I chanced upon From Paris with Love. Ah, no! Not the Paris Hilton sex tape. This one’s a February 2010 Hollywood crap-thriller starring a fat, bald, goateed, foul-mouthed John Travolta as special agent Charlie Wax, part Xander Cage and part Rambo, part Milton and part Bryan Mills, and in urgent need both of a finishing school and a good bath. Mr Wax is on a “Wax on, Wax off” mission to kick bad guys’ asses, in this case a terrorist operation run by “Bad guys, baddest ass suicides-destined, cold-hearted Pakistani &#$%&-ers from the south of Karachi.” (Whatever the south of Karachi means.)
This is how it goes. Wax arrives in Paris, is held at the airport by French authorities for carrying his favourite energy drink. When his rookie partner James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) gets to the airport to help him clear customs, Wax is sitting there using the M-word with abandon and refusing to go without his energy drink containers. Before his partner slaps a diplomatic mail sticker on Wax’s bag to bypass customs and Wax leaves after a lewd thrust of his hips to tell the French custom authorities to go &^$# themselves, he has already informed the French of his country’s contributions towards saving ungrateful French derrieres in both world wars.
Once in the car, Reese the rookie asks him what the big deal about the energy drink containers was, only to find out that Wax is carrying his stripped Sig Sauer pistol in them. In effect, the man has brought into another country an illegal firearm. Anything, of course, for God and country.
(NB: the Sig Sauer seems to be some kind of American special agent-this and special forces-that phallic symbol. This is how Nicholas Schmidle described the leader of the SEAL team that took out Osama bin Laden: “James… wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol…”)
Wax can, of course, out-fight, out-gun, out-punch all the bad guys, breaking bones here, double-tapping there. He starts at a Chinese restaurant, goes on to incapacitate six guys from a dangerous Chinese gang, kills a dozen more shortly thereafter, then takes on the #&^%$-ing Pakistanis and cleans them up without breaking a sweat (in between ongoing action he also does a hooker), all before arriving at Reese’s apartment for dinner. There, he kills a Pakistani woman terrorist and proves to Reese that even his French fiancée, Caroline, is in league with the Pakistani terrorist cell. Is that what the French connection means?!
Caroline escapes after injuring Reese, leading to a long chase and much loud thinking about the target, the MO and how best to neutralise the evil bastards. Wax, as is his wont, doesn’t take any prisoners and kills one of the terrorists just as the evil man is about to ram his explosives-laden vehicle into the motorcade of the US secretary of state. Caroline is later taken out at the US embassy by her fiancé, Reese, with a single, clean shot to the forehead after his entreaties fail and she raises her hand to explode her suicide vest. Like I said, anything for God and country. The action ends with Reese buying Wax a Royale with Cheese from McDonalds.
How do you like this? Does Wax’s behaviour at the Paris airport sound familiar? Does his carrying an illegal firearm remind us of something? Does his trail of broken bones and corpses tell us something? At no stage in the film do we see Wax and Reese operating in collaboration with the French security forces. From the word go, Wax has embarked on unilateral action. And throughout the film he stays the course. He even lets some French cops get killed when they try to open a rigged door because what he is doing is supposed to save the lives of thousands of people, as he tells Reese. Saving American interests is of course synonymous with saving the world.
In a brilliant article for Reuters, shortly after the New Yorker published Nicholas Schmidle’s yarn of the Abbottabad raid, Myra MacDonald talks about the new “Orientalism”, quoting Jakob Steiner in RugPundits. She writes that Steiner’s reference “led me to look at how small a role Pakistanis play in the story. Pause here, and consider that Pakistan is a country of some 180 million people of diverse religious, social, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. People who fret about their children’s education and grieve for their parents like the rest of us. People who in the office will bitch around the water cooler, and over dinner talk about the weather. And yes. I simplify people’s lives, because those of us who live them (signpost irony here) know how simple they are.”
MacDonald notices that there is, in Schmidle’s story, even a clear identity for the dog the SEALS were carrying, a Belgian Malinois called Cairo, but there’s nothing about the Pakistanis. Instead, they are referred to only as ‘locals’, ‘mob’ and a ‘few curious Pakistanis’.
This leads her to conclude that “I don’t know what really happened that night from May 1 into May 2. I don’t know, and none of us know, how its repercussions will play out in Pakistan over the months and years ahead. But I would guess that any version of US policy, based on the same thinking behind the New Yorker’s story, that there are no real people on the ground, is unlikely to succeed.”
She is spot-on. The repercussions have already begun to play out. Not just that incident’s but also that of the earlier one, the infamous Ray Davis episode.
But the issue goes beyond Pakistan. Just like there are no Pakistanis in Schmidle’s story, there’s nothing in the Hollywood version about who the ‘terrorists’ are, what they want, what makes them the bad guys, the cause for which they are fighting and, in the case of Hollywood, getting their asses kicked by Sig Sauer-toting cool, American special agents and special forces personnel who are prepared to save the world from these evil creatures even if it means middle-fingering international law and the domestic laws of host states.
Like other flicks of its kind, From Paris with Love reflects a particular reality, one which is evident not only from the Abbottabad raid but which has been openly proclaimed by several top US officials. America will act unilaterally when it wants to: the rest of the world can either like it or lump it.
The only problem with the Travolta approach and this America-centric narrative is that the rest of the world is getting sick of it. If America’s actions can be explained on the basis of simple realpolitik, so too can the rising opposition to its actions. Realism is a two-way street.
The writer is Contributing Editor, The Friday Times.