|
Does United 93 whitewash Islam?
While the film United 93 looks worthwhile, some conservatives are leery of it because of the stated views of its writer and director, Paul Greengrass, about Islam. In an interview with Rush Limbaugh, Greenglass made the following comment, which Limbaugh, not to his credit, let pass without challenging:
Greengrass: There were two hijacks on the morning of 9/11. There was the hijack that we know about, the hijack of the airplanes, of the innocent people, that flew into the buildings and all that terrible death and destruction that occurred as a result. But there was a second hijack that took place that day. The hijack of a religion by a bunch of young men who twisted and perverted it in order to create a creed and an ideology to justify the slaughter of innocent people, and that�s a hijack that is still out there today. It�s still going on today, and it�s going to be very hard for us to work out what to do to deal with that.However, the fact that Greengrass is a liberal idiot on the subject of Islam does not mean that United 93 must be a liberal movie. Sometimes the non-liberal truth of a film�s material is so compelling that it overrides the conscious liberal dispositions of its director. Examples are Dead Man Walking (intended as an anti-capital punishment tract, but having the opposite effect) and Wilde (intended as a plea for tolerance of homosexuality, but having the opposite effect). The same may be the case with any pro-Islam intentions in United 93.
Here is a later entry, in which readers give their positive reactions to the movie. And here is my own, intensely disapproving, view of the movie. It’s a post-modern, extremely liberal movie, which makes the hijackers seem like nervous young men rather than jihadist warriors, and largely depersonalizes the passangers and removes most of the meaning and heroism from their death. The movie takes the most dramatic and tragic situation possible, and turns it into a lot of chaotic motion. The movie also consistently shows Americans as unattractive. Conservatives’ fears were more than justified in this case.
Email entry |