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AMERICAN
TERRORISM IDENTIFIED IN TWO RECENT FILMS
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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A
more chilling treatment of domestic terrorism can be found
in this year’s Pariah, which goes beyond last
year’s American History X
in showing how skinhead gangs operate. We are not surprised
to learn that the gang members are obsessed with sex, and
filmviewers see the brutality of their sexual encounters,
which are heterosexual simulations of prison rape. Women who
associate with the white and black gangs were molested as
children and now survive mostly as sex slaves; some are hooked
on drugs. In Pariah, the white protagonist,
Steve (played by Damon Jones), is held down by a skinhead
gang, forced to watch while his black girlfriend is gang-raped.
When she commits suicide after the incident, Steve resolves
to join the skinhead gang to exact revenge. To establish his
legitimacy in the gang, however, it is not enough that he
is beat up by a black gang or that his girlfriend Sissy (played
by Aimee Chaffin) is a member of the skinhead gang; he is
forced by the leader of the gang Crew (played by Dave Oren
Ward) to execute a transsexual in a park. The film graphically
shows violent crimes perpetrated by the various gangs, led
by young studs who have had bad interracial experiences, either
while they were growing up or in prison. Pariah,
an independent film that was first released to the general
public in Los Angeles during May 1999, shows upward spirals
of first senseless and then brutal retaliation beatings and
a discourse in which the only adjective known by gang members
seems to be the word "fucking." If there ever was a film to
justify locking up perpetrators of hate crimes, this is it;
yet prison life seems to be a rite of passage to prove one’s
manhood. Once out of prison, the gang members try to return
to live at home, are rejected by their parents, and soon reconstitute
on the streets. Randolph Kret, director and screenwriter of
this film noir, suggests that there is no easy answer to stop
the violence-begets-violence scenario depicted in which even
a gay gang is portrayed as retaliating against the skinheads
over the death of the transsexual. MH
POLITICAL
FILM SOCIETY INVITES NOMINATIONS FOR AWARDS
Members of the Political Film Society can nominate feature
films released in 1999 for awards in the following categories:
democracy, exposé, human rights, and peace. Nominations close
on December 31 each year, and voting will take place in the
first two months of the year 2000 for the film that best raises
political consciousness in each of four categories.
NOMINEES
FOR 1999
EXPOSÉ:
Bastards, Three
Seasons
HUMAN RIGHTS:
The
General's Daughter, Hard,
Xiu Xiu
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