How
extensive is terrorism inside the United States? The film
Arlington Road, directed by Mark Pellington,
poses this question through the words of Michael Faraday (played
by Jeff Bridges), a widowed Professor of George Washington
University, who lectures to students that most political assassinations
and bombings are pinned to a single person even though logic
suggests otherwise. He says that the government feeds the
"lone madman" theory to the press because most Americans want
to feel safe after a terrorist incident, and this preposterous
lie serves to calm public fear. Faraday notes that the original
American revolutionaries were in fact anti-British terrorists,
and thus that terrorism is part of the American political
tradition. Faraday also asks why skinhead and other right-wing
groups now flourish in an era of unparalleled prosperity,
and why so many groups are stockpiling weapons to retaliate
against the U.S. federal government, and why voter turnout
is so low? Having raised profound questions that might provoke
us to ask what really happened during such celebrated events
as the Ruby Ridge massacre, the storming of Waco (as in the
1997 New Yorker documentary Waco: Terms of Engagement),
and the like (President Kennedy’s assassination perhaps?),
the film downshifts to consider one particular nest of terrorism,
namely, the house in Arlington, Virginia, across the road
from Faraday. Similar to The Stranger (1946),
where a former Nazi moves into a small town, in Arlington
Road structural engineer Oliver Lang (played by Tim
Robbins) has just moved to the same block as Faraday, who
gradually becomes suspicious that Lang is a terrorist. Lang,
in turn, realizes that Faraday is tracking down his past,
so he sets up Faraday to play a role in an elaborate plot
in order to deliver explosives to blow up the headquarters
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington. Although
Faraday, during a class field trip, demonstrates the FBI’s
incompetence in a situation that curiously resembles Ruby
Ridge, where his wife died as an FBI agent, he nevertheless
confides his suspicions about Lang to FBI agent Whit Carver
(played by Robert Gossett). Carver, in turn, ignores Faraday’s
warnings and then unexpected silence when Faraday’s son Grant
(played by Spencer Treat Clark) is kidnapped by Lang, a nerd
who is able to physically overpower an otherwise macho professor
who gets emotional and even weeps in the film. The savvy professor,
in short, is maneuvered to become a naïve patsy, the lone
madman responsible for the latest terrorist bombing. Although
most filmviewers will not believe that a clever professor
could so easily crack up and fall into such an extraordinary
trap, the biggest disappointment of the film is that there
are no informational titles at the end, telling us for example
about the so-called Patriot movement. According to the Southern
Poverty Law Center, some 523 militias and other right-wing
terrorist groups in all fifty states are absolutely determined
to cause trouble in the year 2000. Starting out as an exposé
of a serious problem, the film ends with the hero of the film
acting like a fool. MH
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