Security Theatre

When it comes to movies about Islamic terrorism, there is a certain amount of timeliness expected. It's a zeitgeist thing. But Four Lions' timing was especially fortuitous: an English satire of jihadists, it arrived on U.S. shores November 5th, just a week after the TSA patdowns and body scanners began meeting some resistance, and just another week before John Tyner’s “don’t touch my junk” objection became a cause célèbre for ACLU lawyers and right wing authoritarians alike. Though Four Lions doesn’t particularly concern itself with these issues or the post-9/11 security apparatus, it is useful in defusing the mentality that allows them to thrive.

The four lions in question are actually five English Muslims living in the suburb of Sheffield, of varying levels of unintelligence: there is Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), stupid but mostly harmless; Barry (Nigel Lindsay), a recent and very possibly gay convert, bloodthirsty to the point of spiting his own face; Hassan (Arsher Ali), who thinks his Islamist bona fides make him much cooler than he actually is—and who has one of the funniest introductory scenes I can remember—Waj (Kayvan Novak), generally confused and clueless; and Omar (Riz Ahmed), the protagonist, generally klutzy but on some level cognizant of his cohorts’ ineptness and with a growing ambivalence on what the group is trying to do. (I am dealing with generalities here, as the film’s comic surprises are best kept concealed. The film’s trailer spoils far too much.)

Making characters stupid but not hatefully obnoxious is a tough balancing act--see Idiocracy for an example of when it doesn’t work, and Burn After Reading for when it does--but the movie pulls it off pretty well, making them interesting enough that we want to see how gloriously they screw up next. It's smart stupid comedy, like seeing different permutations of Ali G bounce off one another.

Yet Omar and his friend are far from the only fools on parade. Omar’s conservative brother, his co-worker at a security firm, Barry’s ditzy neighbor, are all head-bashingly oblivious to what he’s up to. Indeed, even as the group’s big operation gets underway, the police are grossly ineffective at stopping them.

A little frustratingly, the only characters not to come in for audience scorn are the ancillary jihadists: Omar’s smart wife is the sharpest character in the movie, and fully aware of her husband’s plans. And a group of Pakistani terrorists, who end up kicking Omar and Waj out of their training camp for being so useless, are the straight men in their section of the film. Ordinarily this would not be worth mention, since the Taliban are generally understood to be the bad guys. But Bagram and Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg, whom director Chris Morris consulted so as not to offend Muslims (what kind of satire sets out not to offend?), doesn’t share that understanding.

But I digress. What does all this have to do with the TSA’s groping and lurid photography?

More than any particular goal or character motivation, the driving force of the movie’s episodic story is the complete ineptness of its characters, who lurch from scheme to scheme as their plans sometimes literally go up in smoke. Though work on Four Lions began several years ago, its subject matter has a useful analogue in Umar Farouk Abulmutallab, who last Christmas failed to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner when he attempted to light on a fire a bomb in his underwear. (He also invited Moazzam Begg to speak at University College London’s 2007 Islamic Awareness conference…) Abdulmutallab’s terror fail invites mockery, but it also prompted the new TSA procedures, which would detect any crotch fire potential and prevent such an attack from occurring.

The scanners and pat-downs are a convenient dodge for the fact that Abdulmutallab would never have boarded his flight had intelligence agencies acted on his dubious profile and the tip-off given by his father. Other recent terror plots and incidents either stemmed from similar failure to act on reasonable suspicion, such as Nidal Malik Hasan’s massacre of troops at Ft. Hood, or had nothing to do with airport security, such as Faisal Shazhad’s Times Square bombing attempt this past spring.

Abdulmutallab and Shazhad are most pertinent to discussing anti-terror measures because they were successes in spite of the utter failure of their plots. Even though they were caught and no one was injured, influential swaths of the country still lost their collective minds anyway. The TSA, of course, implemented its new invasive measures. Meanwhile the conservative intelligentsia demanded Abdulmutallab be tortured in spite of his cooperation with authorities, and wanted to revoke Shazhad’s Miranda rights. Only on Wall Street can failure reap such benefits.

All of this is done in the name of fighting a shadowy terrorist threat that, with a little light shone on it, loses a lot of its capacity to inspire, well, terror. Four Lions’ depiction of domestic terrorists as bumbling fools then, while imperfect, provides a necessary corrective to the constant scare-mongering that often seems to do the terrorists' work for them. Sometimes the best response to the lions’ roar, is to roar back, in laughter.

An Islamist and an Atheist Walk Into an Art Museum...

Said Qutb was the intellectual godfather of today’s Jihadists, articulating anti-American animus as no Islamist had before. He spent time studying in America in the 1950s and gave people an earful when he returned home. The excerpts provided in The New Republic’s consistently great The Book make for fascinating reading.

Some of his opinions are offensive to the point of being funny—he makes no attempt whatsoever to disguise his anti-black racism:

“Jazz” music is his music of choice. This is that music that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other.

Would that he had lived to experience Lil Wayne.

His criticism on ‘higher’ culture later on is, shall we say, more measured, and I daresay many would agree with him. It boils down to Americans taking everything they have for granted. To begin with, interpersonal relationships are devalued to the point of, ‘who have you met?’:

As for friends, it is enough that one be invited to get-acquainted parties. There he encounters their faces for the first time, and the host acquaints him with the attendees one by one (men as well as women)[5], and he asks whoever of them wish to do so to write down their names and addresses, and so they in turn do with him. After some time, his notebook is full of names and addresses. And see! he has a great number of friends (men and women)[6], and perhaps he is even victorious in the competition undertaken in pursuit of this goal. How great, how strange are the competitions here!

This is almost verbatim the case against Facebook. And he applies it to American notions of travel—reduced to brief and shallow sightseeing—and especially its wealth of art. This term is meant literally, as fortunes are spent procuring rare, often foreign works for American museums. And all of it, to him, is a waste, as Americans only patronize museums to say that they were there, with no special consideration given to the art contained therein:

Again I arrived at the point where [I could say that], out of the great mass of visitors comprised in my enumerations, only a rare minority comprehended anything of these tremendous artistic riches that the dollar has gathered from all the places on earth; all that remained for the dollar to do was to create artistic sensation, but apparently that does not respond to the dollar’s charms!

The cinema, to him, is the most egregious exemplar of American vulgarity, in that it is the one medium in which they lead over any other nation, but it too is squandered. Yet instead of producing riches of creation that the multitude ignores, it directly panders to masses and only occasionally bothers to produce something of artistic merit:

In the great majority of American films, one sees manifestly primitive subjects and primitive excitement; this is true of police/crime films and cowboy films. As for high, skillful films, such as “Gone with the Wind,” “Wuthering Heights,” “The Song of Bernadette,” and such, they are few in comparison with what America produces.

Not only are these observations true, they are still true today. But they are not the whole truth. For to find common ground with this man is to be in very uncomfortable territory, with very unpleasant implications. Dinesh D’Souza thought Qutb was onto something in his criticism of loose American morals and sexual depravity (and conveniently neglected to mention that the licentious Americans of which he speaks were of at least a decade before the sexual revolution), and he too betrayed a fundamental misconception of America and American freedom of culture.

The American polity was not founded on the stringent ideals of the Puritan colonies, but on the Enlightenment values of the Founding Fathers, which emphasized among other things egalitarianism. Qutb and other such snobs—for condemning an entire people to death and damnation is snobbery taken to homicidal extremes—fail to understand that at the time of America’s founding was an extreme cultural stratification and aristocratic tradition. The multitude did not have the time or the money, probably not even the right, to patronize the symphony, the ballet, the museums. They probably do not in many Muslim countries today. Western Enlightenment egalitarianism as applied to culture ensures that more than just the extremely wealthy few will be able to partake of high culture. Naturally, in trying to appeal to the masses, there is considerable dumbing-down (Shakespeare is the greatest victim of this by far), and much of it is taken for granted. But this is not restricted to Americans by any means.

As I said in my take on the Facebook criticism, it will always be the case that only a dedicated few will ever fully explore the depths of what life has to offer, be it friendship or high culture. Additionally, hit-and-run sightseeing is not a simply American phenomenon; I spent 45 minutes in London last year with a Nigerian woman who was hell-bent on being photographed in front of the London Eye and double-decker tour buses). And I will go even further and add that what disinterested museum-goers lack in sufficient appreciation of the arts is compensated by an intimate knowledge in some other field, often a given person’s career: an art critic can no better rebuild his car’s engine than the mechanic can identify a Francis Bacon. We can argue the validity of prizing one over the other, but rare is the person who is so completely moronic as to have no expertise to offer. Sarah Palin would have made an excellent sports journalist, I hear (it’s what she went to school for, after all).

I hate lowest-common denominator crudity just as the next art snob. But given the nature of people, and the alternative of an even more artistically impoverished mass culture, we should rejoice at the kitsch, the commercial appropriation, the gaudy Broadway musical, the museum drifters. It's not like the original work is harmed (at least, not usually). Their many dollars help make important work possible, and the egalitarian attitude that affords them their disinterested patronage are afforded to those who would make the most of their opportunity to stand with the classics.

And besides: