Back to Govindas
Dinner and a movie for nearly the price of either is worth every cent, so we took a walk up into Darlinghurst to see Syriana at our latest favorite place to have it all. (Don’t be fooled, however, into thinking that all the reclined seating arrangements are equal; in this case we chose badly and spent the time watching the film with increasing discomfort.) Now we, like everyone else who reads or listens to reviews, had been convinced that while this was going to be a very good movie, it was also going to be very complex and hard to follow. It wasn’t, with the exception of some of the arcana of business/legal practices that weren’t exactly spelled out, and even then it wasn’t as hard as it’d been made out as. The obfuscation is deliberate, of course, as it’s part of what the film’s about in the first place: how hard it is for us, even those of us actually involved in such matters, whether as governmental regulators or legal overseers and just straight-up players, to see around every corner and into the furthest reaches of the abyssal depths we’ve allowed to be created. And while even that characterization shouldn’t entirely be taken as a negative criticism, since modernity requires complexity, this is an important part of the message: that by having made the world this way and letting things slide for the appearance of understanding, we make it impossible to improve the world. High-minded idealism, of course, but that’s no reason it should be so easily dismissed or even destroyed, and we all know that’s exactly what happens, even if it isn’t a result delivered at the end of a Cruise missile, which, if it isn’t actually happening now (per se, and leaving aside Iraq), is something that we have to acknowledge has been a method employed all too often just because American interests are threatened. Sadly, and this is a point highlighted in Syriana, the confluence of business and government is all but complete, and political exigencies are now shareholder-value driven. It’s hard to come out of this movie without bitterness, but it isn’t a cynical film at all. If anything, even if it is depressing as hell, it is meant to achieve a positive result, kind of like a smoke alarm: the house may be burning, but at least we don’t have to go down with it. If nothing else, come out of the movie acknowledging that what has happened in the Middle East (and elsewhere, Nigeria, for example) and the radicalisation of its people has roots well beyond the easily denigrated medievalism of the cultures there and the corruption of its entrenched regimes. Look at the oil fields and refineries and imagine that none of it beyond a tenuous job benefits you and imagine what that can do to your soul. Then try to imagine what perpetrating that has done to ours.