Step Across This Line (44 page)

SEPTEMBER 2001: TELLURIDE

In the beginning were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the little town of Telluride, Colorado—originally To Hell You Ride, so named by the nineteenth-century silver miners who tobogganed down the mountains to what was then a wild place full of whorehouses—was the site of their first bank robbery. Then came the movie, and Robert Redford named his Sundance Institute after his most famous role. The Sundance Film Festival became a celebrated showcase for new, independent filmmakers. Telluride itself became the USA’s other most famous festival for independent cinema, playing the role, you could say, of Butch to Sundance’s Sundance.

I’m writing this in Telluride’s thin air, amid spectacular mountain scenery, at the end of the town’s twenty-eighth such film festival (to declare an interest, I was this year’s guest director). Over the past four days, a feast of good movies has been reminding crowds of passionate moviegoers why they fell in love with the cinema in the days before the coming of the giant multiplexes and the domination of the first weekend’s gross.

Anyone who’s been going to the movies lately could be forgiven for thinking it might be more fun to stay home and stare at a wall.
Planet of the Apes
is, well, unkind to primates. A much-praised thriller,
The Score,
turns out to be a pedestrian, do-it-by-numbers heist movie. (The hackneyed figure of the old pro on his one last big job can also be seen in a somewhat better British film,
Sexy Beast.
) The Julia Roberts–Catherine Zeta-Jones “comedy,”
America’s Sweethearts,
is a movie-biz in-joke that nobody got.
Blow
sucks. The one genuine movie thrill on offer of late has been Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now Redux,
and even this contains disappointments. The restored “French plantation sequence” is the biggest; it’s too expository, not fabulist enough, for its place close to the heart of darkness. It’s merely eccentric at a point in the film when insanity ought to rule. And Brando’s performance as Kurtz hasn’t improved with time (and a little re-editing). Still, given the high ambition of the filmmaking, and performances such as the great Robert Duvall’s (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”), and given, above all, the dross on offer elsewhere, it’s easy to forgive its trespasses.
Apocalypse
is a Himalaya among anthills.

Listen to young filmmakers in L.A., and even the most talented of them will tell you that they have no choice, they have to bow down before the power of the marketplace and dilute their art to make their films commercially viable. There’s an answer to this playing to packed houses in Telluride: the smash-hit French film
Amélie,
the story of an isolated girl who has always lived in her imagination until one day she starts trying to impose her startling inner reality upon the external world. The film bursts with visual inventiveness and a gently surreal cinematic wit, and its huge European success stands as a reproach to all those filmmakers who find compromise an easier option than originality.

The daring and radicalism of the feature films being financed by the cable-television channel HBO, a selection of which has been a highlight of the Telluride festival, stand as a further reproach to the pusillanimity of so much big studio fare. (Look out in particular for Agnieszka Holland’s
Shot in the Heart,
an adaptation of Mikal Gilmore’s brilliant book about his murderer brother Gary.) And some fine films from places not thought to be at the center of world cinema offer further proof that the center does not hold. I was particularly impressed by the style and grace of Danis Tanovic’s first feature,
No Man’s Land,
in which wounded Bosnian and Serb soldiers, caught in a trench between opposing front lines, become a vision in microcosm of their vicious, absurdist war. It’s as if Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon were bleeding in a trench, and when Godot comes, he turns out to be wearing the impotent blue helmet of the UNPROFOR troops. (“Here come the Smurfs!” is the movie’s funniest line.) It struck me that Hollywood would have insisted that the wounded soldiers should gradually befriend each other, their common humanity overcoming the craziness of their war; and one of the most tough-minded, as well as bitterly funny, virtues of Tanovic’s movie is that he makes the opposite happen, leading to a bloody climax as blackly satirical as
Catch-22
—so “feel-bad” an ending that no L.A. producer would have tolerated it.

In Telluride, this year, we screened Andrei Tarkovsky’s great movie
Solaris,
to honor a sci-fi masterpiece before the contemporary plague of remakes comes to obliterate it. This exploration of the unreliability of reality and the power of the human unconscious, this great examination of the limits of rationalism and the perverse power of even the most ill-fated love, needs to be seen as widely as possible before it’s transformed by Steven Soderbergh and James Cameron into what they ludicrously threaten will be “
2001
meets
Last Tango in Paris.
” What, sex in space with floating butter? Tarkovsky must be turning in his grave.

Another success from the past was Satyajit Ray’s enchanting film for children,
The Golden Fortress,
a film whose lack of international recognition always distressed its great director. Perhaps its huge impact here will finally earn this neglected film a release. Today Telluride, tomorrow the world?

There are two kinds of film festivals: there are the mega-hyped, hoopla-infested selling circuses like Cannes and even Sundance; and there is Telluride, where no prizes are given, and where, if people have come to buy and sell, they keep pretty quiet about it. It is extraordinarily exciting, in this age of the triumph of capitalism, to discover an event dedicated not to commerce but to love. And if that sounds old-fashioned and starry-eyed, so be it. The cinema was always in the business of gazing at the stars.

OCTOBER 2001: THE ATTACKS ON AMERICA

In January 2000’s column I wrote that “the defining struggle of the new age would be between Terrorism and Security,” and fretted that to live by the security experts’ worst-case scenarios might be to surrender too many of our liberties to the invisible shadow-warriors of the secret world. Democracy requires visibility, I argued, and in the struggle between security and freedom we must always err on the side of freedom. On Tuesday, September 11, however, the worst-case scenario came true.

They broke our city. I’m among the newest of New Yorkers, but even people who have never set foot in Manhattan have felt her wounds deeply, because New York in our time is the beating heart of the visible world, tough-talking, spirit-dazzling, Walt Whitman’s “city of orgies, walks and joys,” his “proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!” To this bright capital of the visible, the forces of invisibility have dealt a dreadful blow. No need to say how dreadful; we all saw it, are all changed by it, and must now ensure that the wound is not mortal, that the world of what is seen triumphs over what is cloaked, what is perceptible only through the effects of its awful deeds.

In making free societies safe—safer—from terrorism, our civil liberties will inevitably be compromised.
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But in return for freedom’s partial erosion, we have a right to expect that our cities, water, planes, and children really will be better protected than they have been. The West’s response to the September 11 attacks will be judged in large measure by whether people begin to feel safe once again in their homes, their workplaces, their daily lives. This is the confidence we have lost and must regain.

Next: the question of the counterattack. Yes, we must send our shadow-warriors against theirs, and hope that ours prevail. But this secret war alone cannot bring victory. We will also need a public, political, and diplomatic offensive whose aim must be the early resolution of some of the world’s thorniest problems: above all the battle between Israel and the Palestinian people for space, dignity, recognition, and survival. Better judgment will be required on all sides in future. No more Sudanese aspirin factories to be bombed, please. And now that wise American heads appear to have understood that it would be wrong to bomb the impoverished, oppressed Afghan people in retaliation for their tyrannous masters’ misdeeds, they might apply that wisdom, retrospectively, to what was done to the impoverished, oppressed people of Iraq. It’s time to stop making enemies and start making friends.

To say this is in no way to join in the savaging of America by sections of the Left that has been among the most unpleasant consequences of the terrorists’ attacks on the United States. “The problem with Americans is . . .” “What America needs to understand . . .” There has been a lot of sanctimonious moral relativism around lately, usually prefaced by such phrases as these. A country that has just suffered the most devastating terrorist attack in history, a country in a state of deep mourning and horrible grief, is being told, heartlessly, that it is to blame for its own citizens’ deaths. (“Did we deserve this, sir?” a bewildered worker at “ground zero” asked a visiting British journalist recently. I find the grave courtesy of that “sir” quite astonishing.)

Let’s be clear about why this bien-pensant anti-American onslaught is such appalling rubbish. Terrorism is the murder of the innocent; this time, it was mass murder. To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions. Furthermore, terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate complaints by illegitimate means. The terrorist wraps himself in the world’s grievances to cloak his true motives. Whatever the killers were trying to achieve, it seems improbable that building a better world was part of it.

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. These are tyrants, not Muslims. (Islam is tough on suicides, who are doomed to repeat their deaths through all eternity. However, there needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains. If the West needs to understand its Unabombers and McVeighs, Islam needs to face up to its bin Ladens.)

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no-brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I’m against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list—yes, even the short skirts and dancing—are worth dying for?

The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his worldview, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.

How to defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized. Don’t let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

NOVEMBER 2001: NOT ABOUT ISLAM?

This isn’t about Islam.” The world’s leaders have been repeating this mantra for weeks, partly in the virtuous hope of deterring reprisal attacks on innocent Muslims living in the West, partly because if the United States is to maintain its coalition against terror it can’t afford to allege that Islam and terrorism are in any way related.

The trouble with this necessary disclaimer is that it isn’t true. If this isn’t about Islam, why the worldwide Muslim demonstrations in support of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida? Why did those ten thousand men armed with swords and axes mass on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, answering some mullah’s call to jihad? Why are the war’s first British casualties three Muslim men who died fighting on the Taliban side?

Why the routine anti-Semitism of the much-repeated Islamic slander that “the Jews” arranged the hits on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, with the oddly self-deprecating explanation offered by the Taliban leadership among others: that Muslims could not have the technological know-how or organizational sophistication to pull off such a feat? Why does Imran Khan, the Pakistani ex–sports star turned politician, demand to be shown the evidence of Al-Qaida’s guilt while apparently turning a deaf ear to the self-incriminating statements of Al-Qaida’s own spokesmen (there will be a rain of aircraft from the skies, Muslims in the West are warned not to live or work in tall buildings, et cetera)? Why all the talk about U.S. military infidels desecrating the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, if some sort of definition of what is sacred is not at the heart of the present discontents?

Let’s start calling a spade a spade. Of course this is “about Islam.” The question is, what exactly does that mean? After all, most religious belief isn’t very theological. Most Muslims are not profound Quranic analysts. For a vast number of “believing” Muslim men, “Islam” stands, in a jumbled, half-examined way, not only for the fear of God—the fear more than the love, one suspects—but also for a cluster of customs, opinions, and prejudices that include their dietary practices; the sequestration or near-sequestration of “their” women; the sermons delivered by their mullah of choice; a loathing of modern society in general, riddled as it is with music, godlessness, and sex; and a more particularized loathing (and fear) of the prospect that their own immediate surroundings could be taken over—“Westoxicated”—by the liberal Western-style way of life.

Highly motivated organizations of Muslim men (oh, for the voices of Muslim women to be heard!) have been engaged, over the last thirty years or so, on growing radical political movements out of this mulch of “belief.” These Islamists—we must get used to this word, “Islamists,” meaning those who are engaged upon such political projects, and learn to distinguish it from the more general and politically neutral “Muslim”—include the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the blood-soaked combatants of the FIS and GIA in Algeria, the Shia revolutionaries of Iran, and the Taliban. Poverty is their great helper, and the fruit of their efforts is paranoia. This paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders, “infidels,” for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest-growing version of Islam in the world.

This is not really to go along with Samuel Huntington’s thesis about the “clash of civilizations,” for the simple reason that the Islamists’ project is turned not only against the West and “the Jews” but also against their fellow-Islamists. Whatever the public rhetoric, there’s little love lost between the Taliban and Iranian regimes. Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep as, if not deeper than, those nations’ resentment of the West. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to deny that this self-exculpatory, paranoiac Islam is an ideology with widespread appeal.

Twenty years ago, when I was writing a novel about power struggles in a fictionalized Pakistan, it was already de rigueur in the Muslim world to blame all its troubles on the West and, in particular, the United States. Then as now, some of these criticisms were well-founded; no room here to rehearse the geopolitics of the Cold War, and America’s frequently damaging foreign policy “tilts,” to use the Kissinger term, toward (or away from) this or that temporarily useful (or disapproved-of) nation-state, or America’s role in the installation and deposition of sundry unsavory leaders and regimes. But I wanted then to ask a question which is no less important now: suppose we say that the ills of our societies are not primarily America’s fault—that we are to blame for our own failings? How would we understand them then? Might we not, by accepting our own responsibility for our problems, begin to learn to solve them for ourselves?

It is interesting that many Muslims, as well as secularist analysts with roots in the Muslim world, are beginning to ask such questions now. In recent weeks Muslim voices have everywhere been raised against the obscurantist “hijack” of their religion. Yesterday’s hotheads (among them Yusuf Islam, a.k.a. Cat Stevens) are improbably repackaging themselves as today’s pussycats. An Iraqi writer quotes an earlier Iraqi satirist: “The disease that is in us, is from us.” A British Muslim writes that “Islam has become its own enemy.” A Lebanese writer friend, returning from Beirut, tells me that, in the aftermath of September 11, public criticism of Islamism has become much more outspoken. Many commentators have spoken of the need for a Reformation in the Muslim world. I’m reminded of the way non-communist socialists used to distance themselves from the tyrannous “actually existing” socialism of the Soviets; nevertheless, the first stirrings of this counterproject are of great significance. If Islam is to be reconciled with modernity, these voices must be encouraged until they swell into a roar.

Many of them speak of another Islam, their personal, private faith, and the restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticization, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern. The only aspect of modernity in which the terrorists are interested is technology, which they see as a weapon that can be turned against its makers. If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which their countries’ freedom will remain a distant dream.