Do we have another producer-auteur on our hands? The opening credits to Syriana are minimal, just the title and the producers, so for much of the film I was wondering if Steven Soderbergh was directing, or someone who’d watched a lot of Soderbergh films. Turns out it’s the latter. The same formal tics are there - the roving "handheld" Steadicamed camera, the liberal use of jump cuts, the expressive cutaways to music. The only thing missing was Soderbergh’s fluid, capable hand in editing. Even the All the President’s Men obsession was restaged in the theatre scene where Bob (Clooney) goes to see his ex-CIA friend.
I’d heard how complicated the film’s narrative and political picture of the Middle East where, but I found the conspiracy making a little pat. I’m perfectly willing to entertain (in fact, believe it already) that the political machinations in the U.S. leading to the Iraq war - the alliance between neocon thinktanks and vested interests - were unsavory. And I know that oil does enter the equation: a political party is in power that puts highest primacy on oil (the quantity of production, the ease of trading, and the freedom from monopolization) as defining our national interest. Where I think the film fails is to suggest that narrow pecuniary interests of specific oil films looking for specific pipeline routes is what’s driving this all. Even if such interests did not exist, we would almost have to invent them.
Also, the film’s portrayal of a young Pakistani exile turned terrorist reminded me of an excellent Michael Kraig post, which I’ve quoted before:
I find on Democracy Arsenal (and other blogs) a certain amount of agreement with the status quo policy conception that the anger in the Middle East is due to internal, domestic repression/oppression/injustice under autocratic governments, and that the anger toward Israel, the West, the US, and the globalizing world order is a byproduct of this, or an escape valve for this. Indeed, I’ve heard this from numerous US officials and non-officials throughout my work for the Stanley Foundation; you could almost call it a standing epistemic agreement in the US policy community.
Unfortunately, it’s wrong — or at least, half-wrong. There is of course an "escape valve" factor at work here. But after traveling to the Near East and the Persian Gulf for a combined total of two months this year (in a cross-country outreach tour for a Stanley product translated into Arabic), what I found was nearly everyone saying that "democracy" is not just about internal practices — there is also an international dimension to justice, development, and democracy. And this is where anger toward perceived neo-colonialist aggression, not too different from the British mandate in Egypt and the French mandate in Lebanon and Syria, comes in. The truth is that people feel oppressed at one in and the same time by their own governments (internally) AND by perceived anti-Islamic, anti-Arab forces at the international or global level (externally), and neither of these exists in a vacuum apart from the other.
Nonetheless, for all its problems, I really liked Syriana. Conspiracy or no, it provides a model for commercial cinema to grapple with world historical events and to make the spectator piece together narrative strands on the basis of abstract casual relationships (hence the claims, I’m sure, that the film is complicated). It’s Traffic, writ large onto the world stage, without the detours into Victorian melodrama.
And it’s gripping cinema. Unlike the spy-thriller equivalent, where you might be worried that Matt Damon’s mission is foiled, here you’re genuinely worried that a country’s fate is foiled. Even if the real world is more complicated (if the CIA weren’t out to get the emir wanting to bring women’s vote and McKinsey consultants to Syriana, might not the fundies?), that’s a feat in itself.
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