatollah Ali Khamene’ei, which in large measure also brings to light the 30-year unpardonable conduct of the regime to the court of the public opinion again. The Islamic Republic is now turned into a paramilitary regime beyond the imagination of both the Shah’s regime and the founding fathers of the so-called Islamic Revolution. The irony of recent history that had positioned the Iranians between a premeditated tragedy and an impulsive comedy: the former—the CIA intervention that brought the Shah back; the latter—the pathetic post-election coup that metamorphosed the regime toward an all-encompassing paramilitary state. The context below is more pertinent to this year’s Student Day anniversary than ever.
As the universities in Iran have turned into the bastion of paramilitary “Revolutionary Guards” and “Basijis,” the present-day post-revolutionary Sha’abaan bi Mokhs (literally, Sha’abaan the Brainless), like Mr. Kamran Daneshjoo and Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, portray themselves as learned individuals worthy of respect. These individuals, whose numbers are sky rocketing and whose purpose has nothing to do with learning and scholarship, have been able to get phony degrees and titles that presumably give them respect and thus prop up their stature to sugarcoat their thuggish and unbecoming mission as the agents of repression in Iran. Mr. Ahmadinejad, of course, is a talented man who wore many hats in the past; he was a one-time assistant executioner in the notorious Evin Prison in which he was reportedly putting the final bullet (tir-e khalās) in political prisoner’s head. Ahmadinejad and his cohorts in the “Revolutionary Guard” and Basij are thus desperately seeking such titles in order to do their dirty work in disguise—as a “respectable” make-belief academic authority. And this is but a horrifying parallel for some of us who know one or two things about Iran’s recent history that the senior interrogators under the Shah’s regime too used to call themselves “Doctor,” when they engaged in interrogation by means of torture leveled routinely against the tied up political prisoners in the same prison in Tehran.
The Next Big Thing in the War On Terror and airport security is the full-body scanner. You’ve heard about it. This is the machine that will expose everyone – you, me, everybody who passes through it – as if we were naked. You may think that’s a good idea. A highly trained security expert would be able to spot hidden explosives and other such terrorist dangers. Who will examine and interpret our full-body scans? Who will look at our exposed bodies with an eye to making the American People safer? You know who. Our nakedness will be seen by and interpreted by at least one and perhaps a whole group of minimum wage TSA employees. Real security experts, right? If you have been in an airport lately you know exactly who I’m talking about. Do you think those new full-body scans will make you feel more comfortable flying? More secure? Safer? Sure they will.
Did you know that President Obama’s Dept. of Homeland Security has already purchased more than $50 million worth of these new airport machines, and that they have ordered another $25 million more, which are yet to come? You didn’t hear about Congress approving this? That’s because they never did. They took the money right out of the Stimulus Package. Exactly what you thought that program was meant for wasn’t it?
Guess who the most vocal supporter of this new technology is. How about Michael Chertoff, the former head of The Dept. of Homeland Security under George W. Bush. That fact, I’m sure, makes you feel better, doesn’t it? Chertoff is a security expert. He knows what works and what doesn’t. Right? He has your safety and your interest as his personal goal, doesn’t he? Why else would he be on every television show he can find talking up the need for these full-body scanners at every airport in America and all around the world? Chertoff wouldn’t have a personal, private agenda, a special interest here – would he?
Well, maybe. It’s called The American Way.
Michael Chertoff served his country – and now his country is damn well going to serve him. Isn’t that The American Way? Sure it is. Chertoff is now part of the “private sector.” Ever hear of The Chertoff Group? Here is what they have to say about themselves. These are their words. This is how Michael Chertoff is selling his services today.
Read carefully.
“For deals in the security industry, Chertoff Group offers unparalleled subject matter expertise and contacts to give you the competitive advantage.”
“We have overseen billions of dollars of technology development and acquisition for the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the National Security Agency, and the CIA. We have keen insight into which new technologies are likely to transform the landscape, and our experience allows us to predict which ones may be headed for obsolescence.”
“We have proven success, not only in the domestic U.S. market; members of our team have years of experience in completing international transactions, as well.”
“The security and risk management market is large, growing and resilient, even in this economic downturn. Despite its potential value of over $200 billion per year, the market is highly fragmented. Together, these realities provide many opportunities to leverage economies of scale and enhance returns through operational improvements.”
“The Chertoff Group partners with compatible private equity firms across the investment spectrum, by providing our sector knowledge to help monitor and manage target companies during periods of transition. Regardless of our role, we are committed experts at aligning interests and maximizing value for our clients.”
Impressive, isn’t it? So, exactly who are The Chertoff Group?
Michael Chertoff is a Co-Founder and Managing Principal of The Chertoff Group. No surprise there. As they say, it’s his name on the door. Who are some of his partners and colleagues? Take a look.
Charles E. Allen: Formerly at The Dept. of Homeland Security along with Chertoff and before that, 40 years at CIA – the Central Intelligence Agency.
Larry Castro: 44 years at the NSA – the National Security Agency.
Jay M. Cohen: Former Chief of Naval Research at the Dept. of the Navy under George W. Bush.
Michael Hayden: General US Army. Former Director of NSA and former Director of the CIA under George W. Bush.
Nathaniel T. G. Fogg: Top executive at FEMA under George W. Bush.
Paul Schneider: Senior Acquisitions Executive at the National Security Agency under George W. Bush.
Chad Sweet: Former Chief of Staff at The Dept. of Homeland Security under George W. Bush. Previously, a top executive at both Morgan Stanley and Goldman-Sachs.
Imagine having your “interests aligned” and your “values maximized” by such a group.
Now, take a wild guess. Who do you think represents the company that manufactures and sells the full-body scanner? Did you say, The Chertoff Group?
In years past, I had a tendency to eject a DVD screener after 10 minutes or so when it became obvious that it deserved a “rotten”. This often generated complaints from my detractors, including one fellow who demanded to know how I could make up my mind after seeing only the first 10 minutes. I never quite understood this point of view since I have no trouble coming to the conclusion after the first few paragraphs that an article by Thomas Friedman is a waste of time. Perhaps the only difference this year is that I stuck with movies to their dreary conclusion in order to get a handle why Hollywood is in the pits.
I should add by the way that this detractor was a huge fan of the movie “Crash” which should tell you something about his judgment in light of the following:
I haven’t created any best-of or worst-of lists yet, but I think that the 2000s featured one cultural phenomenon that deserves its own special shoutout for true heinousness: the 2004 best picture winner “Crash.”
The movie is manipulative and unrealistic – the characters tend to reveal their true feelings in the most over-the-top and obvious ways imaginable. If racism is indeed so pervasive that it seeps into every interaction, why does the movie need such a complicated, twisting plot?
Bad movies get made all the time. But what infuriated me about “Crash” was that so many people mistook it for something profound when it was truly the opposite. It shouts at the top of its lungs: “I’M SUBTLE! I’M NUANCED!” and so many people somehow agreed.
Although I generally reserve most of my venom for such liberal “message” movies, including this year’s “Invictus”, I want to call attention to another matter that generally falls outside my purview, namely the failure of screenwriters to understand the most basic element of drama, namely conflict. In film after film this year, I discovered that the movie drifted along aimlessly content to have its characters engage in petty conversations about their lives. In its most extreme form, this tendency is encapsulated in the Mumblecore genre that might have several of its major characters sitting around a breakfast table discussing the merits of raisin bran versus granola. Think of it as the Seinfeld show without laughs.
This is one of the reasons that there are so many movies made in the crime, war and horror genres. With such fare, there is always a recognizable hero and villain and the plot is driven forward by the need for the former to vanquish the latter. At its best, you have a classic like “Casablanca” and even at its worst with so many of the slasher movies you at least sit at the edge of your seat wondering who will be the next teenager to have his or her throat cut by a madman.
I am not exactly sure why today’s novelists or dramatists (either stage or screen) have so little interest in conflict but I suspect that the tendency of young writers to learn their craft in college writing classes has a lot to do with it. With most instructors the product of such training themselves, and with a classroom filled with students who have simply not experienced much in their lives outside of reading and writing, there will inevitably be a tilt toward writing about quotidian matters.
Rather than going on any further in such an abstract vein, let me turn my attention to “Sunshine Cleaning”, a film that epitomizes this kind of aesthetic conflict avoidance.
Sunshine Cleaning
Debuting at the Sundance Film Festival last year, this movie encapsulates the “indie” sensibility that flourishes there and which exemplifies the sort of screenwriting that some critics, including me, find lacking. Launched by Robert Redford in 1978, the festival premiered “Little Miss Sunshine” in 2006, a movie that shares a similar title as well as sensibility. It also shares Alan Arkin, who reprises the role of eccentric grandfather.
The movie’s two lead characters are sisters who live in Albuquerque, eking out a living cleaning apartments. One of them is having an affair with a married cop who advises her that cleaning up at crime scenes pays well. That leads to them starting such a business that has fits and starts in keeping with the sister’s flakiness, character traits that will remind you of the family in “Little Miss Sunshine”.
The movie seeks to draw drama out of their series of encounters with blood-soaked apartments and grieving relatives, the victims of either murder or suicide. For reasons alluded to above, this simply does not work. A plot is driven forward by suspense and by conflict. What will happen next? We know what happens to these two figures. They just stumble along from one clean up to another until the professional requirements of the job prove too daunting, just as the juvenile beauty contest in “Little Miss Sunshine” does.
Before the movie began, I had the totally unwarranted assumption that it would take off after the sisters discovered that in the course of cleaning up a crime scene that a suicide had actually been a murder. That would lead them into becoming amateur sleuths like Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window” and a thrilling conclusion. Silly me.
Crazy Heart
This movie suffers from the same flaws as “Sunshine Cleaning”. It is a character study of a middle-aged, alcoholic country and western singer who travels from one low-paying gig to another in a beat up old car. Earlier in his career, he was a rising star but fame passed him by just like the two heavy metal musicians in the great documentary “Anvil”. Any comparison between the two leaves “Crazy Heart” in the dust. The fictional character has none of the fire and idealism of the real musicians in the documentary. Leaving aside the weakness of the character, the real problem once again is the lack of any sort of conflict. The musician Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) meets a single mom and aspiring journalist (Maggie Gyllenhaal) early on in the film who wants to interview him. This leads to a relationship most difficult to sustain since Bad Blake’s first love has always been the whisky bottle.
There is little drama between Bridges and Gyllenhaal, except for a brief moment when he loses track of her son at a shopping mall when he is an whiskey-induced haze. Since there is never any attempt to describe the pair’s initial coming together as anything remotely passionate, there is little sense of a letdown when the relationship threatens to come to an end. Since director and screenwriter Scott Cooper, who had adapted a novel by Thomas Cobb, set his sights so low, he can’t blame us for simply not caring. This, however, does not include the professional critics who have worked themselves into a lather in touting this as a big time winner at the next Academy Awards celebration.
I should add that Thomas Cobb’s novel predetermined the lackluster quality of the movie. Cobb studied writing under Donald Barthelme at University of Houston, where he absorbed his professor’s minimalism. In a typical Barthelme story, often published in the New Yorker magazine, nothing much happens. Once again, Seinfeld without the yucks.
Taking Woodstock
This is Ang Lee’s take on the famous music festival that occurred about fifteen miles from my village in the Catskill Mountains at Max Yasgur’s farm. Despite the bashing this took on Rotten Tomatoes (51 percent rotten), I was anxious to see this movie since it was focused on the Jewish small businessmen and women of the area I grew up in, who were a lot like my father.
The main character is Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin), a gay man in his 20s who has come up to the mountains to work with his Eastern European immigrant parents who run a motel called El Monaco nearby Yasgur’s farm. After becoming president of the village board in White Lake, he is in a position to grease the wheels for the music festival’s producers who are seen as an invading army by the locals.
The movie is utterly lacking in dramatic tension and consists of one disjointed scene after another in which either the hippies or the locals—Jew and gentile alike—are depicted as charmingly eccentric. In one scene, when Tiber’s parents are visited by a couple of Mafia types offering protection, they chase them out with baseball bats in a clumsy attempt at slapstick humor. It falls on its face, as does Ang Lee’s other attempts. Granted, he did not have much to work with in long-time collaborator James Schamus’s script, an adaptation of Elliot Tiber’s memoir.
Tiber, like blogger Julie Powell and the fictional “me” in “Me and Orson Welles” is something of a publicity hound. His memoir is viewed by some experts on the region as exaggerating his importance in making the festival happen.
While I don’t really have the time or sufficient motivation right now to deal with the Woodstock festival or the hippie “movement”, I tend to agree with those who view it as an attempt to divert young people away from politics. Since so much of what happened in 1969 on the counter-culture front has become absorbed into the commercial mainstream, it is appropriate to question how “alternative” it was. In the final analysis, revolutionary politics is the only real alternative to the stultifying values of the bourgeoisie even if it is likely never to be the subject of an Ang Lee movie.
Up in the Air
They predict that this will share a lot of Oscars with “Crazy Heart”. And so it goes. It is co-written and directed by Jason Reitman, who is responsible for foisting the awful, pseudo-hip, anti-abortion “Juno” on the world, one of those movies that I could not watch for more than 10 minutes.
George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a consultant whose job it is to fire people. Since his job forces him to travel to one economically devastated area of the country to another, he is in airplanes much of the time. But the title “Up in the Air” also refers to his inability to make a commitment to women. Poor thing.
Bingham is assigned to work with a much younger new hire named Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) who believes that the firing can be done over a computer equipped with cameras on each end. Much of the film consists of the two vultures wrangling with each other over which method is more effective. You can’t make this shit up.
If you’ve heard, by the way, that this movie is about the plight of the unemployed, don’t believe a word of it. It has as much to do with this as an episode of Saturday Night Live. Reitman majored in English/Creative Writing at University of Southern California, a department that would be about as useful for writing about such social problems as it would be for understanding advanced calculus.
It turns out that Jason Reitman has a variegated career. At one point he formed a production company to make “small subversive comedy”. Small I agree with; subversive I do not. In 2007, Reitman produced and directed holiday season commercials for Wal-Mart with advertising agency Bernstein-Rein. He has also directed ads for Burger King, Nintendo, BMW, and Buick, we learn from his wiki. Some subversive.
The Lovely Bones
There’s not much to say about this, except that it is very much like the movie “Ghost” but with an inferior script. After a teenaged girl is raped and murdered by a neighborhood deviant, her ghost is in limbo and walks about looking at family members trying to adjust to her absence or at the murderer covering up his tracks. Unlike “Ghost”, the girl has no ability to communicate with the living and only serves as a mouthpiece for musings on life and death most likely lifted directly from the 2002 novel by Alice Sebold upon which it is based.
Since there is not much in the way of a detective story here, there is little in the way of suspense. Director Peter Jackson, famous for his Fellowship of the Ring trilogy, appears most interested in choreographing scenes of the taste of heaven that awaits the main character as soon as she is delivered from limbo. They are a mix of a Hallmark Card and Saturday morning children’s programming. Highly embarrassing, to say the least.
All of these will get a “rotten” from me on RottenTomatoes.com as well as the next batch that I will comment on tomorrow or the next day.
Police, Adjective
After having my expectations raised by “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” and ” 4 Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days”, this new film also from Romania that opened in New York last Friday left me cold. I strongly suspect that its minimalism is geared to international tastes. It is the story of Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a young cop who is tracking a high school student who likes to smoke hashish with friends, including a boy his age who is ratting him out to the cops. Most of the movie consists of Cristi staking out locations where the suspect is expected to buy or sell hashish or get high. Think of these scenes as analogous to Gene Hackman eating hot dogs on the street in “The French Connection” but without the car chase or other memorable scenes. One imagines that director Corneliu Porumboiu was trying to avoid cheap thrills, but overdid it. The title of the film refers to an extended scene at the end of the movie where Cristi refuses to take part in a sting operation against the student since it will land him in prison. He tells his superior officer that his conscience prevents him from victimizing the youth, especially in light of the fact that drug laws in Romania will soon be changed to be consistent with a more lenient and civilized approach in Western Europe. In the most patronizing fashion, his boss instructs him to read the definition of “conscience” and of “police” in a dictionary in order to understand his duties. One of the definitions of police that Cristi reads out loud is as an adjective, as in “police state”. This is the obviously the epiphany that Porumbolu expects audiences to achieve through the scene, namely that Romania remains a police state despite the end of Communism. I applaud the director’s integrity, but only wish he had made a more compelling film.
Bright Star;
The Young Victoria
These two come from the same studio and represent the PBS Masterpiece Theater aesthetic raised to highest levels of boredom. “Bright Star” is a love story about the poet John Keats and a perfectly ordinary woman named Fanny Brawne who wrote about their affair when she was in her old age. Keats died of TB when he was only 26 years old but produced some of the 19th century’s greatest poems, including the one from which this listless movie derives its title. Directed and written by Jane Campion, who is best known for “The Piano”, it is lovely to look at but totally lacking in drama. It consists mainly of Keats and Brawne in dalliance with each other, like scenes from a Jane Austen novel but without the biting irony. Keats had little to speak of in his life other than his genius with verse, but it is simply impossible for a movie to convey the internal drama that allowed that genius to grow into full flower. So all we end up with is strolls through the garden until a cold rain and a light jacket puts Keats on his deathbed.
The director of “The Young Victoria” must have assumed that the audience would be entertained sufficiently by the opulence of Windsor Castle and similar environs and did not take the trouble to secure a decent script before filming. Unlike “The Queen”, the splendid dismantling of Queen Elizabeth and Tony Blair, this is an attempt to bolster the image of Queen Victoria, who is represented as a kind of proto-feminist whose marriage to Prince Albert supposedly ushered in a period of social reform that left the working class of Britain as adoring subjects. We are led to believe that Victoria and Albert were locked in battle with powerful Tory politicians who would not be happy until every drop of surplus value was extracted from the workers. Missing from the film is any consideration of Queen Victoria’s role in empire-building, a project that had the effect of robbing Asian and Africans in order to allow the British rich to build their castles and manor houses, while offering some crumbs from the table to the men and women of the British Isles. Julian Fellowes, a life-long Tory and son of a diplomat who has written toothless satires on the aristocracy, wrote the vapid screenplay. The only mystery is why Martin Scorsese helped to produce this valentine to the aristocracy. Perhaps Fellowes caught him in a compromising situation, like a scene out of one of his Mafia movies.
Julia & Julie
A perfectly dreadful movie about the famous French chef (and CIA agent) and a New York woman who wrote a blog on Salon.com describing her attempts to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s landmark cookbook. She turned her blog into a bestselling book, which forms the basis for this stupid film. Meryl Streep’s performance is as broad as Danny Ackroyd’s on Saturday Night Live but played only partially for laughs. As blogger Julie Powell, Amy Adams is not so nearly as annoying as the woman she is portraying. We learn from Powell’s follow-up book, a memoir titled “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession” about working as a butcher in upstate New York, that she was cheating on her husband during the period covered in the film. This amazon.com comment on that book might give you some sense for the sort of person who occupies half of the film’s scenes:
Throughout the book, Powell is consistently despicable. I know that’s harsh, but it’s true. Julie Powell cheats on her husband: first in college before they’re married, then again, and again, and again during their marriage. She returns to her husband, promising fidelity, only after her situation forces her to return – and she has no intention of honoring her promise of fidelity. She only stops seeing her boyfriend when HE breaks it off, and even then she (by her own admission) stalks him for several months. I’m not a traditionalist when it comes to marriage, and I respect and appreciate that different people are in different situations that may not always involve monogamously living happily ever after. But Powell wants it both ways. She wants a traditional marriage. But she also wants her husband AND boyfriend to both dote on her lovingly and exclusively, with no jealousy or repercussions.
I was inspired to add a comment on Julie Powell’s blog after seeing “Julia & Julie”
I loved “Juliet and July”. Greatest movie since “The Hangover”. Even greater than “Saw VI”. Hope that they make a movie out of “Cleaver”. Maybe James Cameron can make a 3D production? Can’t you see the cleaver hurdling toward your forehead? Wowee!
Me and Orson Welles
Very close in spirit to “Julia & Julie”, this is a movie that is more about the insignificant “me” in the title than the more famous main character. In place of the cheating blogger, we have a fictional character named Richard Samuels (played by Walt Disney Films boy toy Zach Efron) who we are supposed to identify with–a high school student who wrangles a bit part in Welles’s Mercury Theater production of “Julius Caesar”. Based on the novel of the same name by Robert Kaplow, it is not really that much about Welles but more of a coming of age tale about Samuels, who is explicitly Jewish in the novel. Like the ineffable Julie Powell who lives to see her name in print in the NY Times, Samuels dreams only of “making it” in the theater in order to impress girls in his school. So here we have one of the most powerful talents of the 1930s and 40s, a genius with a strong identification with the left, playing second fiddle to what amounts to a character in a Philip Roth short story. While Tim Robbins’s “The Cradle Will Rock” was a flawed attempt to recapture Orson Welles’s unique personality and talents, it at least made a serious attempt to engage with an unforgettable time and place. By comparison, “Me and Orson Welles” perfectly captures the underachieving epoch we find ourselves unlucky to live in.
This is the second installment of 2009 movies in review. Those discussed below arrived as DVD screeners from the studios, except for “Thirst”, a Korean movie about a Catholic priest turned vampire. This movie and the two others—”Sin Nombre” and “Men Who Stare at Goats”—will get a ‘fresh’ rating from me on Rotten Tomatoes; all the rest to be reviewed in subsequent posts get a ‘rotten’. Generally, this has been a bad year for Hollywood as well as the supposedly innovative “indie” movies that crop up at the Sundance Festival and elsewhere. Fortunately for me, I am spared the onerous task of attending all sorts of crappy movies—an occupational hazard of my full-time professional colleagues in NYFCO. Indeed, the studios seem to send out lacrème de la crème to NYFCO as should be obvious from their generally high ratings and pretensions to High Art. As always, I don’t believe the hype.
Thirst
Some of you might be familiar with Park Chan-wook’s past work. As director of “The Vengeance Trilogy”, which included “OldBoy”, Park specializes in darkly comic grand guignols. “Thirst” is the story of Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), a priest who after beginning to lose faith volunteers for a medical experiment in which an antiviral agent transforms him into a vampire. It departs completely from the romanticized hogwash of the Twilight series and represents bloodsucking as a thoroughly debased activity. Starting off at a relatively leisurely pace, it gathers a horrific momentum when the priest takes on Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin) as a lover who he eventually turns into a vampire as well. Unlike the priest, she enjoys going out and killing people. The movie’s central drama revolves around his ambivalent relationship to her. Despite being defrocked, he still retains a conscience.
When Sang-hyun first meets Tae-ju, she is married to the doltish and sickly son of Lady Ra. As an orphaned street urchin, Tae-ju was most vulnerable. After she falls in love with Sang-hyun, the two conspire to kill her husband and consummate their unholy passions. Park Chan-wook’s plot borrows elements from Emile Zola’s novel “Thérèse Raquin”, another tale of a love triangle and murder, which reminds me of what a writing instructor at NYU once told me: there are only perhaps 10 plots in all of world literature. After all, when you really get down to it, neither Zola nor Park are saying anything that much different than what Homer said in the Iliad, but it finally devolves into how you say it. Park, like Zola, understands how to make a well-traveled path fresh and new. All it takes is a good sprinkling of blood.
Sin Nombre
This was filmed in Mexico and features Latino actors, many of whom are not professionals. However, it was written and directed by Cary Fukunaga , an American with Japanese and Swedish parents. It can be described as a mixture of “City of God” and “El Norte”, drawing from the former a lurid fascination with gangs and from the latter a compassionate identification with Latino émigrés. Two stories in one, it starts off by looking at the mayhem in a Honduras barrio that is divided between two gangs. One of the gangsters is Willy, who is in his late teens and in the process of recruiting Smiley into the gang. Smiley, who could not be more than 12 years old, looks like he would be more at home watching Sesame Street.
Their paths cross with a group of Hondurans headed north to the U.S. on a freight train like 1930s hoboes. Indeed, you will be reminded immediately of William Wellman’s “Wild Boys of the Open Road,” a 1933 feature about the unemployed on the move. Along with their boss, the heavily tattooed Lil’ Mago, they have boarded the train in order to rip off the refugees at gunpoint. When Lil’ Mago appears ready to blow off the head of Sayra, a pretty girl about Willy’s age who refuses to turn over her desperately needed savings intended to help her to get to her relatives in New Jersey, Willy slashes his boss’s throat with machete and orders Smiley off the train. Once back in the barrio, Smiley volunteers to kill Willy and thus help complete the initiation into the ranks of the gang. Meanwhile, Willy heads north on the train with Sayra who appears to be falling in love with him. As soon as he becomes aware of her feelings, he insists that she forget about him since he is a dead man walking.
I found the barrio sequences of this movie far less involving than those that take place on the train. Fukunaga tends to make the gangsters, especially Lil’ Mago, a bit cartoonish when more complex characterizations were called for, especially in light of the fact that gang culture is simply another expression of the economic disaster that has forced others to flee to the North.
Fukunaga gave an interview to Socialist Review, the monthly magazine of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, where he had some refreshingly candid things to say about immigration and the power of a film-maker to effect political change:
Do you think people’s views of immigration will change when they see the film?
I do think films can influence people, and especially influence them to learn more. When I was growing up I’d watch a movie and something would really fascinate me and I’d go and learn a lot about it. But to change people’s minds I think it takes much more time and you have to hit them personally, so I’m not sure I expect the film to change people’s minds. If someone’s anti-immigration they’re going to be anti-immigration after the film – they’ll probably think the film is some kind of propaganda. And someone who is pro human rights is still going to feel that way after the film.
My philosophy in film school was the idea of filmmaking as what the griots do in Africa – you collect stories then you record them. The story’s not meant to be any more than a record of a time. So this is Mexican immigration 2007.
This one took me quite by surprise. As was the case with “Inglourious Basterds”, I was all set to despise it. I got the impression from commercials and from a cursory look at reviews that this was one of those George Clooney vehicles like “The Informant!” that was an “edgy” treatment of an historical event that was calculated in the final analysis to strengthen the lead actor and director’s hipster reputations.
This is Grant Heslov’s first turn behind the camera as director, having up until this point worked mostly as an actor, including a performance as Don Hewitt in the excellent “Good Night and Good Luck”.
The script is by Peter Straughan, an adaptation of the book of the same title by Jon Ronson that describes the military’s experiments with ESP. The film essentially tells the story of how the book came into being, with a character named Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) filling in for Ronson.
Wilton has come to the Middle East in the early days of the war in order to hook up with a military detachment as an “embedded” reporter. While in a Kuwait hotel, he runs into Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) in the bar. Very soon, he discovers that Cassady is a veteran of the ESP experiments who takes the reporter along with him into Iraq in the course of describing his experiences through flashbacks and demonstrating them in a series of encounters largely played for laughs.
Screenwriter Straughan made a perhaps unwise but cinematically essential decision to make some of the ESP-inspired exploits plausible, such as Lyn Cassady toppling a goat through his brain waves (hence the title of the film). If the ESP experiments were revealed as sheer hokum, there’s not much left the film. So we end up with some fairly pointed satire about the army’s idiocy tacked on to some conventional plot elements not that different from other movies “inspired” by the war in Iraq, with Cassady and Wilton just one step ahead of the bad guys—a kind of latter-day Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.
The movie is best when it focuses on the military’s experiments, which are led by an officer named Bill Django (a fine performance by Jeff Bridges) who comes across as a mixture of Timothy Leary and Oliver North. For those who have studied the army’s experimentations with drugs and mind control experiments, this is not as far-fetched as it seems. The movie actually refers to the MK-Ultra experiments with LSD that had the effect of turning Django into a hippie/Special Forces hybrid.
The final scene of the movie involves a subversive use of LSD on American forces in Iraq, a fictional embellishment of Ronson’s story to be sure—I believe. With all its faults, this movie is worth seeing if for no other reason that it invites further examination through Ronson’s book and similar material.
You can read chapter one of Jon Ronson’s “The Men who Stare at Goats” on his website to get an idea of what is in store:
General Stubblebine’s trip to Fort Bragg was a disaster. It still makes him blush to recall it. He ended up taking early retirement in 1984. Now, the official history of army intelligence, as outlined in their press pack, basically skips the Stubblebine years, 1981-84, almost as if they didn’t exist.
In fact, everything you have read so far has for the past two decades been a military intelligence secret. General Stubblebine’s doomed attempt to walk through his wall and his seemingly futile journey to Fort Bragg remained undisclosed right up until the moment that he told me about them in room 403 of the Tarrytown Hilton, just north of New York City, on a cold winter’s day two years into the War on Terror.
“To tell you the truth, Jon,” he said, “I’ve pretty much blocked the rest of the conversation I had with Special Forces out of my head. Whoa, yeah. I’ve scrubbed it from my mind! I walked away. I left with my tail between my legs.”
He paused, and looked at the wall.
“You know,” he said, “I really thought they were great ideas. I still do. I just haven’t figured out how my space can fit through that space. I simply kept bumping my nose. I couldn’t…No. Couldn’t is the wrong word. I never got myself to the right state of mind.” He sighed. “If you really want to know, it’s a disappointment. Same with the levitation.”
Some nights, in Arlington, Virginia, after the general’s first wife, Geraldine, had gone to bed, he would lie down on his living-room carpet and try to levitate.
“And I failed totally. I could not get my fat ass off the ground, excuse my language. But I still think they were great ideas. And do you know why?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you cannot afford to get stale in the intelligence world,” he said. “You cannot afford to miss something. You don’t believe that? Take a look at terrorists who went to flying schools to learn how to take off but not how to land. And where did that information get lost? You cannot afford to miss something when you’re talking about the intelligence world.”
Reading this, I cannot but help be reminded of Leon Trotsky’s observations about European culture during the rise of fascism. In 1933, ten years before the death camps, Leon Trotsky wrote an article titled “What is National Socialism.” It does an excellent job of diagnosing the madness of the Nazi movement that had just taken power:
Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth of the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet, fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the psychology of National Socialism.”
