The Kingdom: Malign or maligned?

The Kingdom, Peter Berg’s political thriller about the aftermath of an Al Qaeda terrorist attack on an American oil company compound in Riyadh, is Tinseltown’s gritty, realistic, whodunit-action flick attempt to deal with an epic subject whose tragic shock waves have convulsed the Arab world as well as the West. Peter Berg had a unique opportunity to create a work of art, to explore the emotional firestorms and existential sorrows of human beings trapped in a state of siege in a paranoid world of video beheadings and teenage suicide bombers, to convey a message of hope, reconciliation and a shared humanity that could comfort our wounded world. Sadly, he did nothing of the kind.

Since 9/11, it is fashionable to bash the Saudi kingdom as a misogynic, America hating enclave of sybarite princes, pitiless terrorists and zealot mullahs in the American media. Osama bin Laden, to be sure, possesses all the ingredients of a world class cinematic prince of darkness, an evil doer (to use another Bushism) in the immortal league of Dr No, Goldfinger, Uncle Adolf, Gabbar Singh and Fu Manchu. So it was easy enough for Peter Berg to set up a moral fable about good and evil in the surreal desert kingdom. The kingdom, a folksy, aw shucks All-American FBI agent reminds us, is like “going to Mars” If Saudi Arabia is Mars, its people are Martians, not real people, right? Just like Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo grunted and blew away gooks in Vietnam, Chuck Norris infiltrated the maze of West Beirut to rescue the American hostages from their raghead captors, just as the fiendish Jap admirals planned a day of infamy in Pearl Harbour, John Wayne rid the world of such savage lowlife as the Apache, Sioux and bison, such movies serve America’s cultural collective subconscious. They allow the enemy de jour to be dehumanised, they allow human beings of a different skin colour to be branded as sinister and homicidal ,they allow history to be rewritten so Americans kick backsides in exotic offshore locales, they provide cheap thrills and rake in billions at the box office. The Roman Empire arranged for lions to mangle save girls and gladiator fights in the Colosseum in its use of bread and circuses, to dumb down the culture, set the geopolitical agenda and satiate the human urge to kill the Other in orgies of violence. Modern America has Hollywood arrange its blood-gore gladiator contests.

The movie begins when Al Qaeda terrorists in Saudi National Guard uniforms slaughter a hundred Americans watching a little league softball match in a Riyadh compound. If Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s literature is magic realism, Hollywood directors like Peter Berg and Steve Seagal have invented a genre of manic realism. Superb cinematography, breathless action, choreographed scenes of violence that are almost pornographic in their blood, gore, guts and body parts vividness, like the Hollywood slasher movies of my boyhood. But the real nightmare was not on Elm Street but in the same streets of lower Manhattan and London’s West End where I once lived, worked and know so well. Mohammed Atta and the terrorists of 9/11 were clearly psychopaths, fanatics brainwashed to commit the crime of the century. But perhaps not. After all, this is only 2007 and the century still has ninety three long years more to go.

Berg gets the atmospherics of Washington and Riyadh, Saudi palaces and military bases, the FBI’s Middle America meat and potatoes corporate culture just right. But his scriptwriter’s understanding of the politics, psychology and culture of Saudi Arabia is banal, devoid of nuance or depth. So Berg’s princes of the House of Saud preen with their falcons and live in marble Moorish palaces funded by petrodollars from Exxon and Chevron, donate millions of dollars to Arab American charities in Boston, money that results in people (defined here as Americans) getting “blown up”. FBI Special Agent Fleury (Jamie Foxx) even blackmails Prince Thamer, (a fictional Bandar bin Sultan, the legendary Saudi ex-ambassador to Washington) with threats to disclose secrets of royal family donations to charities to obtain a visa for the kingdom. Incredibly, there is not a single mention of the daily butchery in Iraq or Afghanistan and Palestine in a movie about Middle East terror.

The subliminal connection between Islam and terrorism is continually reinforced by whenever sinister Saudis in thobes and disdashas bomb, machine gun, knife and behead Americans while loudly screaming “Allahhu Akbar” much as evil Japs tended to scream “Banzai!” when they killed Gl Joe at Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal in the racist Yellow Peril movies Hollywood churned out to boost morale after Pearl Harbour. After all, the moment Arabs can be safely dehumanised on screen, America can invade their countries, napalm bomb their cities, mock their dress and religion, humiliate their kids at JFK and La Guardia, malign their culture at will.

After all, why should Americans treat camel jockeys from Mars as people, why should they mourn the death of their children or feel pity for the pain of their women? Peter Berg’s movie is straight out of the Nazi Propaganda maestro Josef Goebbles school of international relations. A lie, repeated often enough, becomes the truth. Sadly this movie itself markets the Big Lie.

The Kingdom deeply offended me (hard to do!) because it drained my humanity as I watched it, it stereotyped Saudi Arabs as fanatical, incompetent, people who hail the terrorist acolytes of Osama as heroes. Scenes of sickening violence were invariably juxtaposed with terrorists screaming “Allahu Akbar”. The Saudi army and security forces were shown as completely infiltrated with Al Qaeda. Torture was portrayed as routine in Saudi jails. This movie libels and maligns the kingdom, its royal family, its culture. Even its causal reference to Arab Americans is a slur. If Berg had referred to Jewish Americans in the same malevolent context, I am certain the Anti Defamation League would have had the movie banned in the United States. The dialogue is stiff. There is no character development. The plot is a joke. However, the car chases and RPG shootouts are all too real. The terrorist mastermind Abu Hamza is a kindly old gentleman with a white beard. Voila, even Martian grandpas are Al Qaeda killers? Quelle horreur!! So America can safely smoke ‘em out with F-16’s and Apache helicopters with Hellfire missiles, in Fallujah, in Gaza, in North Waziristan.

The movie is an adolescent, pseudo-realist bang bang farce, not a sophisticated humanist work of cinematic genius like Steven Spielberg’s Munich. Munich portrayed a Mossad hit team’s hunt for Black September terrorists in the 1970’s, captured the sorrow, anguish, doubt, pride and hope among both Israelis and Palestinians as hunters became the prey. Its message was so profoundly human, universal and authentic in its moral ambiguities. In contrast, the movie’s message is simple and nihilistic. Kill them all. But an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind .Sorry Mr Berg, Saudi Arabia is not Mars but a nation of flesh and blood human beings that does not deserve your cinematic venom.

Matein Khalid is a Dubai-based investment banker and economic analyst