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 THREE
FILMS SHOW HOW ANTI-TERRORISM METHODS IMPERIL LIBERTIES
In The Siege, nominated for the best film of
1998 raising consciousness of the need to protect both DEMOCRACY
and HUMAN RIGHTS, Edward Zwick (director of Courage
Under Fire and Glory) poses a hypothetical: What if
terrorism graduated from retail bombings to wholesale slaughter
in New York City? What would government authorities do? Would
the conventional FBI and local police departments be shuffled
into the background by a declaration of martial law? After
all, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas
corpus during the Civil War, martial law was imposed on the
South after the Civil War, Japanese Americans were incarcerated
arbitrarily during World War II, and the Territory of Hawai`i
was under military rule after December 7, 1941. In this film,
the military does indeed impose martial law in Brooklyn, rounds
up Arab-looking Americans, and sees torture of prisoners as
a necessary step to root out terrorists. However, the protagonist
forces the military to back down when he points out that martial
law so abandons democratic values as to raise the ante on
terrorism. The film also makes the point that if terrorism
gain a foothold in the United States, this could be because
terrorists have been trained by the U.S. military for foreign
low-intensity warfare and then provided sanctuary in the United
States. Although many film critics found the political statement
to be too didactic, the film clearly is intended to tell filmviewers
to be watchful of their liberties, which can be jettisoned
too easily by powerful forces, and to note that terrorism
is one of Washington’s exports.
In contrast, Enemy of the State demonstrates
in depth how terrorism and other high crimes can be fought,
using the technology of electronic eavesdropping, communication
satellites, and computer hacking, thus making privacy obsolete.
Although most filmviewers will doubtless assume that the high-tech
gadgetry is yet another Hollywood fantasy of director Tony
Scott (of Crimson Tide and Top Gun
fame), in fact Big Brother technology does exist, is used,
and the potential to track the movements of ordinary citizens
is in the hands of government as well as those in the private
sector who have manufactured devices that can be used to invade
our privacy.
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Anyone,
the film demonstrates, can be caught up in a surveillance
nightmare, and those controlling the technology depicted in
the film can also fabricate news stories to discredit us,
freeze our bank accounts, and plant electronic bugs on our
person and in our homes. Also nominated for the best film
in the categories of DEMOCRACY and HUMAN RIGHTS, Enemy
of the State highlights a more insidious reality than
the hypothetical premise of The Siege, yet both
films serve as wake-up calls to remind us that assumptions
about our civil liberties and democratic freedoms cannot be
taken for granted.
In Predrag Antonijevic’s Savior, the protagonist
(Dennis Quaid) spends most of the film as a terrorist. An
American whose spouse and son are killed by a terrorist bomb
in Paris, throws a bomb in a mosque, joins the Foreign Legion,
and ends up fighting for the Bosnian Serbs as a terrorist,
inflicting atrocities in acts of self-preservation while fighting
along-side sadistic Serbian terrorists. In a change of heart
reminiscent of Edward Norton’s turnaround in American
History X, Dennis Quaid portrays a terrorist who at
some point can no longer stomach brutal killing and prefers
to save an innocent woman and her child. Nominated as a film
that raises consciousness of the need for PEACE rather than
violence in resolving conflicts, Savior is filmed
in Bosnia, a beautiful land in which nature is at peace but
humans are at war of the most brutal sort. Oliver Stone, among
the film’s producers, doubtless found the quagmire of Vietnam
relived in the obscenity of Bosnia while humming "Where Have
All the Flowers Gone?"
THIS
YEAR'S NOMINATED FILMS
DEMOCRACY:
Enemy of the State, Four
Days in September, Primary Colors,
The Siege, The Truman Show, Wag
the Dog
EXPOSÉ:
Bulworth, Four
Days in September, Regeneration
HUMAN RIGHTS:
Enemy of the State, The
Siege, Wilde
PEACE: American
History X, The
Boxer, Men with Guns, Regeneration,
Saving Private Ryan, Savior
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