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Rules of Engagement
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Memories of the Oklahoma and World Trade Center bombings are fading. Now, a new terrorist attack is grabbing attention.
A young Yemeni girl fires a revolver at the U.S. Embassy in Sana, part of a large crowd throwing rocks and firebombs. It's not long before the squad of U.S. Marines faces heavy gunfire. The battle results in bloodshed.
Of course it's true. I just saw it in the movies.
Director William Friedkin's military thriller Rules of Engagement follows in the footsteps of Saddam Hussein with its depiction of Middle Eastern terrorists. Here are bad guys we've seen countless times before -- in a post Cold War environment that's eliminated the Communist threat, Arabs have become Hollywood's favorite cartoon scoundrel. The redundancy smacks of xenophobia.
War hero Col. Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) seethes as he watches the angry crowd of protesters outside the embassy walls. As the violence escalates, gunfire is an inevitable act of heroism for him and his marines.
Later, Childers faces a court martial for ordering his troops to fire into a crowd of protesters. He violated the "rules of engagement."
But Childers is confident that he did the right thing in Yemen. Old friend and military lawyer Col. Hays Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones) agrees to take his case. The task at hand is to persuade everyone else.
Jackson and Jones are receiving the lion's share of attention as Rules of Engagement's two gruff leads. But controversy continues to build on the film's scenes of Arab violence. Granted, the film's courtroom drama is taut and suspenseful. But after watching the film a second time, I find myself struggling to think of another Hollywood film willing to put a gun into the hands of a 5-year-old girl and label her a terrorist. Away from the multiplex, the image is troubling.
An April 20 protest sponsored by the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee attracted a sizable crowd to a Washington, D.C. multiplex. A leaflet sums up their argument that Rules of Engagement is a racist film: "Paramount Pictures new film, Rules of Engagement, sets a new low for anti-Arab racism and defamation. It stands out even among the crop of Hollywood movies in recent years, many of which, including True Lies and The Siege, were highly offensive, as particularly relentless and vicious in its negative portrayal of Arabs and Arab culture. Indeed, Rules of Engagement can only be considered in the same light as other films whose purpose is to deliberately and systematically vilify an entire people, such as Birth of a Nation and The Eternal Jew."
Controversy remains the best advertising money can buy, but the furor over Rules of Engagement remains on the sidelines of Washington's international community. Cries of racial stereotyping are drowned out by arguments over sexual content and film violence. Sadly, American society overall isn't in the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's concerns. An April 11 letter sent by committee spokesman Hussein Ibish to Paramount Pictures Chair Sherry Lansing criticizing the film attracted little attention in the Hollywood trades.
When Abdulwahab Al-Hajjri, Yemen's ambassador to the United States, complained to The Boston Globe that Rules of Engagement ruins his country's public image, nobody pays him much attention. Keeping video copies of The Matrix out of the hands of impressionable teens? Now that's something that attracts public ire.
From the all-important box-office perspective, Rules of Engagement continues to attract sizable numbers -- a third weekend take of $8.3 million pushed its take to $43 million. It's fair to say that the protests, limited to a few cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, have failed to attract much attention.
Still, Paramount Pictures did issue a brief statement to the film's critics: "Rules of Engagement is a dramatization and a fictional account of the consequences of extremism in all its forms. The film is not an indictment of any government, culture or people. Rather, it explores the human tragedy and consequences that can result when people of any society are put in extreme situations."
Like most movie dramas, Rules of Engagement doesn't want itself to be taken seriously. Its flashpoint of U.S. foreign policy chaos was never meant to generate racial conflict.
The problem is that most people do take movies seriously. When Friedkin films the U.S. Embassy attack in gritty, documentarylike fashion, the movie becomes as realistic as TV news footage of the devastated Federal Building in Oklahoma City. A line in the closing credits qualifying the film as a work of fiction makes a negligible impact -- the emotional damage has already been done.
Yemen is not on the U.S. State Department's list of countries sponsoring terrorism, and there have been no anti-American protests there recently. But Rules of Engagement has suddenly made Yemen a place of grave danger.
Hollywood's continual bashing of Arabs as terrorist villains flies in the face of the industry's political correctness. It was only last year that the Directors Guild of America removed D.W. Griffith's name from the title of its annual prize because Griffith was guilty of fostering an intolerable "racial stereotype" in one of his several hundred films. Yet this current wave of cinematic Arab bashing continues with no abatement.
Political correctness matters only when people care about the persecuted, and nobody is taking issue with Friedkin's creative decisions and its impact on the Arab American community. Racial stereotypes are wrong only when they bother the majority of audiences. Middle East villains have become a common sight in movies these days.
Nazi villains were the scourge of past World War II adventures, and Indians went on the warpath in countless Hollywood westerns. In the darkness of countless movie theaters, it's the Arab villain who now deserves swift, brutal justice. As always, the movies are brutish and unfair. ©
