Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Suicide
is Painless
(Day Night, Day Night, 8/27/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
"Suicide
is Painless" is the theme song from the Korean War comedy M*A*S*H
(1970), but might as well be the anthem of the modern suicide bomber.
For there can be no doubt that the speed and finality—and indeed,
the painlessness—of blowing oneself up is a big factor in why there
is no shortage of volunteers in Iraq, the Palestinian territories, and
elsewhere. It's hard to imagine there would be so many takers for such
duty if the perpetrators had to, say, light themselves on fire. Their
final act, the mere flipping of a switch, makes the bombers' experience
of death so abrupt it might as well be an abstraction. It's the wounded
around them that have to deal with the messy consequences of mortality.
Julia Lotkev's Day Night Day
Night is a spare but ambitious portrait of one such bomber—a
young woman (Luisa Williams) who volunteers to detonate herself in the
middle of Times Square. In the film's somewhat clinical first half,
we watch the bomber prepare for her errand in a hotel room. She scrubs,
clips, and brushes herself in anticipation of entering paradise. She
follows the directions of her handlers with unstinting politeness. We
watch her surmount the prosaic obstacles on her way to meeting God,
like choosing which top to wear on her big day, or learning how to hold
an AK-47 in her suicide video. Lotkev presents all this with an almost
maddening intimacy, never letting her camera stray more than three feet
from her actress.
All this pays off in the film's
last half, as the woman is let loose on Times Square. The tension created
by watching a bomber walk in such proximity to her victims, close enough
to see their faces and hear their private conversations on their cell
phones, is palpable. There is also surprising humor as she encounters
further distractions in her path to Heaven, such as a pretzel stand,
or someone selling candy apples. What is most definitely absent is any
prospect that Jack Bauer will arrive to save the day.
Lotkev is to be commended for taking
on a subject firmly dominated by the 24 aesthetic of ticking
clocks, surveillance video, and torture. She is also wise enough to
accept that there's no understanding the root of this particular evil—we
get no cheap psychoanalysis of the bomber, no confession of misery,
loneliness, or poverty. Indeed, Lotkev seems to show the character far
more respect than any suicide bomber shows to his of her innocent victims.
The latter begins to get at what
is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Day Night. The fact
that Lotkev writes the bomber as a polite and pretty young woman, not
the typical angry male monobrow, is a too-obvious bid to keep us interested
in the possibility of her death. Nor does the film address the simple
fact that suicide bombing is almost exclusively an act by people professing
to be Muslims. Williams, the actress, could pass for vaguely Middle
Eastern, and there is a woman in a headscarf among her handlers. But
the bomber's prayers are almost studiously cleansed of any specificity—she
never proclaims the greatness of God. Nor does she broach her faith
in her suicide video. It's as if Lotkev believed she could treat an
inherently messy subject in a pristinely non-denominational spirit.
No doubt Lotkev wanted her film
to emphasize the personal dimension of this kind of terrorism, and not
get caught up in details that might be politically divisive. Then again,
it is truism in critical circles that the personal is political.
The fact that we haven't seen many Lutheran or Buddhist or Hindu suicide
bombers is an important part of this issue. A truly honest treatment
of it would not have avoided the role of religion.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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