to twist or not to twist

Probably the most irritating unintended consequence of the terrorist attacks of Terrible Tuesday in New York City and Washington has been the increase in expressions of righteous indignation from Americans of all political persuasions. Relativism (cultural, moral) is out and a new era of Moral Clarity is in the ascendant. The irony is that this notion of moral clarity is used by each side to denounce the position of the other, so who has it right?

When the world is talking about issues as heady as extra-judicial rendition, warrantless wire-tapping and tor . . . er, I mean ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ you can bet that filmmakers will not be far behind in sharing with us their own elevated views on matters. Topical cinema is generally problematic for a whole host of reasons, but what passes for political filmmaking in these post-9/11-Iraq-War-On-Violent-Extremist-Islamo-Fascism times has reached a new nadir.

Gavin Hood's Rendition (2007) uses the practice of extraordinary rendition—a policy drafted during the Clinton administration—as its starting point to ostensibly ask questions about the efficacy and morality of the practice of harsh interrogations (torture) to identify members of terrorist organizations and learn the details of coming attacks with the ultimate aim of preventing them. The film bears comparison to another topical film dealing with issues stemming from an earlier historical example of what one might call the Clash of Civilizations between the liberal democratic West and Arab/Muslim Near East--Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1967). The two films differ not so much on the answers they develop to the question of the legitimacy of torture as a tactical response to terrorism—though their conclusions are indeed different—but in the ways in which the essential questions are asked.

The story told in Rendition is that of Anwar el-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian chemical engineer who has been living in the United States as a resident alien for fourteen years with his mother, his very beautiful, very pregnant and very white wife (Reese Witherspoon) and their young son. As the film opens, el-Ibrahimi is preparing to return home from a chemical engineering conference in South Africa. At the same time, in an unnamed North African country, a suicide bomber detonates his weapon outside a sidewalk café frequented by Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor), an apparatchik in the country's internal security apparatus and a notorious torturer. Though the bomb fails to kill Fawal, it just so happens that a vehicle carrying local CIA station chief William Dixon (David Fabrizio) and his lead analyst Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhall) is passing just at this moment and Dixon is killed by shrapnel from the blast. Combing through the call logs of the telephone number of Rashid Salimi, the notorious terrorist who claimed responsibility for the attack, American agents discover that several calls were made and received by el-Ibrahimi's mobile telephone. As he disembarks from an airliner at Reagan National Airport, el-Ibrahimi is detained by CIA personnel and put on a plane headed to the (still) unnamed North African country—it is at this point that everything turns to shit.

One of the paradoxes inherent in contemporary political cinema is that, on the one hand, a filmmaker should present the superiority of her moral position as forcefully as possible, but she must also, in accordance with the dictates of political correctness, do so without giving offense to special populations or interest groups. In effect, a political film—particularly a liberal political film—must be made without controversy and a non-controversial political statement is basically meaningless or at best irrelevant.

Rendition is no exception to this in that the film is neatly stripped of controversy by insisting on the innocence of el-Ibrahimi. The audience is forced to endure scenes of successive sessions of various tortures, including electrocution and the obligatory water-boarding (wink!) and el-Ibrahimi is powerless to stop it as he does not have the information his interrogators are seeking. We are thus justifiably sickened by his extra-judicial interception and his treatment at the hands of Fawal and his associates. The problem with this is that the film doesn't really ask whether such harsh tactics might indeed be effective and justified. The idea that torture simply doesn't work is presented as something of a Received Truth that needs no scrutiny. An attentive viewer must ask herself how the movie might play if el-Ibrahimi had indeed sold technological information to the bombers as he falsely claims in order to put an end to his mistreatment.

The Battle of Algiers, on the other hand, comes to the viewer unencumbered by such received moral truths. Though Pontecorvo's sympathy with the native Algerians' struggle for self-determination is never left in doubt, the conflict between them and their French colonial masters is presented as a case of two roughly equally legitimate groups who happen to have competing agendas. When the Algiers cell of the FLN begins its campaign of bombings in the European quarter of the city, the audience is not spared the sight of the terror and violence that results. Though based on an antiquated system of racial and cultural superiority, part of the legacy of French colonialism in Algeria was a population of several million European residents who had lived in the country, often for generations, expending their labors to make the desert fruitful and build fulfilling lives for themselves and their families. Viewing the film through 21st Century eyes, we understand the inherent injustice of the unequal treatment of Arab and European residents in Algeria—but this does not mean we cannot sympathize with the pieds-noirs who suddenly find themselves faced with the destruction of their lives and livelihoods.

The Battle of Algiers is something of a textbook for modern day insurgency and counter-insurgency tactics. The Algiers cell of the FLN structured itself such that each member knew only the identities of two other members. Moreover, members were instructed to change their hiding places within the casbah every 24 hours, rendering any information gleaned by the authorities obsolete after only a day. As a result of the acutely time-sensitive nature of the search for intelligence, the French authorities found it necessary to resort to torture in order to glean information that was still relevant. This is the key: the French had a compelling reason to resort to inhumane interrogation tactics (the old ticking time bomb, if you will) and as the historically accurate events portrayed in the film show, these techniques worked. The Algiers uprising was quashed, all members of the leadership of the cell either killed or arrested, in a span of three months.


Pontecorvo did not shy away from pointing out the many ironies of the French government's tactics in dealing with the uprising and the press's response to them. In one of the film’s most bitterly rendered scenes, the architect of the French response to the uprising, Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin), faces tough questions from reporters about the methods used by his paratroopers. Mathieu responds:

“Their success is the result of these methods. One depends on the other. The word ‘torture’ isn’t used in our orders. We use interrogation as the only valid police method against clandestine activity. The FLN asks all its members, in case of capture to remain silent for 24 hours. Then they may talk. This gives the FLN time to render any information useless. And us? What form of questioning must we adopt? Civil law procedures, which take months for a mere misdemeanor? The problem is this: The FLN wants to throw us out of Algeria, and we want to stay. Even with slight shades of opinion, you all agree that we must stay. When the FLN rebellion began, there were no shades at all. Every paper, the communist press included, wanted it crushed. We’re here for that reason alone. We’re neither madmen nor sadists. We are soldiers. Our duty is to win. Therefore, to be precise, it’s my turn to ask a question. Should France stay in Algeria? If you answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences.”

As Mathieu’s speech ends, the film presents a chilling montage of the various torture techniques used by the French to bring down the Algiers uprising. Following this, scenes of FLN cadres driving down busy Algiers streets, gunning down dozens of innocent European civilians.

By refusing to either idealize or excuse the actions of either side in this struggle, The Battle of Algiers establishes an enlightened position that is far ahead of its time. This contrasts strongly with the undoubtedly unintentional, but nevertheless unmistakable air of cultural bigotry presented by Rendition. There is a remarkably telling scene in which Gyllenhall’s gutless “jackal” reveals to the North African country’s interior minister that the names provided by el-Ibrahimi are the same as the starting line-up of the 1990 Egyptian soccer team. Gyllenhall insists that this means that el-Ibrahimi is innocent and he just provided the names to stop the torture. The interior minister responds:

“We have a saying: ‘Beat your woman every morning. If you don’t know why, she does.’”

Gyllenhall responds:

“We have a saying, too. Do you know Shakespeare? ‘I fear you speak upon the rack where men enforced do speak anything.’”

This exchange provides a startling contrast to the exchange between Colonel Mathieu and Djafar (Saadi Yacef), the captured leader of the Algiers cell:

Mathieu: I’d have hated to blow you all up.

Djafar: Why?

Mathieu: Your picture and your file have been on my desk for months. I have the feeling I know you a bit. You don’t strike me as the kind for empty gestures.

Djafar: You seem satisfied to have me alive.

Mathieu: Yes, I am.

Djafar: I thought you’d regret it. I gave you an unexpected advantage.

Mathieu: No, only the satisfaction of having had the right hunch.

These are the words of men, admittedly of competing goals and worldviews, who recognize the legitimacy of one another’s positions. Though one position may be more tenable in moral terms, the world of the film—like the world of, well, the world—is not divided between good guys and villains. The worldview of Rendition, on the other hand, is more neatly divided between the heroes and villains and therefore so much less like life.

I do not fault Rendition for asking the question of whether extra-judicial rendition and torture are legitimate means for prosecuting a war against armed terrorist. Rather, my problem with the film is that it asked the questions in such a way that the answers were presented as foregone conclusions. Debate of this sort insults the intelligence of attentive filmgoers and adds little to the many critical debates going on within our society.

Call It Cred

By the time my family got our first VHS player in 1983, the format was already well on the way to besting Sony’s Betamax in its quest to become the standard medium for home video playback. I can still remember the first movie we rented to watch on our new machine—Poltergeist; to this day, one of the few Spielberg movies for which I have fond, if youthful, associations. This was two years before Blockbuster opened its first store and the home video rental market was still largely dominated by local mom & pop shops like Erol’s or Jacksonville Video—complete with tantalizingly be-curtained “adults only” rooms—which generally levied a significant one-time fee for new members and often required the remittance of annual dues. Presumably these fees paid for, amongst other things, the comprehensive catalogues that were published by each store, which included a list of all titles offered for rent—sub-divided by genre—brief descriptions of the films’ respective narratives, and notes about content which may be found by some viewers to be objectionable: violence, language, nudity, sexual situations or adult themes. I can remember reading these catalogues as though they were novels, delighting in particular in the descriptions of the R or X-rated movies I would never be allowed to view.

Though the VHS cassette has essentially been replaced by the DVD (digital versatile disc) as the default medium for home video playback, these two media are not exactly analogous. This is partially due to their respective technologies and the fact that the DVD, as it’s proper name suggests, has many applications aside from allowing users to watch movies on their televisions. Moreover, consumers do not use DVDs in all the same ways that they use VHS cassettes. An obvious example of this is the recording of television programming. Though DVD recorders are now affordable, the advent of DVRs, such as TiVo, and services such as On Demand has fundamentally altered the ways in which consumers view the problem of conflicted television program scheduling. Another major way in which DVDs are used in a fundamentally different way than were VHS cassettes is the fact that people are more likely to opt to purchase DVD recordings of their favorite films, rather than simply renting them, wherein it was far more rare to find a large library of movies on VHS cassettes (excluding dubbed copies) in someone’s home. There are a couple of reasons why this is the case. The first is physical: VHS tapes are somewhat large and cumbersome in comparison to DVDs and it takes a large amount of space to store a respectable library of movies in this format. The second and more important factor in this phenomenon has to do with the agreements that Blockbuster Video made with movie studios, which were specifically designed to discourage consumers from purchasing movies on VHS outright. Originally, Blockbuster paid a relatively high price for each VHS cassette they purchased and consequently kept 100% of the revenues from video rentals. In the 1990s, however, a new arrangement was made in which Blockbuster paid a nominal fee for new video cassettes and then gave 40% of revenues from the rental thereof back to the studios. As a corollary to this deal, for the first year after a film’s release on home video, the studios charged consumers an artificially high price—generally near $100—to purchase the film; effectively limiting movies to the rental market for the first year after their video release.

I watch a lot of movies. I also have a significant, if not over-large, collection of movies on home video. According to an informal count of the titles in my library conducted during the early morning hours of Thursday February 21, 2008, I have 539 movies in DVD format—this figure inevitably excludes some small number of movies loaned out to friends that have been so long in returning that they have effectively been forgotten. Many of these films are long, multi-disc editions that were comparatively expensive to procure—a prime example of this is the newly minted Criterion edition of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15 ½ hour late masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz (retail price: $124.95).

More than a handful of my DVDs are bootleg copies of foreign editions of films that at least at the time of purchase had not been published for the North American market—a copy of Bresson’s adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s Mouchette purchased on eBay in late 2005 for about $40. A substantial number of the rest are editions that are no longer in print and have thus escalated in value significantly in the time since they were purchased—a DVD of Juzo Itami’s Tampopo purchased second-hand at a Blockbuster Video location for $14.99 could now be sold through Amazon Marketplace for upwards of $100.

As someone who has taken a particular interest in movies—watching them, reading about them, thinking about and discussing them in a more or less systematic fashion—and has put forth the time and investment in acquiring a not insubstantial home video library, I inevitably have friends who wish to borrow one or more of my DVDs to see what it is I keep rattling on about—or, as may more often be the case, it is me who pushes the DVDs on to my unsuspecting (and often uninterested) acquaintances solely in order to have someone with whom I can talk about a particular work. I lend my DVDs out freely without any real regard to their value or scarcity, or the amount of time it takes to get them back.

Conversely, my library contains no more than nine (9) films in VHS format. None of these cost me more than $10 to procure. Most of them, in fact, were had for $2 or less and a couple of them were totally free. The technology of this format is such that the image and sound quality are considerably diminished when compared to their counterparts on DVD. The format does not allow for any of the wide range of features—variable sound and commentary tracks, optional sub-titling in a variety of languages, choice of aspect ratio, historical and critical documentary features, archival interviews, et cetera—that we have come to view as our birthright with the advent of the “Special Edition” DVD. Limits in recording capacity mean that longer films must be split amongst two or more cassettes (admittedly this does happen with some DVDs, though the incidence is comparatively quite rare). One cannot instantly jump to a particular scene with a simple push of a button, as one can with DVDs. Shit, you even have to rewind the fucking things, for God’s sake.

And yet, I will only loan out one of my VHS tapes to the more trustworthy of my companions. In the rare case I do loan one out, it is only with exhortations that they be coddled during their use and returned at the earliest possible convenience. I get a little hyper when one is out of my sight for more than a week. What could explain this? Scarcity partially accounts for it, as some, though by no means all of the VHS cassettes I own are either currently out-of-print, or are unique to the point that they were never in print in the first place (more on this later). Fragility also plays a role; just about everyone who has any experience with watching movies on VHS has witnessed the consumption of a tape by the VCR. These factors are logical and seem pretty self evident, but they do not, on their own, wholly account for this discrepancy. The fact is, this seeming disconnect from a sound assessment of the real value of the individual articles comprising my home video library stems from a nebulous aesthetic of socio-cultural elitism. Simply put, the ubiquity of the DVD has given to the lowly VHS cassette something it never had of its own accord, namely cachet. To put it another way, the possession of obscure or scarce films in VHS format lends to their owner an aura of street credibility.

In order to illustrate this assertion, I will present you with a hypothetical scenario. It is your day off and you walk into your neighborhood coffee shop with the intention of planting yourself at a table and spending the next four hours really digging in to that copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason you have been promising yourself to read for the last year. You pay for your americano, seat yourself at an open table when suddenly you notice two very attractive members of the opposite sex sitting alone at separate tables, each reading a copy of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep—perhaps your favorite novel of the immigrant experience in America. Each of these individuals has, in their turn, acknowledged your presence and your obvious intelligence by pointedly gesturing toward your Kant, making eye contact with you and briefly smiling. Assuming the two are roughly equally physically attractive and equally smartly dressed, how do you decide which to approach, or, in other words, is there some other criterion by which you can make a qualitative differentiation between the two? It occurs to you at this point that though both of them happen to be reading the same novel, their respective editions of the work are markedly different. The reader to your right is reading a pristine copy of the currently available Picador trade paperback edition with the cover graphic depicting a cirrus filled sky—the receipt from the local Borders store sticks out from amongst the pages. The reader to your left, on the other hand, is reading the long out-of-print Avon Press mass-market paperback edition with its rounded corners (!), fire escapes abutting aging tenements and yellowed pages with the marginalia of past readers still intact—the same text, indeed, but hardly the same book. A book of this nature is the sign of a true bibliophile and was probably got for seventy-five cents at a local used book stall, if not fobbed off the bookshelf of a past lover. The difference between the two books and their respective readers is one of street cred—its abundance in the latter and its utter lack in the former.

Indulge me in sharing another anecdote, this one wholly actual, in order to further demonstrate the merits of this argument. In April of last year I had the opportunity to attend a screening over two days of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. The breadth, scope and completeness of this film are such that I feel it wholly beyond my meager powers to effectively write about it. This was undoubtedly the singular cinema-going experience of my life. Thus, I was inordinately gratified to learn that The Criterion Collection planned on publishing one of their full tilt special editions of this masterwork later in the year and I purchased my copy the day it was released.

Several weeks later, two of my very close friends—both of whom are also great admirers of Fassbinder’s work—showed me the gorgeous, complete 8-cassette VHS edition complete with seven of the eight cloth covered slip cases, which, when placed together, depict an image of the historical Alexanderplatz with the film’s title embossed in gilt Teutonic lettering that they had procured from the video store at which one of them works for some ridiculously paltry sum (maybe ten dollars?). On a practical level, mine was the superior edition in a multitude of ways: the respective image quality cannot reasonably even be compared, my DVD edition includes three supplementary documentary films and the Philip Jutzi’s complete 1931 adaptation of the novel from a script penned by Alfred Doblin himself. And yet I felt somehow inadequate when faced with their prize.

My own collection of films on VHS is small enough to warrant an inventory thereof:


Rights, Respect, Responsibility
Our Boys
Zero for Conduct
Bunuel’s Wuthering Heights
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (R-rated version)
Drowning by Numbers
Rosetta
Shoah
Orson Welles’s Othello


The first two films have a particular sentimental value for me as they are two of the films in which I was featured as a performer. Rights, Respect, Responsibility was the first film for which I auditioned and subsequently the first film in which I was cast—though I was not cast in the role for which I read. It was a short film produced in the aftermath of Terrible Tuesday in New York in 2001 for distribution to public television stations and school systems in order to teach youngsters tolerance toward people’s differences in general and Muslims in particular. I played the role of Kevin, a ruthless high school bully who incessantly badgers and beats upon the South Asian Muslim entrant into our erstwhile lily-white community. Our Boys, on the other hand, is a short heist film, which was written by a fellow student from my scene study workshop and produced on the ultra-cheap-and-quick in a diner in northern Utah owned by this same student’s aunt. Zero for Conduct (Zero de Conduite) is the legendary short film by the French master Jean Vigo about an anarchic uprising in a French boarding school, which was a primary influence on Lindsay Anderson's If . . . I saw this film at the Janus Films retrospective at Lincoln Center and found to my delight that it was still available in VHS format and could be got for $15 through Amazon.com. The subsequent four films—Bunuel’s Wuthering Heights; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover; Drowning by Numbers; Rosetta—were picked up at my neighborhood Hollywood Video location as part of their liquidation of their complete stock of films on VHS for about $2 each. Though each of these movies made for a fine score in its own right (although learning upon arriving at home that the copy of Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover was the R-rated version, with more than thirty minutes of footage excised was something of a disappointment), it was the discovery of Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers—a film I had rented on a VHS some years earlier and which I still consider to be Greenaway’s most effective movie but which is inexplicably unavailable in any format in the North American market—which had me jumping up and down and hooting through the aisles at Hollywood. The final two films in the list were picked up at the same Delaware rental shop at which my friends procured their copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Finding these particular films was no easy task, as they were tucked away in a room quite literally stuffed with VHS films, which represented the inventory of a sister store that had recently closed down. My friends and I spent nearly an hour picking through the stacks and stacks of cassettes (arranged in no particular order) trying to find the best combination of movies to purchase—these were offered at $2 per cassette or three for $10. I found the copy of Shoah quite early in our search and was glad to be able to forego purchasing the $150 New Yorker Video DVD set of the documentary. As the entire film comprised five cassettes, I needed to find one other movie in order to make a neat two sets of three tapes. I kept saying to my friends that I hoped I could find a copy of Welles’s Othello. The store was getting ready to close and I had decided on a copy of George Romero’s Martin, when Monique pointed out a stack of boxes and asked if I had looked through them. I hadn’t and immediately upon poking my head inside, I saw Orson Welles's black face staring right back at me.

More films will undoubtedly be added to my VHS collection over the years. Unless somebody steps up and puts it out on DVD, I predict I will pick up a VHS of Max Ophuls’s The Earrings of Madame de . . . within the year. Even as the collection grows, however, the older tapes will begin to decay, lose their images or otherwise become unwatchable. As consumers begin to move en masse from standard DVDs to Sony’s high definition Blu-Ray discs over the coming years, the technological inferiority of the VHS cassette will inevitably become more apparent. Yet with this increasingly apparent inferiority will come an inversely proportional rise in their emotional-aesthetic cachet.

God, Science & Hygiene

What is perhaps the defining moment in Alex Cox’s Walker (1987) comes just over half-way through the film, when two employees of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company pay a visit to Ed Harris's William Walker, erstwhile American filibuster and President of the Republic of Nicaragua, and inform him that Vanderbilt, Walker’s patron and the instigator of his Nicaraguan project, has not been paying what he owes for his company’s exclusive concession for overland shipping from the Atlantic to the Pacific through Nicaragua and propose starting a new company, which would offer Walker a more favorable deal. Responding with accusations of treason to his lieutenants’ suggestions that, distasteful though this development may be, they owe all their victories—indeed everything they have—to Cornelius Vanderbilt and reminding them that the newly adopted Constitution grants him the power to do as he wishes, Walker declares that he will not only revoke Vanderbilt’s concession, but that he will further commandeer all of his ships, rendering them the property of the Republic of Nicaragua. Moments later, we see him walking along the beach with a member of the American phalange (Walker’s Immortals), with whom he shares the following exchange:

“I cannot help noticing, sir, during the time I’ve spent with you that you’ve betrayed every principle you’ve had, all the men who supported you. May I ask why?”

“No, you may not.”

“I’m still not clear on what exactly are your aims.”

“The ends justify the means.”

“What are the ends?”

“I can’t remember.”

By playing fast and loose with notions of time and history, Alex Cox and Rudy Wurlitzer achieved something approaching the prophetic with Walker. Produced in Nicaragua at the height of the brutal Contra War, Walker was an explicit critique of American involvement in that conflict. But by filling their historical satire on the history of American expansionism and the notion of Manifest Destiny with technological and historical anachronisms—a Newsweek magazine cover featuring a photograph of Walker with the headline “Nicaragua’s Liberator,” a U. S. military helicopter arriving in the burning city of Granada to evacuate all American citizens, a Mercedes sedan speeding past the carriage of the executed Nicaraguan president’s widow—Cox and Wurlitzer were able to emphasize the cyclical nature of history, indicating that flights of cultural elitism and imperialism all share the same characteristics, whatever their historical moment.

Early in the film, shortly after their arrival in Nicaragua, Walker instructs his Immortals that, “as of this moment, we do hereby under God become citizens of Nicaragua.” He continues, “It is our mission to introduce into the family of enlightened and civilized nations a new sister.” To an American viewing this film for the first time in the early years of the twenty-first century, it is difficult not to see shades of George Walker Bush’s messianic crusade—is there any other word for it—to democratize the Middle East. What makes both of these men truly dangerous, rather than simply contemptible, is their respective insistence that they are driven by causes nobler than a desire for wealth or power. This is exemplified in an exchange between Walker and Cornelius Vanderbilt, who, upon hearing of Walker’s attempt to colonize the Mexican states of Sonora and Northern Mexico, summons Walker to meet with him.

Vanderbilt: Does Nicaragua mean anything to you, Walker?

Walker: Nothing at all.

Vanderbilt: Nicaragua’s a fucked-up little country somewhere south of here. This worthless piece of real estate controls the overland route to the Pacific. I now control all transportation in Nicaragua. But in order to continue to do so I need stability.

Walker: What’s this got to do with me.

Vanderbilt: What I need is for some man to go down there and take over. I want that country stable. I want it done now. They tell me you’re a clever man, Walker. Doctor, lawyer, surgeon. All that Renaissance rubbish they talk about these days. Well? Can you handle the job?

Walker: That’s not the issue. I plan to get married. Start a newspaper.

Vanderbilt’s Assistant: Then you would be wasting one of life’s golden moments, sir. It is not every man who is offered the chance to have a country of his own.

Walker: Walker’s goals involve a higher purpose than the vulgar pursuit of personal power.

Walker’s reference to himself in the third person here and throughout his occasional voice-over narration to the film provides a window into the messianic madness that drives him. Perhaps the most lucid account of Walker’s character comes from Dona Yrena Corral, who remarks to her husband upon hearing Walker address his Immortals, “Clearly this is no ordinary asshole.” Walker of course ended up accepting Vanderbilt's offer, but only after his fiancée succumbed to a cholera epidemic.

There is also something of a strange amalgamation of Vice President Dick Cheney and Iraqi National Congress head Ahmad Chalabi in Peter Boyle’s corpulent and malevolent Cornelius Vanderbilt. One only need hearken back to the secret energy commission meetings of the early years of the Bush presidency and their recommendations for regime change in Iraq, months before 9/11 and the ensuing hysteria over Iraqi doomsday weapons, to see the Cheney connection. Moreover, we see in Walker’s riding to power in Nicaragua on Vanderbilt’s back only to betray him once he achieves his goals an echo of Chalabi’s role in feeding the CIA the apparently falsified evidence that led us to invade Iraq and his eventual arrest and disgrace after the fall of the Ba’ath regime.

The ironies of the notion of Manifest Destiny and its reliance upon the inherent superiority of civilized cultures over backwards indigenous populations are played to great effect in Walker. After subduing the Nicaraguan conservatives and establishing the American phalange’s control over the country, Walker is offered the presidency of the country. At the advice of his chief lieutenant, Byron Cole, he declines the offer and instead proposes that he head the Nicaraguan military—nominating a Nicaraguan aristocrat, Don Corral, to the presidency. When Walker learns that Corral along with other Nicaraguans are plotting to remove him and his phalange from the country, he has Corral arrested, charged with treason and executed. Shortly after assuming the presidency, Walker's voice-over narrates a scene showing the streets of the Nicaraguan capital. As Walker declares, “Walker’s Immortals initiated various cultural and civic reforms, including the construction of a theater in the traditional European style,” we see the various members of his phalange raping, beating and pillaging the city’s inhabitants.

All of this heavy socio-political commentary could easily become bogged down in its own moralist fervor, were it not for the film’s brilliant humor and dazzling visual cues. Cox’s film is heavily indebted to the westerns of Sergio Leone and especially Sam Peckinpah for its tight close-ups, impressive vistas and its occasional bursts of balletic violence. Moreover, the comic pairings of the members of Walker’s Immortals provide an important counterpoint of levity to the films more serious themes. As one phalange member says to another, “I brought you down here to the Paris, France of Central America and you’re behaving like you’re still in some hamlet in the woods.”

The film's historical cycle is brought full circle in Walker’s speech to the crowd of Nicaraguans gathered around him as the city of Granada is besieged by Vanderbilt’s armed opposition:

“You all might think that there will be a day when America will leave Nicaragua alone. But I am here to tell you, flat out, that that day will never happen, because it is our destiny to be here. It is our destiny to control you people. So no matter how much you fight, no matter what you think, we’ll be back . . . time and time again. From the future, if not the present, we may expect a just judgment.”