*"Do you ever get that strange feeling of vuja de? Not déjà vu; vuja de. It's the distinct sense that, somehow, something that just happened has never happened before. Nothing seems familiar. And then suddenly the feeling is gone. Vuja de."
     — Napalm & Silly Putty (2001)

Oh! I completely forgot why I was blogging on this film in the first place: because it also relates to the discussion of torture. There's a scene where Denzel Washington bursts into a men's washroom lined with urinals and finds Annette Bening (small, short-haired American woman) and Bruce Willis (officer in beret and cammies) getting ready to torture a naked Arab, for all the world as if they were the prototypes for Lynddie England and Charles Graner. Washington declares, "If we torture him, then everything that we have bled and fought and died for is over. And they've won. They've already won."

See? This movie is as goose-walked-over-your-grave as the one in which Chris Reeve played a paraplegic before his accident, or as The China Syndrome in the light of Three Mile Island. I don't know how The Siege did at the box office, but it gives new meaning to the word "bomb": the film was an unwitting time bomb, packed with deadly shards of Things To Come.

**The Siege does feature the same homoerotic buddy-film cliché at its center as The Last Samurai, but with an interesting twist: this time the hero is black, and his noble sidekick is Arab-American (an FBI agent played by Tony Shalhoub). The twist isn't as interesting as it looks, though, once you realize that in films like this Denzel Washington or Wesley Snipes only looks black. They're generic action-hero leading men; they've completely crossed over. Which in my opinion is a good thing: such actors, who neither dissemble nor flaunt their ethnicity, are forerunners, making sneaky inroads into everyone's consciousness, breaking ground for the future. It's ironic, though, that in Zwick's Hollywood cornfield, Arabs, who used to pass for white, are the new Other, at once menacing and soulful.