‘Live free or die’: has Hollywood made suicide bombers heroes post-9/11?Only after 26 paragraphs does an ultra-left author say she is slightly uncomfortable with the comparison:
Think Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Christian Bale, then think of 9/11. No? Haven’t drawn any parallels yet? Then there’s one recurring theme in the film industry you may have missed out on.
In the 12 years since the September 11 terrorist attacks against the U.S., movie directors have zeroed in on the concept of suicide bombings.
But while we’ve seen the Arabs and Asians in their terrorist garb wreaking havoc on Western interests, there’s also been another type of suicide bomber depicted on the silver screen – and it’s not the “evil” kind.
“We’ve seen several different trends. One of them is the suicide bomber as the apocalyptic kind, wanting the downfall of America. But the other is a heroic figure, a self-sacrificing individual,” Haroon Moghul, an author and a fellow at the center of national security at the New York-based Fordham Law School, told Al Arabiya English on Tuesday, ahead of the 12th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
“I think the fact that no one talks about this, and yet it’s so prominent in many different movies, is interesting.”
So, what kinds of films feature these self-sacrificing suicide bombers, which appear to be celebrated within the narrative?
Tom Cruise is perhaps one of the latest culprits of the seeming trend, starring as an action hero in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller Oblivion (2013). Cruise plays Jack Harper, who ends up believing the only way he can save humanity is by sacrificing himself.
It’s not a new theme, but Moghul believes such storylines have been churned out by Hollywood left, right and center post-9/11.
“We use art subconsciously as a way to work out so many things going on around us. We have been at war since 9/11. For a lot of Americans, and a lot of the audiences who we would assume are now younger, this is all they really know of American politics, history and global affairs,” says Moghul.
“On a rhetorical level, we talk about good and evil, but I think what we’re really talking about is questions over what kind of violence is permissible and what isn’t. Inseparable from that is the question; what is it permissible to give your life for?”
Hollywood has certainly given an assortment of examples.
One was a sacrificial death in sci-fi flick Pacific Rim (2013), which was described as “Christ-like” by critics.
The hero “dives into the belly of the beast, he goes through the dimension of this dark underworld and then he pops up in a sort of resurrection scene,” said Dr. Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Coalition and Editor-in-Chief of Movieguide, in an interview with U.S.-based The Christian Post in July.
In ever the macho show of bravery, the hero ejects his copilot, and romantic interest, so she can survive, and goes on to destroy villainous aliens. The sacrifice is similar to the seeming death of Iron Man in “The Avengers” (2012).
...In the latest installment of the Batman franchise, The Dark Knight Rises (2012), the audience is led to believe that the caped crusader dies to protect Gotham City. Again, martyrdom finds its way into silver screen narratives. But, in a twist of fate that only Hollywood could conjure up, Batman survives due to a painfully obvious software glitch in the character’s vehicle.
Suicide bomber?
But, likening the self-sacrifice seen in recent Hollywood flicks to the terrorist suicide bombings seen in “real world” attacks is not a comparison without flaws.Al Arabiya, and in particular Haroon Moghul (also a HuffPo columnist besides being a fellow at the center of national security at Fordham), simply cannot understand how heroes who sacrifice themselves are any different from suicide bombers.
“I’m not entirely certain that the self-sacrifice of the heroes in those films is directly analogous to a suicide bombing,” says [U.S.-based author and graphic novelist Willow] Wilson.
“In the cases that have been mentioned, the ‘threat’ is very immediate and external, it’s more like the hero is throwing himself on a bomb rather than setting the bomb off.”
Wilson notes that in the case of the Dark Knight Rises, for example, Batman takes a bomb way out to where it won’t hurt anybody and in doing so, sacrifices his own life.
“Now we’ve been in two horribly long wars and we went into war under false pretenses; the threats we thought existed were exaggerated, or in some cases falsified, and so I almost wonder if it’s an attempt to justify our reaction to a suicide bombing rather than the suicide bombing itself,” adds Wilson.
Still, she believes that the common thread of self-sacrifice in film since 9/11 cannot go by unnoticed.
In Al Arabiya's view, Daniel M. Lewin - who was murdered on American Airlines Flight 11 as he tried to foil the hijacking of the plane that destroyed the North Tower of the World Trade Center - is exactly the same as his murderers. The heroic passengers of United Flight 93 who sacrificed themselves to avoid having that flight crash into another building in Washington are themselves "suicide bombers," just like the hijackers, according to this nauseating logic.
If the editors at a modern, moderate, well-written Gulf Arab news source cannot distinguish between suicide terrorism and heroism, then one has to wonder if anyone in the Muslim world gets it 12 years later.