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CounterPunch
December
24, 2002
The Quiet American
Returns on Film:
The CIA Man as the Al-Qaeda Op of the 50s
by SAUL LANDAU
Fowler: You and your like are trying
to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested.
Pyle: They don't want communism. Fowler: They want enough rice.
They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the
same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling
them what they want.
from The Quiet
American, by Graham Greene
I saw the movie version of Graham Greene's novel
just before Miramax film exec Harvey Weinstein quietly yanked
The Quiet American from the market, despite the good reviews
it had gleaned. The word around the industry (Hollywood) had
it that given the current climate, the strains of "anti-Americanism"
in the film might offend sensitive publics. The government had
set the tone with media acquiescence on standards of "acceptability"
in the aftermath of 9/11. It didn't have to make a "no critical
films" list as it did for anti-war activists who appear
on airline computer screens as part of a no-fly list. Nor did
the FBI have to circulate to Hollywood a memo on "don't
portray Americans as equivalents of Al Qaeda terrorists"
as it circulated to large corporations a list of people it "suspected"
of having "possible" terrorist links (mostly Muslim-Americans).
The government didn't have to scare Miramax
executives, who read about new categories like "enemy combatants,"
those without rights and authorization for the CIA to assassinate
"terrorists." Hollywood execs knew that the new government
lists coincide with the denial of old individual rights, especially
those connected with privacy. Better watch what you check out
of the library or purchase at the book or video rental store,
because the FBI is checking.
Hollywood responds viscerally when the
government restricts liberties and widens its intrusive powers.
Look at the new James Bond movie, Die Another Day, and you will
see how the crony media reinforces the government's version of
recent history. The official story goes like this: On 9/11/01,
Americans lost not only their innocence but their tolerance for
nay-sayers as well. Miramax executives, like most large corporate
CEOs, understood the message. CEOs get nervous when their relations
with the government become less than harmonious.
The company had held a test screening
in New Jersey on September 10, 2001. The audience liked the film.
The next day, September 11, world reality changed. So Miramax'
subsequent "tests" showed that audiences supposedly
found the film's implicit critique of
US policy less than appealing. Predictably, some flunky denied
that Miramax delayed the release plans and then removed the film
quickly from the market because of 9/11 reverberations. You judge
for yourself.
Under the new post 9/11 movie and TV
script, we as a nation lost almost 3,000 lives to the cowardly
bombers and our collective virginity to boot. To remedy this,
we would have to stand together against the terrorists, whatever
that means. Bush launched a "promote America as the virtuous"
campaign. Let's not hear any criticism of our wonderful way of
life. Long Live Disneyland and the Super Bowl! Shop, fellow Americans,
and show those Al Qaeda nasties what we really stand for.
Abroad, we took it to them. No more Mr.
Nice Guy. It's time we showed a knuckle to those ungrateful foreigners.
So, instead of learning meaningful lessons as a result of the
fiendish attack of 9/11, like why they did it and how can we
deal with the causes of this terrorism, Bush and his ideologues
opportunistically embarked on the next chapter of The Quiet American
or The Quiet American Returns. In the next film Sylvester Stallone
can show us how assassinating large numbers of suspected Al Qaeda
operatives can earn the love of an Arab beauty and the gratitude
of the western world and he can be quiet, i.e., not speak much
during the film.
The sequel could suggest an implicit
answer, Hollywood style, to the question "why do they hate
us" or "how come anti-Americanism runs rampant in the
Arab world?" Stallone, able to take on hundreds of armed
killers and dispatch all of them, virtually shows them that we're
superior certainly at killing and hamming for the camera. Since
we're Americans, as Hollywood films imply, everyone knows we're
inherently virtuous. We saved Afghanistan, suffered a few casualties
from friendly fire, killed only a few thousand innocent civilians
and took a major step toward confronting the axis of evil. We
shall become missionaries again and destroy nations in order
to save them.
Perhaps, future historians will label
this era the Noisy American Period. They may even conclude that
Osama bin Laden wrote the outline for the script in this latest
saga of US imperial history. With Vietnam almost three decades
behind us out of memory for most Americans we see characters
similar to those who told us that our holy mission was to fight
communism in Vietnam and bring democracy to that far off land.
Indeed, some of those very people now do lucrative business with
the communist government of Vietnam. In the new era of bullying,
boasting, cocky and self-righteousness, the horrible results
of our decade plus military involvement in Vietnam has faded
from historical memory. That conflict occurred some time after
the Greco-Roman era, my students assure me, but what does it
have to do with today and terrorism?
Graham Greene warned us in the early
1950s when he wrote his insightful novel. In 1953, despite US
military aid, the French were losing the war to retain control
of Vietnam. As the communist government of the North won battle
after battle, US officials began to plan their intervention.
This is the setting for Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine) as Graham
Greene's London Times reporter covering this one of several anti-colonial
revolts as adopted for cinema by Australian director Philip Noyce.
Fowler, in full middle age lives with his young Vietnamese lover
Phuong (Hai Yen Do). He meets a recently arrived US official
attached to the Economic Aid Mission. Fowler senses that this
overly sincere young man Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) will disturb
his established order. It happens rapidly as Pyle falls instantly
in love with the Vietnamese paramour. She symbolizes innocence
because he does not know better and of course she represents
a challenge.
Fowler realizes that his apparent political
or philosophical differences with the young zealot always reading
about making democracy go beyond the world of ideas. The Quiet
American turns out to be not just a killer, but the quintessential
terrorist. He makes his big bang in Saigon by planting bombs
(the means) to bring democracy (the ends) and thus stave off
the communist menace and transform Vietnam into a US-style democracy.
If one doubts the reality about Americans having this intensity
of belief in our ability to export our order everywhere, read
our more passionate op ed writers today who have recently discovered
the cause of the Iraqi people and extol our government to go
to war to "liberate" them.
Ironically, Greene's book, written in
the early 1950s, eerily predicted what the United States would
do in Vietnam. The fictional quiet American multiplied and became
real protagonists in one of the bloodiest wars of the late 20th
Century. Always in the name of spreading democracy to Vietnam,
the quiet Americans advocated ever more mass bombing of Vietnamese
cities, dropping of napalm on its villages and people and the
destruction of its vegetation through the application of Agent
Orange. The Quiet American epitomized the young US officer in
the late 1960s who lamented to a reporter in all innocence that
"we had to destroy the village in order to save it."
Those men, like Greene's Alden Pyle,
get their espirt d'corps from the intellectuals whom we read
in the newspaper and magazine columns, like the octogenarian
William Safire and the know-it-all- but-doesn't-like-to-fight-personally
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. These chicken hawks eschew
the lesson that Graham taught fifty years ago. The failure in
Vietnam taught them nothing about the impossibility of exporting
our order to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea or, well, you
pick it. These missionary writers do not, of course, do the fighting.
They also glide over some of the issues that make the constant
repetition of the word democracy ring hollow. A country where
the majority doesn't vote? A country where the majority of federal
offices are uncontested? We want to spread this abroad? What
we don't want to spread at home or abroad, however, is the distinguishing
fact that makes us special: immense wealth.
Fowler, Greene's protagonist, is the
antithesis of those Americans who try to "win the hearts
and minds" of the natives. He goes native, smoking opium
in the colonial tradition and also taking his pleasures from
the young Vietnamese woman on whom he has become dependent emotionally.
She prepares his pipe and gives him pleasures. She demands little.
He loves her. What she feels for him remains in the realm of
the enigmatic. Her money-grubbing sister plays a large role in
the younger woman's affairs, but Phuong herself never stops to
such vulgarity. She maintains a facade of innocence, which makes
her so attractive to both men. Ah, to be above the struggle,
delicate and sensual, dignified and mysterious!
The Quiet American, intent on changing
Vietnam, must also change relationships. But he has rules for
both processes: taking the Vietnamese beauty from Fowler and
forging his democratic third way between European colonialism
and communism. Greene, the observer, asks implicitly in the book,
what winning means in such a context. The American's less than
superficial understanding of Vietnamese culture and history can
only lead him and his nation to disaster. Is this why the film
seems threatening now, when we're about to embark on yet another
crusade in Iraq, to change the destiny of yet another country
whose 5,000 year old history and culture we do not understand?
Since the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay
Colony, missionary zeal has led some Americans to spread "our
way of life." But the angry Puritan God has been replaced
by the Baal of shopping. The modesty and humility our ancestors
assumed before the power of God, has changed into bragging about
how great we are -- while we pop pills for stress of various
kinds to those who have yet to hear or see the revealed word
or image. The new quiet Americans perpetrate the myth that we
can export our almost perfect order. The misdeeds of the 2000
election they attribute to an aberration, the fact that A type
millionaires vie for the few political offices that are actually
contested nasty television spots. We've exported the American
ideal in movies and TV shows, where the undernourished models
don't have children or stressful jobs, where no street and homeless
people or even poor people exist and emaciated actors drive convertibles
in perpetual summer time. We sell foreigners on our excellent
police force, which has yet to find the anthrax killer, our wonderful
doctors, who don't worry about HMOs that exclude about 42 million
people from health care, or clever lawyers who assure a fair
trial for all their clients. How come the rich white killers
and thieves almost always get off or short sentences and the
poor felons of color get life or death sentences?
Greene's Alden Pyle, a CIA heavy using
a humanitarian cover, set out to liberate Vietnam by all means
necessary. Liberation meant "Rolling Thunder" the carpet
bombing of cities. Indeed, by 1973, US planes had dropped three
times as many bombs on Vietnam as all the protagonists had used
in World War II. Liberation meant destruction of Vietnamese cities
and the deaths of a million or more civilians. To free Vietnam
from the yoke of communism means destroying their rice fields
with poisons and bombing their dikes. To save Vietnam, not just
one village, we set out to destroy it. Why else pour millions
of gallons of deadly, Dioxin laden Agent Orange on the countryside?
The long-term effects of these "saving" devices used
during war continue to haunt present generations. The United
States destroyed infrastructure as it did in Iraq in 1991 --
and massacring civilians. These were war objectives, not "collateral
damage."
The American in the film radiates sincerity,
but his feelings for the young Vietnamese woman border on compulsive.
Fowler notes this, but Pyle's very intensity makes him compelling.
He is the moderate Fowler's antithesis. Then, he saves Fowler's
life. Later, Fowler discovers that the killers were Pyle's charges,
the very third force he bragged about. Under a facade of innocence
and certainty, Pyle contains all the seeds of a modern war criminal
killer, one who "knows" that the future he helps usher
in will more than atone for the deaths and damage he causes in
the present. Fowler finally understands that Pyle is a terrorist,
a man unable to see past his anti-Communist ardor. He will destroy
in the name of his cause. How is he different than the arch fiends
who did the 9/11 deeds?
Is this why the government doesn't want
people to see The Quiet American? In 1947, Washington leaned
on Hollywood executives to change their standards on hiring stars,
directors, writers and changing movie themes that might conceivably
have connections with "reds." This taboo included material
that smacked of anti-Americanism. Having finished with the war
against fascism, we were entering a new war against communism.
In 2002, having long finished with the commy menace, we've turned
out attention to terrorism, the buzz word of our era. Terrorism
means violence done to or planned against our country, not violence
done by us or our allies to their enemies. For example, James
Bond can blow to smithereens any number of bad North Koreans,
because he is good and thus can practice pre-emptive violence.
The applauding audience revels in his virtual pyrogenics.
The Quiet American goes beyond Vietnam.
It describes American imperialism on the ground and portrays
a modern imperialist. The quiet but overconfident Americans like
Alden Pyle have pushed their "democracy" or "anti-Communism"
into killing fields in Chile, Colombia, Indonesia the list grows
long. They had no interest in understanding Vietnamese nationalism
albeit they read a few books about its culture and history. Today,
they have no better understanding of similar forces in the Arab
world. They make moral judgments about our systemic superiority
and then reaffirm them by reciting Christian and democratic cliches.
Watch the texture of the film and the
movement of the Vietnamese actors and learn lessons about Vietnam's
aesthetics. Listen to Fowler's lines and understand true conservatism.
Responding to Pyle's rationalization for war, Fowler says: "Isms
and ocracies. Give me the facts." Thus statement should
reverberate through the political chambers. Bush and Blair have
yet to offer us facts on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or
links to Al Qaeda. Like Pyle in The Quiet American. Bush has
mastered the unsupported allegations!
Yet, our very American aesthetic links
truth with virtue. We should also consider Aristotle's other
linkage, between the beautiful and the good, before we roar into
Iraq with our current mission. There, the exotic tropical humidity
does not dictate the ways of life, but the desert does. Hopefully,
Miramax will soon re-release the film and make a contribution
toward the cause of understanding through cinematic beauty --
and thus virtue.
Saul Landau
is the Director of Digital Media and International Outreach Programs
for the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences California
State Polytechnic University. He can be reached at: landau@counterpunch.org
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