..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Reporters covering the entertainment industry have become weary of attempting to split the difference between hype and reality, when newsworthy events appear to coincide far too neatly with the marketing campaigns for Hollywood movies and television shows. This applies as much for the often bizarre mating habits of such celebrities as Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie, as it does for attacks by predatory fish in advance of the Discovery Channel‘s annual “Shark Week” and movies like Jaws and Open Water.

Still, only the most jaded of journalists would even attempt to find a link, however tenuous, between last week’s terror alert in New York, subsequent claims it was based on a hoax and the release this month of The War Within and Paradise Now. In both films, thought-provoking dramas in which suicide bombers target innocent people in big cities -- New York in the former, Tel Aviv in the latter -- the protagonists are revealed to be something other than soulless monsters or fire-breathing zealots.

Even by contemporary standards, resorting to this sort of publicity stunt would be … well, evil … and likely too expensive to pull off on an indie budget.

But, then, I’m old enough to remember the marketing campaigns that preceded Two-Minute Warning (1976) and Black Sunday (1977), big-budget thrillers in which ruthless men and women laid siege to an NFL championship game. In Two-Minute Warning, the culprit was a psycho-sniper, while the villains in the far better Black Sunday were members of Black September, the same organization responsible for the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

Even with that tragedy still fresh in our collective imagination, studio marketeers deemed it necessary to tease the movies with one-sheet posters that blared, “91,000 People. 33 Exit Gates. One Sniper …”; “Black Sunday: It Could Be Tomorrow!”; and “For 100,000 People, Monday May Never Come.”

In May, 2002, less than a year after the events of 9/11, The Sum of All Fears imagined what might happen if a “dirty bomb” were detonated by neo-Nazi terrorists during a more recent Super Bowl, this once staged within 60 miles of the White House.

Neo-Nazi terrorists?

Before 9/11, that same nuclear device was to have been smuggled into the United States by Islamic extremists, as it was in Tom Clancy’s novel. By the time the movie arrived in theaters, however, the production team changed course, bowing either to pressure from Arab-American groups or the reality that Clancy’s original vision might cut a bit too close to the bone for folks still trying to make sense of the horror. Nonetheless, posters for The Sum of All Fears warned, “27,000 Nuclear Weapons. One Is Missing.”

In the meantime, documentary filmmakers have done a fine job covering the guerrilla war that followed President Bush’s premature declaration of peace in Iraq. By contrast, Hollywood has yet to find an adequate way to exploit -- er, dramatize -- the many demonstrations of heroism, tragedy, anguish and suspense that occurred on that terrible day in September.

Perhaps, that’s because so much of it either played out before our eyes, live, on television, or beyond the reach of cameras and other recording devices. During the course of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sophisticated transmission devices carried by embedded reporters brought the fighting home to America instantaneously and unedited. Even so, the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib might still be unknown to the American public, if it weren’t for the guards’ need to showboat in front of digital cameras available to anyone with a credit card.

Consider: If some ambitious producer had rushed to make a movie-of-the-week about the events surrounding the death of NFL star Pat Tillman, based solely on early Pentagon reports, his no-brainer project would have been reduced to fiction. Even today, it’s impossible to determine with any certainty if Tillman’s story would more closely that of Audie Murphy, or Captain Karen Walden in Courage Under Fire.

Arriving this month to help fill some of the dramatic vacuum are two very good non-studio releases, Joseph Castelo and Ayad Akhtar’s The War Within and Hany Abu-Assad’s similarly riveting Paradise Now. They intentionally put a human face on the otherwise ordinary men and women, boys and girls, who have strapped on the vest or driven cars loaded with explosives into crowds of non-combatants. None of the characters fits western stereotypes of how a terrorist should look, or act, and no innocent bystander is likely to be saved at the last minute by a Rambo-esque superhero.

Both pictures dare to ask questions that have haunted the world since 1968, when Palestinian militants diverted an El Al flight from Rome, to Algiers, culminating in a 40-day standoff:

Who are these people? What do they see when they look into the mirror each morning? When will someone, anyone, step forward to end the cycle of violence?

“Everyone’s life changed on September 11,” said Akhtar, who grew up in a middle-class suburb of Milwaukee, where his religious background never became an issue among frends and neighbors. “We’re still carrying the wounds from what happened that day, and are still trying to make sense of how it affected us. I grew up with a feeling of invincibility, but suddenly I was treated as a threat to this country, as were other Muslims and Hindus.

“The inducement for those terrorists to take their own lives must have been very powerful. As artists, we decided to extend to this character an attempt to understand him.”

Coincidentally, on the same day The War Within was completed, a series of suicide-bombings rocked London. The young men implicated in that act of domestic terror resembled Castelo and Aktar’s protagonist, Hassan, in that he was western-educated, multilingual and, by all outward appearances, assimilated into the local culture.

None of the would-be bombers we meet in the new movies resemble the wild-eyed, if otherwise anonymous Palestinians, Iranians, Arabs, Chechens and assorted other Islamic militants we’ve seen portrayed in Hollywood movies, at least since the release of Exodus (in which John Derek played a Palestinian). Blind obedience to irrational policy is part of the shorthand used by filmmakers to introduce characters who aren’t American, British or otherwise sympathetic to western democracy and free-market economies.

In The War Within, the portrayal of Hassan could easily have been inspired by press descriptions of the 9/11 hijackers, who never seemed dramatically out of place in the Land of the Great Satan. After being smuggled into the United States, hidden in a container ship, the newly devout young man was welcomed into the New Jersey home of a childhood friend from Pakistan. Although he strictly adheres to the tenets of Islam, Hassan feels comfortable in the company of this fully assimilated family, and among their friends.

“We wanted to paint a picture of the wide spectrum of beliefs and lifestyles in the Muslim community,” Akthar emphasized. “In a sermon at the New Jersey mosque, the imam defines ‘jihad’ in different way than Hassan’s cellmates would. He refers to the long tradition of ‘inner jihad,’ which represents the struggle that opens our eyes to the true ways.”

Hassan’s secular friends assume he’s an engineer, looking for work in America, not someone who has decided to use his skills to build bombs. He’s kept secret the fact that he had been snatched off the streets of Paris by American agents, who flew him back to Pakistan, where he was imprisoned and tortured by government agents.

The police assumed Hassan knew the whereabouts of a prominent militant, if only because his dead brother was a member of the man’s cell and both were seen together in Paris. In jail, Hassan finds a friend and adviser in Khalid, a fellow prisoner who comes across as being as hard-core and dedicated as his brother probably was before being killed in action. It’s Khalid’s tutelage that convinces Hassan to participate in an already well-organized terrorist venture in America.

“Hassan associated his abduction with America, because it was the voice of western agents that he heard before he woke up in prison,” suggests Akhtar, a graduate who went on to study theater under Jerzy Grotowski, in Italy, teach alongside Andre Gregory in New York. “The torture he endured was sanctioned by the state, so, in his mind, it represented the state. Pakistan holds a very important place in our lives, and what happens there has to affect how America is perceived around the world.”

Paradise Now is set primarily in Nablus, where buddies Said and Khaled work as mechanics and dream of the day when the Israeli occupation of the West End will end. During the first third of the movie, the young men more closely resemble Beavis and Butthead, than such now-familiar 9/11 plotters as Mohamed Atta and Zacarias Moussaoui. Before long, though, they almost matter-of-factly tip viewers to their true destiny, which includes sneaking into Israel and blowing themselves to smithereens, thus ensuring an all-expenses-paid trip to heaven.

Said and Khaled are motivated chiefly by feelings of humiliation and hopelessness, borne under the yoke of the Israeli occupation, which has denied them work, land and education. They feel that the world only pays attention to the Palestinian people when one of them -- often someone with few obvious ties to the insurgency -- volunteers to carry explosives into Israel.

None of these characters is ever reduced to caricature, or required to adopt principles that would signal a false political evolution. We see the faces of their would-be victims, as well, even if they’re not always given names.

In Paradise Now, Abu-Assad’s camera contrasts everyday life in occupied Nablus, with that in a cosmopolitan Tel Aviv. No dialogue is wasted explaining the shocking differences between the cultures. Evidence of the economic inequity that breeds such contempt among young Palestinians is vividly rendered, as is the case constant fear and vigilance among Israelis.

The characters of Hassan, Said and Khaled are allowed, as well, to decide for themselves whether or not to detonate the explosives, and what message they’ll leave behind for their loved ones. It’s up to audience to decide if the men’s motivations were dictated by their mentors and handlers, or free will determined their decisions.

Because of this, The War Within and Paradise Now work both as thrillers and character-driven dramas. The films demand we ask ourselves what we would do in similar situations as the protagonists -- or, how we would react to our children‘s decisions to act in such a manner -- without also providing any cheap rhetoric or pat solutions to the quandary.

Audiences accustomed to being guided through life’s many moral and ethical dilemmas by movie cowboys wearing white hats -- or stogie-chomping sergeants in the mold of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood -- likely won’t have much patience with either film. It’s never fun spending more than a few moments of time in the company of characters who are capable of blowing up buses, train depots or convoys of soldiers. Given a choice between a serious discussion about a world-threatening political stalemate, however well rendered, and the sight of Jessica Simpson in Daisy Dukes, most Americans will take the latter.

And, who can blame them? Better minds have left the bargaining tables of Middle East shaking their heads in despair.

Still, it couldn’t hurt to listen to other voices every once in a while. If Americans can learn to appreciate the frustrations that motivate those who wish who wish us harm, while continuing to abhor their tactics, perhaps it could help us short-circuit such violent acts of desperation, in the first place. Neither would it kill anyone who’s considering the ultimate sacrifice -- whether in uniform, or attached to an explosives device -- to open their minds to the hundreds of millions of average men and women around the planet who have lost patience with the use of war and terror as a negotiating tool.

These movies, while no walk in the park, represent a small step in the right direction.

October 15, 2005
- Gary Dretzka

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