Pop quiz, everybody. Question One. Who today is blowing up
innocent people in an effort to thwart democracy, women’s rights,
and economic development in the Middle East? Easy, right? But if
your answer was “fanatical Islamic terrorists,” then you’re
obviously not a Hollywood producer. Now, Question Two. Knowing what
we know about Hollywood, can we make a wild guess as to who a
Hollywood producer might imagine was blowing up innocent
people and trying to thwart democracy, women’s rights, and economic
development in the Middle East? Yep, this time you got it. It’s the
CIA — in league, of course, with big American oil companies. To
anyone not caught up in Hollywood’s curious brand of politically
obtuse paranoia, the premise of Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana
would be laughable, but American movie audiences, which must be the
most undemanding in the world, simply take it in their stride. Well
sure, they say. It’s a movie. Who else would you expect
the villain to be?
It’s perfectly true that the movies occupy their own little
world, one in which the only allowable villainy comes from Nazis,
racists and other “prejudiced” people, the sexually repressed,
sinister forces within the U.S. government, and big corporations or
some combination of the three. We’ve grown so used to this state of
affairs that we hardly notice it anymore. In the same way, 50 or 60
years ago, hardly anybody thought it a matter of notice that the
bad guys so often turned out to be Indians or Mexicans or other
dark-complected peoples — except of course the members of those
disfavored groups themselves. They finally found a voice with which
to protest, but who’s going to speak up in favor of politicians,
generals, and corporate executives? Yet even if we don’t worry
about offending white males in positions of power, such
stereotyping can hardly be a good thing for the movies themselves.
Where’s the fun in knowing already whodunnit as soon as Langley or
the Pentagon flashes up on the screen? We used to want to see
movies “torn from today’s headlines.” Now we’re content to stick
with the familiar Hollywood paradigm of corrupt politicians and
security forces that was first established more than 30 years ago.
In Tinseltown, it’s always 1974, and Watergate is in full
swing.
Gaghan’s movie makes a show of being fiendishly complex, but the
difficulty of following its four separate plot strands is
considerably mitigated by this fore-knowledge of who are the good
guys and who the bad. Only the CIA man, “Bob” (George Clooney), who
is dispatched to Lebanon to arrange for the assassination of the
progressive Arab leader Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), presents
any problem, and that only momentarily. For when he is caught and
tortured by a local warlord for reasons that remain obscure, Bob
becomes an embarrassment to the Agency who naturally proceeds to
disown him. On the outs with the CIA, he would equally naturally be
expected to metamorphose from bad to good-guy, even if he weren’t
George Clooney.
Of the other plot strands, one involves Matt Damon as an
American oil analyst with a Zurich commodity trading firm who
advises Prince Nasir that if he invests the Emirate’s oil profits
in infrastructure and economic development he will be sitting
pretty after the oil runs out. Obviously, nobody but an aging
boy-genius of the type which has become rather a speciality of Mr.
Damon’s could have come up with a brilliant idea like that. The
third plot involves a giant Houston-based oil company and a
politicized prosecution by the Justice Department. Somebody has
been bribing local officials in Kazakhstan to get the corporation
drilling rights there, and the DoJ is insisting on nailing a couple
of scalps to the wall. “We’re looking for the illusion of due
diligence,” says young lawyer on the make Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey
Wright) to the corporation’s CEO (Chris Cooper). “Two criminal
prosecutions give us that illusion.”
Only in the fourth and least-developed plot-strand do we have a
momentary and very unsatisfactory glance at the realities of the
Middle East today. A Pakistani oil-worker (Mazhar Munir) in the
Emirate run by Prince Nasir’s aged father loses his job and is
subsequently inveigled into jihadism by an Arab teacher (Amr
Waked). The treatment of the oil workers by the American-sponsored
Emir’s police and army helps to radicalize him. This has only the
loosest of connections with the other three plots. Moreover, unlike
the real jihadis, this young man’s aim is not to blow up either
American soldiers or local Arab civilians but an American
supertanker. And having watched the wicked skullduggery engaged in
by the ship’s owners, we can be sure that there are no innocents on
board.
Gaghan’s film is supposed to have been “suggested by” Robert
Baer’s See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the
CIA’s War on Terrorism. But Baer’s book is critical of the CIA
for not being more aggressive in the pursuit of Islamic terrorism,
not an account of how it conspires with Big Oil to assassinate
enlightened Arab leaders. In the film, the CIA/Big Oil view is not
only that the aim of American diplomacy is to maximize oil profits
but also that those profits will continue to be maximized “provided
there is still chaos in the Middle East.” Who, outside of Hollywood
or the loony left, ever believed that? And who that knew anything
about the current insurgency in Iraq could continue to believe it?
But then that could be one of the problems with making a film torn
from the headlines of 30-odd years ago rather than today.
