Jim Emerson / March 3, 2006

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Yep: "Oscars for Osama." That's the headline above Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer's mysteriously tardy attack on "Paradise Now," "Munich" and "Syriana" -- but mostly "Syriana" -- in Friday's paper. I don't know what took him so long to vent this time. These movies were released between October and December, 2005, in the U.S.; only "Paradise Now" has been released on DVD; and the Oscar nominations were announced at the end of January. Does he think, perhaps, that Academy voters wait to cast their ballots on Oscar Sunday? I don't know. Indeed, from reading his column, I don't even know if he's truly seen the movies he claims to criticize.

Krauthammer begins with this:

Nothing tells you more about Hollywood than what it chooses to honor. Nominated for best foreign-language film is "Paradise Now," a sympathetic portrayal of two suicide bombers. Nominated for best picture is "Munich," a sympathetic portrayal of yesterday's fashion in barbarism: homicide terrorism.

But until you see "Syriana," nominated for best screenplay (and George Clooney, for best supporting actor) you have no idea how self-flagellation and self-loathing pass for complexity and moral seriousness in Hollywood.

His dismissal of both "Paradise Now" and "Munich" with the same vague and meaningless cliché -- "sympathetic portrayal" -- shows what passes for complexity and moral seriousness in the mind of Charles Krauthammer.

"Paradise Now" is a movie about two would-be bombers -- one of whom (the more "sympathetic" one, you might say) rejects the murderous mission for which he previously volunteered, on moral as well as political grounds, and tries to persuade his friend to do the same. He says he doesn't believe killing innocent people is a good way to achieve his people's goals. Such a heinously sympathetic portrayal! (Krauthammer evidently sympathized with the other guy. Which says a lot more about him than it does about the movie -- which, again, I doubt Mr. K has actually seen.)

We've already had plenty of discourse here to dismantle the absurd logic behind superficial charges of "moral equivalence" against "Munich," so I won't go into them again on Krauthammer's account. That's what links are for. Meanwhile, his op-ed piece leaves us to assume that Krauthammer honestly finds the Black Septemberists in "Munich" to be more "sympathetic" than, say, the main character. Go figure. I'm just glad I don't live in his world. It seems mighty dark and narrow and airless and constricted in there. And a moral and intellectual dead end, too.

From the way he writes I don't really believe Krauthammer would necessarily notice what's on the screen in front of him, even if he had seen the movies, when such realities are utterly irrelevant to his ideological agenda. He sees what's convenient for him, and that's fine, but no matter how much he may try to view them as such, movies and print editorials are two very different kinds of experiences. For most people.

Perhaps Krauthammer doesn't grasp the essential dissimilarities, though. Because when he describes "Syriana," he chooses to cite "stage direction" and page numbers from the script instead of what he has seen (or not seen) on the screen:

The "Syriana" script has, of course, the classic liberal tropes such as this stage direction: "The Deputy National Security Advisor, MARILYN RICHARDS, 40's, sculpted hair, with the soul of a seventy year-old white, Republican male, is in charge" (Page 21). Or this piece of over-the-top, Gordon Gekko Republican-speak, placed in the mouth of a Texas oilman: "Corruption is our protection. Corruption is what keeps us safe and warm. . . . Corruption . . . is how we win" (Page 93).

OK, maybe he wanted to refresh his memory. Or maybe he thinks Oscar voters read the scripts instead of watch the movies when they nominate something for a screenplay award. But since when -- aside from Internet creeps who think it's cool to blather about worthless draft scripts they've read before the movies themselves have even been made -- does somebody critique a film by citing a screenplay's description of a character? Either it's in the movie or it isn't.

Krauthammer claims that the Middle East leader he says the film portrays as a "modernizing, democratizing paragon" actually represents Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai, "a man of exemplary -- and quite nonfictional -- personal integrity, physical courage and democratic temperament." He is outraged that CIA ops assassinate him, supposedly to protect oil interests. It's a peculiar reading of the film, to say the least.

Afghanistan is obviously not an oil-rich monarchy, and Karzai is not its prince or king, and the U.S. government strongly and openly backed him for election to the presidency (not succession to the throne), so what on Earth is Krauthammer talking about? Where are the parallels he's trying to draw? As a Muslim moderate, Karzai briefly sided with the Taliban when it first came to power, so does that mean he was Good, then Bad, and now Good again?

OK, so that particular Krauthammer-invented analogy doesn't work. Then he makes the astonishing leap of claiming that the writer's branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (which determines the nominees in the screenplay categories) chose to nominate the script of "Syriana" because it wanted to make a statement about the assassination of progressive Middle Eastern leaders, based on one particular scene and an association between a character in the movie and the real-life Hamid Karzai that exists nowhere but in Krauthammer's imagination. Whew! This is called "projection" -- and it doesn't require 35mm equipment or a DVD player.

But even on a more general level, Krauthammer's connections fail. Does he mean to argue, say, that something other than oil has been the predominant force behind American foreign policy in the Middle East for the last 100+ years? (Brief history here -- courtesy Ted Koppel, of all people.) Anybody remember Donald Rumsfeld's trip to shake hands with Saddam Hussein in 1981? Does he wish to claim that official or unofficial interests in the United States have not (openly or covertly) at times assassinated or deposed national leaders and supported autocratic or nationalistic rulers over less "stable," democratically inclined ones? Isn't the repudiation of this kind of failed realpolitik a core belief of Krauthammer's beloved neoconservatism? O, the conundrum of Krauthammer's selectively blinkered weltanschauung!

Meanwhile, the non-linear storylines and multiple-moral-dilemmas depicted in "Syriana" are the direct and indirect consequences of an oil deal with China made by a progressive Middle Eastern leader that goes against the interests of a big Texas oil company... The movie is a work of fiction inspired by the best-selling 2002 memoirs of CIA veteran Robert Baer, "See No Evil (The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism)." But, like any work of fiction (including "Munich" and "Paradise Now") it weaves reality into its world, without claiming to give factual accounts of specific incidents. BTW, "Catch-22" is about World War II, but it's a work of fiction -- though, reading today's news stories you might be forgiven for thinking somebody was plagiarizing from it and just changing the names and some of the particulars.

I don't disagree with Krauthammer about the "near-incomprehensible plot" of "Syriana" -- that's clearly a deliberate strategy, and it works or doesn't work for different viewers to varying degrees. By definition that also makes it pretty ineffective as the sort of simplistic propaganda Krauthammer claims it is. So let me offer two alternative -- and contradictory -- views of the film, both of which make far more sense to me than Krauthammer's pre-fab wingnuttery. Roger Ebert wrote:

"Syriana" is an endlessly fascinating movie about oil and money, America and China, traders and spies, the Gulf States and Texas, reform and revenge, bribery and betrayal. Its interlocking stories come down to one thing: There is less oil than the world requires, and that will make some people rich and others dead. The movie seems to take sides, but take a step back and look again. It finds all of the players in the oil game corrupt and compromised, and even provides a brilliant speech in defense of corruption, by a Texas oilman (Tim Blake Nelson). This isn't about Left and Right but about Have and Have Not.

[...]

The movie's plot is so complex we're not really supposed to follow it, we're supposed to be surrounded by it. Since none of the characters understand the whole picture, why should we? If the movie shook down into good guys and bad guys, we'd be the good guys, of course. Or if it was a critique of American policy, we might be the bad guys. But what if everybody is a bad guy, because good guys don't even suit up to play this game?What if a CIA agent brings about two assassinations and tries to prevent another one, and is never sure precisely whose policies he is really carrying out?...

"Syriana" is a movie that suggests Congress can hold endless hearings about oil company profits and never discover the answer to anything, because the real story is so labyrinthine that no one -- not oil company executives, not Arab princes, not CIA spies, not traders in Geneva, understands the whole picture.

Uh-oh. A complex depiction of complexity. No wonder the "moral equivalency" alarm-bells went off in Krauthammer's skull.

Meanwhile, John Powers of the L.A. Weekly argued:

Stephen Gaghan’s quasi thriller about Big Oil, American spooks and foreign policy embodies most of what stinks about today’s liberal filmmaking. First, it’s a big-star movie on a big political theme that chooses not to address the mass audience; instead, it plays at being an art film, deliberately obscuring the crucial connections it wants viewers to make and guaranteeing its own political irrelevance. Second, it serves up hokum that appeals only to the converted....

Because of the movie's style and construction, I can appreciate both of those readings, and my own position is somewhere between them, while Krauthammer is so out in right field he's playing some other game entirely. For Krauthammer to say that the unemployed Palestinian kid in the picture, who is shown being brainwashed into becoming a suicide bomber, is "the character at the moral heart of the film" is just off-the-charts crazy. That's like saying Laurence Harvey's character is the "moral heart" of "The Manchurian Candidate."

Krauthammer writes a frisky, adrenaline-fueled polemic -- and I urge you to read his entire outraged piece. But his "arguments," once examined in light of real-world evidence, are frequently not only unsubstatianted but patently phony. He concludes:

Most liberalism is angst- and guilt-ridden, seeing moral equivalence everywhere. "Syriana" is of a different species entirely -- a pathological variety that burns with the certainty of its malign anti-Americanism. Osama bin Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction.

OK -- if only he could have cited something from the movie that supported his conclusions. Unfortunately, Krauthammer prefers to write as though his unsupported opinions carry the weight of Truth.

UPDATE: The blog Busy Busy Busy offers a one-line condensed version of Krauthammer's column:

"Oh, no, it wasn't the oil. It was an excess of Wilsonian idealism killed the beast."