TOMORROW a cinematic missile is being lobbed into British auditoriums. Steven Spielberg is the perpetrator of this attack. His new movie, Munich, is a sort of big-screen sequel to the terrorist strike that, in September 1972, unfolded live on the television screens of 900 million viewers. It follows the story of the covert hit squad that was hired to hunt down and eliminate the Palestinian extremists responsible for the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games.
Spielberg has called this movie his “prayer for peace”. But so far he seems mainly to have stirred livid hostility. Arabs have vilified the film as a piece of Zionist propaganda. But Zionists, in their turn, have demanded a boycott. They are outraged that Spielberg — the director of Schindler’s List, the man who helped to found and fund a Holocaust remembrance museum in LA — in confronting this brutal passage of Middle Eastern politics should attempt to consider the point of view of both sides. What moral equivalence could there be between an Oympian and a terrorist? They are creatures so different that they barely belong to the same species.
Spielberg is accused of exploiting atrocity, of capitalising on the perverse thrill of violence and on post-9/11 fears. But the era when a stunned nation tied flags to car aerials and when songs such as Leaving on a Jet Plane were too emotive to play is now over. A unified response to horror is giving way to vigorous debate. Munich is just the first in a convoy of politically loaded films that will be arriving in our cinemas. With films such as Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (an intimate tale of Palestinian suicide bombers) and Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (an insider’s story of the oil trade) hotly followed by a fleet of 9/11 movies, the terrorist becomes to contemporary culture what the KGB agent once was to the Cold War.
There is a curious, twisted connection between terrorism and art. Both are forms of expression that need an audience to exist. Both try to blast their way through some social veneer to expose what they see as an authentic truth. The terrorist, in some horrible sense, achieves what the artist most craves. He brings hidden or overlooked subject matter to wider attention. He forces onlookers to account for complicated motivations. He brings public and private life into painful collision. He tries to touch and shape history as it streams past. “I created art,” Abu-Assad said about his film, “because I didn’t want to use the language of violence.”
No wonder terrorists use aesthetic tactics to get their message across. The destruction of symbolic targets and slaughter carried out on camera are both dramatic productions designed to arouse an emotional response. In 2002 a Chechen kamikaze squad took over a theatre. Their hostage scenario was actually played out on stage.
Advertisement
The destruction of the twin towers was a visual spectacle akin to a disaster movie. Damien Hirst was pressed to recant for comparing the horrifying event to an art work. But was public anger aroused because he plucked too painful a chord? When, in 1893, a bomb exploded in the French Parliament, the anarchist poet Laurent Tailhade proclaimed that the victims were of no import so long as the gesture was beautiful. It seemed as if poetic justice had been done when, a short while later, another explosion put out his eye. But nowadays Islamist militants become mini-movie directors. The execution video becomes an ever-more powerful weapon in their hands.
Art in turn uses terror tactics. André Breton once declared that the simplest surrealist act would be to fire off a revolver at random into a crowd. The conceptual artist Chris Burden took him rather too literally when he fired a pistol at a departing aeroplane. Fortunately he missed, but he still managed to make himself (momentarily) famous — as did the Chapman brothers when they destroyed a series of Goya etchings in the name of their art.
And yet for all the similarities, it is the one principal difference that is most telling. Where terrorist violence aims to close down debate, art does the opposite. It offers questions, not answers. The only thing that is going to solve the Arab-Israeli impasse, Spielberg suggested in an interview, “is a lot of sitting down and talking until you are blue in the gills”.
When Munich explodes into cinemas tomorrow, shards will be lodged only in the mind.