Seven Red

There’s a funny moment in the Žižek documentary when he is being interviewed on some talking head show. The interviewer tells him that the book is the most complicated he ever tried to read. Naturally, Žižek tells him it is quite simple, actually, and launches into a little parable. On the one hand, you have the father who tells his kid “We’re going to grandma’s house.” The kid doesn’t want to go, and the father says “Well, you’re going. Now!” On the other hand, you have today’s parent. When the kid says he doesn’t want to go to grandma’s, the father says, “OK, if that’s what you want, but your grandmother would really love to see you, and she’d be awfully disappointed if you didn’t show up.” The kid instantly understands that he must go, etc. The interviewer has a sudden flash of understanding, and suggests that Žižek prefers the first version, and we should go back to the time when parents just told their kids what to do. Of course, Žižek says. Yes. It was more honest. He pronounces the “h” in honest, like “hah-nest,” the way my father does with his accent.

It’s funny because the interviewer didn’t really understand the parable as a parable: the super ego structured as repression (the Law of the Father) as opposed to enjoyment – the whole Žižek bit, really. But I was reminded of this moment after watching The Kingdom tonight. One of a slew of recent War-on-Terror flicks, The Kingdom follows an FBI team (Jamie Fox, Jason Bateman, Chris Cooper, and Jennifer Garner) as they investigate a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia. Unlike the “Arab terrorist” films of the past (the despicable True Lies being the obvious forerunner), The Kingdom deploys narrative tools to humanize the Saudi other, the most obvious being Fox’s relationship with the Saudi police colonel Faris al Ghazi (played by Ashraf Barhom). The Showtime series Sleeper Cell does something similar, but brings it even closer; there, the black undercover g-man is himself a Koran-quoting Muslim, and the sleeper cell terrorists are even sympathetically drawn. Yet when the bullets start flying in the “bad neighborhood” of Riyadh, The Kingdom still looks very much like True Lies (why can’t trained terrorists shoot straight?). Yes, yes. They are people, not caricatures, these films seem to say. Now let’s get on with this nasty business of killing them. So are all these “humanizing” stories akin to the permissive parent in Žižek’s parable? Is True Lies, in Žižek’s sense, more honest?

Adorno says somewhere that during the Enlightenment, writers like Kant addressed the king as “your glorious majesty,” and signed off “your most humble servant,” all the while undermining the king’s power with every word, while today we call our bosses by their first names and begin our emails with “hey,” all the while descending into the most humble subservience. (It’s a really glorious Adornian reversal). Maybe the transformation in the terrorist flick is the same. We used to see the caricature of the Arab monster, with Islam looming as a monolithic malevolence, but we understood Schwartzenegger to be ridiculous as well. Today we see Arabs who are fully human and sympathetic, who love their children the way we do; we are shown Islam as a nuanced and divided set of beliefs. And all the more resolutely do we approve of bombing the shit out of them when they step out of line.

And the Law of the Father, to be sure. One of the devices that The Kingdom uses as a symbolic bludgeon is the parent-child or adult-child relationship, and really, what the Fathers tell their Kids. At nearly every important moment in the film, you get framed shots of the father-child couple: Jamie Fox describing the birth of his son to a roomful of six year olds; the terrorists watching an attack from a distant balcony, and handing the binoculars over to a horrified son at the moment of truth; a small boy watching his father get gunned down; the grandchildren of the terrorist mastermind assembled for the final confrontation.

The role of the child is also emphasized through games. The initial terrorist attack takes place during a company picnic at the Western compound. The adults and kids are all playing softball; the terrorist watching and waiting urges his son to watch the game, noting that it is a “good match.” The children’s game of marbles also plays a major role in the film, since the terrorists use distinct children’s marbles rather than conventional ball bearings in their terrible bombs.

Finally, the film highlights the transmission of information from the father to the child. The film is structured around parallel information transfers of this kind. What does the FBI man tell his kid? What does al Ghazi tell his kids? What do the terrorists tell their kids? (This last parallelism results in one of The Kingdom‘s more bizarre displacements, since the inaudible whisper between the terror leader and his pubescent granddaughter is meant to parallel an inaudible whisper between Jamie Fox and the full grown Jennifer Garner, who ends up being rather instantly infantilized in the bargain, despite the lofty rhetoric of Western feminism sticking it to the Saudi patriarchy that we get in the rest of the film!). One would think that we’re getting the completely tired message that “we shouldn’t teach our kids to hate,” or some other such Sunday school pablum, except that everyone seems to tell the kids that they’re going to well and truly kill all those monsters under the bed, whether they come in the form of the Great Satan, or the Ev-ul Terrists. At least that’s honest.

I know I’ve been on the theme of the Child this week, but I didn’t really expect to see it so blatantly played out in this particular film, and really, it doesn’t take a particularly adept reader to to pick out the way The Kingdom is structured around its children. Why do these relationships become important now? How does the role and position of the child shape our response to terrorism? I don’t think it’s a case of mere “children are the future” claptrap in The Kingdom, though it could certainly be read that way. Why, of all the ways to narrate these problems, does the Child and the adult-child relationship become a particular point of narrative intensity?

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