by proldic » Wed Nov 16, 2005 11:19 pm
<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.juancole.com">www.juancole.com</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Tuesday, November 15, 2005<br><br>The Strange Death of Moustapha Akkad; <br>Zarqawi and "Halloween" <br><br>By Juan Cole<br><br>The ironies and dangers of globalization are tragically epitomized in the death last week of Hollywood director Moustapha Akkad at the Radisson SAS in Amman at the hands of [a] suicide bomber...<br> <br>Akkad was born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1930. Syria was at that time under French rule, and so he was a child of empire, with all the ambivalences of identity such experiences inspire. At the age of 19, in 1949, he came to the United States, and studied theater arts at UCLA...<br> <br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>He got his start in Hollywood as a production assistant for Sam Peckinpah..Peckinpah's fascination with violence and ambiguity would work itself out in Akkad's own oeuvre in unexpected ways</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->.<br><br>Akkad produced the 1976 film, "The Message," starring Anthony Quinn, an attempt to tell the story of early Islam to a Western audience. <br><br>He faced enormous problems as a cinematographer, given that the Arab Muslim tradition is iconoclastic (condemnatory of images), especially with regard to the Prophet Muhammad. <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Akkad therefore had to find ways of suggesting the Prophet Muhammad's presence without actually showing him</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->, such as the shadow he cast...<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>His artistic career played out in the arena of globalizing alienation.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>He found it difficult to get funding for the religious films he dreamed of, and in 1978 turned to producing the "Halloween" horror flic...<br> <br>The plot of the first Halloween movie had to do with Michael Myers, who as a child of 6 murdered his sister with a butcher knife after she had had sex with her boyfriend. This murder occurred on Halloween. He was institutionalized for 15 years, but then escaped from the sanatarium. He then began to stalk three teenaged girls, even as his psychiatrist and the sheriff attempt to track him down and prevent him from committing further murders.<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The anxieties around the Halloween films are, whether it is by coincidence or deliberate, very Middle Eastern. <br><br>Michael Myers's killing of his sister echoed the problem of honor killings in the Arab world, where lack of chastity in teenaged girls so dishonors the men of the family that they are sometimes driven to restore their honor by doing away with the girl...</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Myers's stalking of teenaged girls reproduces that free-floating anxiety about their sexuality and freedom of movement, and the dangers these hold for the masculinity of men.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Myers the horror monster is produced through an exaggeration of these anxieties to the point of homicidal rage.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><br>Of course, even without any Middle Eastern context, the films are about alienation and the isolation of the individual, a distillation of the neuroses of American suburbia.<br><br>Even as he was scaring teenaged couples into hugging tight in American theaters, Akkad was continuing to pursue his dramatic vision. In 1981 he released "The Lion of the Desert," which centers on the...Libyan anti-colonial activist Omar Mukhtar, who fought the Italian empire in his country during the 1920s...Akkad's timing was, however, execrable. <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Only two years after the Iranian Revolution</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->, American audiences just could not establish a connection with Mukhtar's character. One reviewer (was it in the New York Times?) dismissed the film as "ayatollahs on horseback."...<br><br>At the end of his life, Akkad was gathering his energies to do an epic film about Saladin (Salahu'd-Din al-Ayyubi), the medieval Muslim warrior who expelled the European Crusaders from the Middle East. <br><br>(<!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>American audiences were recently reminded of Saladin in the film "Kingdom of Heaven," which tells the story of the fall of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem before Saladin's armies</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->.) <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Whether Akkad could have induced Westerners to identify with Saladin remains an open question.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The postmodern two-track film career of Akkad, wherein he attempted to give American audiences horror films about a serial murderer on the one hand, and serious dramas about the Middle Eastern fight against European domination on the other, came to an end in an Amman hotel where both themes melded.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The "Monotheism and Holy War" organization of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, recently renamed "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia," is dedicated to serial murder on a scale that dwarfs Michael Myers's wildest dreams.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><br>The playbook of insurgency requires grisly acts of terror that help to provoke a guerrilla war, which in turn can be transformed into a civil war, destabilizing the old order and paving the way to a coup by the terrorists, who represent themselves as the only force able to restore order. They represent themselves as fighting against American occupation, but the vast majority of their victims are innocent civilians. This horrific form of anti-imperialism targets the innocent relentlessly. Little children are blown to bits, with tiny fingers and feet hurled across public squares from furiously burning ice cream shops. <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The guerrilla war in Iraq has claimed a unique cinematic voice of transnational modernity</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->, who had explored the terror of psychopathology and the angst of alienation...<br> <br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The Iraq conflict has become a bad horror film</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->. <br><br>Zarqawi's henchmen inspire only horror, not respect. They have no chivalry, only bloodthirstiness. They are Michael Myers, not Saladin. <br><br>Moustapha Akkad was an American voice as well as a Muslim one. We needed his ability to communicate one culture to the other. His death...signals the nightfall of a decade-long "Halloween" of the horrific sort...for the United States.<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.juancole.com/2005/11/strange-death-of-moustapha-akkad.html">www.juancole.com/2005/11/...akkad.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=proldic@rigorousintuition>proldic</A> at: 11/16/05 8:22 pm<br></i>
