Just Above Sunset Archives
September 1, 2003 Reviews
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Just Above Sunset Archives September 1, 2003 Reviews
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Some notes on what seems to be out there,
and what some of us have sampled....
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Books Our
readers recommend....
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Movies
Last Wednesday, the 27th, the command of Special Operations in the
Pentagon held a screening of The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 classic film about a
rather famous urban terrorist insurgency. This decision, and the film, was discussed at length by Charles Paul
Freund, the senior editor at Reason magazine, in an article in Slate magazine this week - The Pentagon's
Film Festival, Wednesday, August 27, 2003 (Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2087628/) and by David Ignatius in the Washington Post. Ignatius called this "one hopeful sign that the military is
thinking creatively and unconventionally about Iraq." Perhaps. The Pentagon flier read in part: How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. ...
Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad
fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to
a rare showing of this film. I have not come across any further comment on how the screening went. I don't remember the film very well, and 1965 was the year I left
for college. The film was studied by the campus left for its lessons in revolutionary-cell organization and was obligatory
viewing for Black Panthers. For an English major from Pittsburgh in central Ohio it was of only passing interest.
No one required I see it. Here is Freund's summary: The first part of the film depicts the campaign of terror launched
by the National Liberation Front (FLN, called "the organization" in the film) against French colonial rule in 1954. The story
is built around a criminal-turned-revolutionary known as Ali La Pointe, and it details his political epiphany and his terrorist
career. The movie's second half concerns the reaction by the French military, which consists primarily of a campaign of torture
and murder, and focuses on the leader in charge of that campaign, "Col. Mathieu." Mathieu is by far the best-realized character
in the film; his is the only role filled by a professional actor. From its first release, the film was extremely controversial: When the film was finally shown in France, theaters were
bombed. In Italy, viewers were attacked. Ali was indeed the hero of the Casbah, the Muslim section of Algiers; as the film suggests, his death marked the end of
the real battle for the city. The French did torture and murder their way to tactical victory. Mathieu, for his part, is based
closely on the real-life Gen. Jacques Massu, who devised the counterterrorist strategy. Many sequences are meticulously accurate,
such as the famous one referred to by the Pentagon in its flier, in which Algerian women put on Western clothes and makeup
and then plant bombs at civilian French targets. Unsurprisingly, many characters are composites, and numerous details are
fudged, made up, or altered. Among them is Ali's powerful last line in the film, directed at the French: "I do not negotiate
with them." The line is actually appropriated from a speech by then-Interior Minister Francois Mitterand, who had directed
it at the insurgents. Very odd. The lessons here? Well, terrorists around the world may have learned the efficacy of insurgent terror
from Algeria. The PLO, Hamas, and other groups are indebted to the Algerian strategy of so-called "people's war."
Its lessons are now apparent in Iraq, too, according to Freund. I see that. Is Freund right in contending that this film shows that wars may not be won with terror, but they can be lost by
reacting ineffectively to it? While The Battle of Algiers has next to nothing to say about
overall French strategy in Algeria, its most obvious military lesson - that torture is an efficient countermeasure to terror
- is a dangerous one in this particular instance. Aside from its moral horror, torture may not even elicit accurate information,
though the film seems to suggest it is foolproof. The French military view of torture is articulated by Col. Mathieu in the course of a series of exchanges with
French journalists. As reports of torture spread, the issue becomes a scandal in France. Mathieu, however, is unwavering in
defense of the practice: To him it is a military necessity. Informed that Jean-Paul Sartre is condemning French tactics, for
example, Mathieu responds with a question that would warm Ann Coulter's heart: "Why are the liberals always on the other
side?" At one point Mathieu challenges the hostile French reporters with a question of his own:
"Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer 'yes,' you must accept all the necessary consequences." Mathieu might
as well be addressing the American military and the American public. Is the United States to remain in the Middle East? If
so, what are the "necessary consequences"? Now wait. Is this a film about doing whatever it takes, no matter what? Is this a film that
is "pro-torture" and being shown at the Pentagon for what it can tell us all? No, the film is set up show that terrorism,
including murder, is better than torture. Slightly better. It justifies its support of FLN terrorist murder over French torture by rewriting history. According to the film,
terror was futile; it didn't work. What finally drove France out, it suggests, was a spontaneous explosion of popular resistance.
That scenario, however, is a fantasy. What drove France out was sustained and bloody insurrection. The French left Algeria in the end. It turns out it was not really ever going to be a part of France.
Charles de Gaulle reversed himself he was brought back in the mid-fifties to fix all this, committed a half-million troops,
and then he granted Muslims the full rights of French citizenship and in 1959 declared publicly that Algerians had the right
to determine their own future. Freund suggests the better lesson is this - As a portrait of revolution and of a war of ideas, The Battle of Algiers suggests that
the French went wrong by denying they were foreigners; they treated Algeria as an extension of France. At least one
lesson for the United States seems obvious: A liberal Iraqi order is going to have to develop within Iraqi terms, and only
the Iraqis themselves can establish those terms. I'm not sure this last point is what the Pentagon folks wanted to show when they screened this film last week.
Or maybe it was. |
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Music Randy Newman anticipated the neo-conservative
agenda, of course...
Randy Newman, Sail Away (1972) Warner Brothers
Reprise Records (W2 2064) Back in the seventies on the very first Saturday Night Live
show on NBC, hosted by George Carlin, the "musical guest" for the week was Randy Newman, who performed the title cut from
this album - and Carlin did his routine where he asks the puzzling question, "Why is there no blue food?" There
is no answer. "Sail Away" is an odd tune. One is, as has been said, sucked
in by a beautiful song, crossing the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay, celebrating a place where "every man is free," and
the narrator sucking you in is a slave dealer. Pretty tune, with a nasty idea about America there, and lots of ironies
balanced nicely. But thirty-one years later a lot of people have been remembering the
seventh cut on the album, "Political Science." Bob Baker writing in the week's Los Angeles Times comments. Newman laughed at the simple-minded song, which he titled "Political
Science," but he distrusted it. It had come to him too easily; it struck him as too exaggerated, even for the brilliantly
warped songwriting sensibility he was developing. At first he would not play it for audiences. Then one night
he trotted it out, and the crowd laughed. Newman put it on his third album, Sail Away, in 1972, and it became
a fan favorite. The years passed, foreign policy ebbed and flowed, spats with allies
came and went, but the wonderful thing about "Political Science," Newman realized, was that no matter how absurd America's
behavior toward the rest of the world seemed to people like him, it could never approximate his song's hyperbolic jingoism.
"Nobody talked like that, not even Curtis LeMay." Of course. Perhaps you remember it. No one likes us; I don't know why We give them money, but are they grateful? And so on and so forth. The tune is not getting a lot of airplay
these days, because Newman is no longer in fashion, and it does cut too close to the bone. It's awfully sarcastic and
would offend the Fox News, Clear Channel crowd. Hey, they assure us we are the good guys. Did Donald Rumsfeld say that France and Germany, opposing our
war in Iraq, were irrelevant? Yes. "Now, you're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't.
I think that's old Europe." Asia's crowded and Europe's too old ... Yep, I remember that line. This is too odd. Two summers ago, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times' foreign-affairs
columnist, was trying to show that Europe's resentment of American free-market capitalism, the death penalty and globalization
had been around far longer than President Bush. He began his column with the first two verses of "Political Science."
The British columnist Miles Kington suggested that Bush's advisors stop making recommendations about how to patch things up
with Europe. Instead, he wrote, they should simply have Bush study the lyrics of "Political Science," most of which
the columnist reprinted, ending with a rhetorical question: "Who said that the Americans don't have irony?" And only the UK and Australia would join us in the war? We'll save Australia Very curious. And if our current international efforts are to make sure the rest
of the world adopts our political system of representative secular democracy, and entrepreneurial deregulated market capitalism,
because that is what they really want, even if they won't say so, and also to assure open semi-free trade everywhere...?
Well, Newman had that covered. Boom goes London and boom Paree ... Oh, how peaceful it will be Do people in other parts of the world mistrust us and resent us telling
them how they really want to be? Do they resent us telling them they want to be just like us? The tune ends as
you would expect. ... They all hate us anyhow Newman thought the song was a silly throw-away thing thirty years
ago. And what does he think of the song now? "It's one of my better songs ... better than I thought
it was. The lines are funny, it doesn't fall down anywhere. After I started playing it live and taking a look at it,
I realized how consistently stupid the guy was." Yeah, well, this is the sort of thing once actually reads these days
in pages of the conservative news service NewsMax. What was silly, over-the-top sarcasm three decades ago seems
what we actually have being said right now. I guess it's still funny. But it's funny in a sad sort of way
now. Still, my favorite song on the album is "God's Song (That's Why I
Love Mankind)." We seem to be in a holy war, where our born-again Christian president
is trying to lead the western world in facing down the maddest of Islamic terrorists and fanatics. Our president says
God is on our side and has said he feels he was chosen by God for this task. And the terrorists and fanatics say Allah
is on their side. In this other Randy Newman song a rather amused God has some good
lines. Man means nothing he means less to me I recoil in horror from the foulness of thee I burn down your cities how blind you must be It's a slow minor blues chant. And Newman seems to have had
a good idea of what God might be musing, looking down on Baghdad and the West Bank and the White House. So, if you are of a certain age, pull out the album and listen to
it again. __ And don't even think about Gary Coleman running for governor out here
in California and start humming Newman's "Short People." That's too spooky. |
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