What are the odds? You go for years without seeing a movie that
offers you a sympathetic portrayal of Islamic suicide bombers and
then two come along within a month of each other. Reviewing The
War Within last October 6th, I complained
that it told an engaging story but refused to take on the
psychology of its hero-bomber except in the crudest terms. Far from
being a typical Muslim zealot, he had been entirely secularized and
non-political until he was radicalized by being tortured by
American-sponsored Pakistanis. This suggests that the film’s
authors didn’t know why any suicide bombers who aren’t
tortured by Western intelligence operatives might have decided to
do what they do.
But Paradise Now, directed and co-written by Hany
Abu-Assad, makes The War Within look positively
Dostoevskian in its subtlety. Its two Palestinian heroes, Said
(Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), offer no reasons at all for
what they intend to do on a foray into Israel (whether in fact they
will do it is the film’s only real point of interest). Or rather,
the only reasons they seem to have are slogans like “a life without
dignity is worthless.” Well, maybe so, but if true the cultural
idea of “dignity” cannot be simply asserted and taken for granted.
Those within the Palestinian and Arab cultural context may need no
further explanation, but those of us who are outside of that
context do. It’s not quite so easy for us to see where “dignity” is
lacking for these people in what remains the only functioning
democratic state in the Middle East, or how it is reclaimed by
blowing oneself up in order to inflict a horrible and random death
on one’s neighbors.
Here’s another slogan retailed by the film’s heroes: “Death is
better than inferiority.” Excuse me, but whether or not that’s
true, we’re not just talking about the death of the guy who thinks
he’s inferior but of a number of those who don’t even know him but
whose very existence somehow makes him feel that way.
Their deaths are better than his inferiority.
Have I got it now? I imagine quite a number of history’s worst
murderers would argue likewise. The odd thing is that there
is a better, or at least a more interesting explanation —
of Said’s prospective self-immolation at any rate. Like the hero of
The War Within, he seems to suffer from little if any
mental conflict, but his revolutionary ardor recognizes a threat to
itself in the form of an attractive young woman. This is Suha
(Lubna Azabal), to whom he confesses that his father was executed
as a collaborator when he, Said, was ten.
So, obviously, his determination to blow up himself and as many
Israelis as possible stems from the urge to wipe this stain from
the family honor, right? If so, he never says so, nor does the film
go out of its way to treat this datum as being of more than
incidental interest. Nor is even the presumptive attraction of Suha
the occasion of any hesitancy on his part. To Mr. Abu-Assad, Said
seems to be just one of a great many would-be Palestinian suicide
bombers all, apparently, exactly alike. We must take him or leave
him. Or rather, they are exactly alike in every important respect
but one, which is the sole point of interest about them. Do they,
that is, have the resolve to go through with it?
In this as in other ways, the film is as much the prisoner of
the Islamic honor-culture as its heroes are, and it offers us the
same simple, binary system they take for granted. Will it be honor
or shame, courage or cowardice, dignity or worthlessness, yes or no
to bomber-glory? The title may provide a hint, but not a reason for
anyone who doesn’t share the assumptions of the director — and the
bombers — to care very much.
