[Marxism] Amnesia at the Multiplex

[Louis Proyect]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080107/chaudhry
Amnesia at the Multiplex

by LAKSHMI CHAUDHRY

[posted online on December 30, 2007]

"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.

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.