Zionism in Film: Black Sunday - The First Neocon Propaganda Movie

 

Black Sunday as Neocon Propaganda -- Videoclip 1

1 min 37 sec - Oct 10, 2007

Black Sunday as Neocon Propaganda -- Videoclip 2

1 min 12 sec - Oct 10, 2007

Not only is Black Sunday (1977, Paramount) the first action adventure film that combines the Israel-Palestine conflict with Neoconservative political thinking, but also this movie looks in retrospective exceptionally prophetic after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.  One might hypothesize that the attackers were inspired by the imagination of Thomas Harris, the author of Black Sunday as well as Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. 

Michael Lander is a disgraced US Air Force pilot that plots with the help of Black September to kill 80,000 people and the president of the United States at a Superbowl football game by crashing an explosive laden blimp into the stadium.  Because of the similarity of the movie's terrorist operation to the WTC attack, it is worth mention that that no Palestinian group was involved in the September 11 atrocity and that the perpetrators were members of an extremist group loosely associated with the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood (المسلمون الإخوان), which has its own distinct and often legitimate grievances against the USA.  Such complaints, as Palestinians and other Arabs can make against the USA, do not interest Harris, who focuses mostly on the psychopathology of the killer.  Palestinians, the Middle East conflict and Black September are mostly props in his book.  Harris suggested a possible connection of Black September to Vietnamese communists by means of a videotape of Lander's confession to war crimes while he was a POW during the Vietnam war.  The screenwriter made the connection to international anti-Americanism by explicitly portraying collaboration with Japanese terrorists.

Both the movie and the book are somewhat unique in that they begin with murders of Arabs by an Israeli death squad in Lebanon. Normally, Israeli terror squads are portrayed as retaliating for some on-screen act of violence, but Harris' lack of interest in Middle East issues may have immunized him to some extent to the common Zionist attitudes that most Americans have adopted. Nevertheless, the terrorist act itself corresponds far more to Zionist mythology than to actual Palestinian operations at the time, which generally confined themselves to the seizure of hostages or airplanes to secure the release of prisoners that were held by Israelis under torture and the threat of execution at any time. 

 

The director and the scriptwriter went beyond the book to explore motivations and the cause of the conflict.  In the movie Major Kabokov, the Israeli protagonist, suffers from the usual "whack 'em and weep syndrome."  Harris and the screenwriter portray such as qualms as explicitly negative in conformance with the Neoconservative ideology that is developing at the time.  If Kabokov had not shown mercy toward Dahlia Iyad in Beirut, the Black September attack would have been stopped before it could even stop. 

View full size

Kabokov's self-doubts belong to the films subtheme of recovering masculinity.  The US agents are paralyzed by procedures and rules that prevent them from taking the necessary action to stop the terrorists.  Lander's masculinity has been permanently damaged by his imprisonment in Vietnam.  The paralysis of US intelligence agents and Lander's impotence serve as fairly obvious metaphors for the Vietnam syndrome.  Lander shows us the wrong way to overcome his impairment when Iyad helps us to overcome his impairment in a not too subtle reference to the power of Arab sexuality and seduction.  When Kabokov overcomes his self-doubts in response to the killing of his partner and thwarts the terror attack, he becomes in conformance with Neoconservative ideology the forceful Israeli that teaches Americans how to deal with foreign and in particular Arab threats.

The scenes of the auditing of the Black September post-attack tape and of the identification of the Dahlia Iyad by Egyptian security are worth reviewing.  The message that Iyad reads is far more powerful in the movie than in the book while the identification scene was created for the movie. 

One can only speculate why it was necessary in the movie to identify Iyad as an Arab of German Palestinian extraction. Perhaps after showing some sympathy with Palestinian suffering, the director might have felt an obligation to pander Zionist myth of the Arab-German link in the opposition to Zionism. Or perhaps, the director just needed explain the portrayal of a Palestinian woman by an actress of German extraction.

I also have to wonder whether the director was reluctant from the start to portray Arabs as relentlessly negative as Harris did in his book.  While there could have been some last minute editing of the film in response to Sadat's peace initiative, there might be a subtle indoctrination that the validity of Arab or Palestinian grievance is irrelevant.  Arabs and Palestinians are too dangerous, and the coalition of Americans and Israelis must crush them without mercy in all their schemes.

The movie's ending differs significantly from that of the book. While Harris' book is on the whole rather flawed, his denouement in which Kabokov sacrifices himself to stop Iyad and Lander would have created a far superior climax for the movie. A powerful cinematic ending seems to have been sacrificed to the desire to provide a triumphalist Neoconservative conclusion to the film.

---

Email and AIM finally together. You've gotta check out free AOL Mail!

Sphere: Related Content