On April 17, a Palestinian walked into a Tel Aviv restaurant and exploded 10 pounds of explosives on his body, killing 11 others and wounding dozens. Who would do such a thing? What were they thinking? For a chilling presage and analysis of this very scenario, watch Paradise Now, a movie that chronicles two young Palestinian men in the West Bank called up by their terrorist cell to carry out a double suicide bombing in Tel Aviv the following day.
The film depicts life in the Israeli-controlled West Bank as seen through the eyes of the Palestinians who live there. It looks at small aspects of their daily lives, their relationships, and gradually delves into the thoughts and beliefs that could lead them to suicide bombings as a self-justified tactic in their struggle.
The movie is very careful to put a human face on all the characters. Nobody is vilified as a cartoon evildoer and individuals have doubts and conflicts. There are those who believe the violence is wrong, there are those who are convinced it is the only way, and there are those who sway back and forth, unsure of what is right.
I was fascinated and drawn in to the drama. It showed a lifestyle and thought structure that I was completely unfamiliar with and it gave an impression of reality in its depiction. Nothing felt like a set or like movie script writing. The movie is a fictional creation and it doesn’t try to present events in a documentary style. There is no narration, no voice-over monologues by the characters explaining what they are thinking. There is very little soundtrack music. It gradually and naturally builds familiarity with the characters and their situations.
Surprisingly for this well-paced and relatively short run time of 90 minutes, the only point where I felt things were dragging was in an artificially inserted "action sequence" showing the various leads racing around the city trying to locate each other before an important deadline passes. The shots of racing cars, chases, and breathless missed connections seemed to me like a forced capitulation to a "Hollywood blockbuster" strategy for ratcheting up the audience's pulse rate. I found much more excitement in the inherent dramatic development of events told so well through the rest of the film.
Article comments
1 - Bliffle
John Updike has a new book titled "Terrorist" which might be interesting.
The fact of Suicide Bombers certainly proves that parents, and the community, can invest their own psychotic vengeance-lust in children. The question is: what can a reasonable society do to reduce the murderous effect of psychotic parenting? Do we just wait for the criminality to manifest itself and then react with prison, or, in the larger context, warfare?