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	NEWMAN

What If Jihadists Watched The Kingdom?
by Marc T. Newman [media reviewer/critic] 11/01/07

Warning: This film analysis contains plot spoilers that are necessary to make the points contained herein. Read at your own risk.

There is nothing quite so quintessentially American as a company softball game. Everyone plays, regardless of age or ability. Families cheer on the teams. It is the iconic nature of this softer side of America’s favorite pastime that makes it the perfect target for the radical Islamic jihadists of The Kingdom. Demonstrating careful planning, the terrorists deliver a one-two-three punch that leaves theater-goers gasping at the indiscriminate carnage – and thirsty for payback packaged in the form of Jamie Foxx, who, as FBI Special Agent Ronald Fleury, has arrived in Saudi Arabia with a crack investigative team to bring the bad guys to justice.

Critical reviews of The Kingdom range from those, like Michael Sragow at the Baltimore Sun, who see the film as a prime example of the need to combat terrorism with a police response, rather than a military one, to Glenn Kenny at Premiere, who observes that The Kingdom is “designed to stoke audience bloodlust.” Both of these reviews, like many others, look at the film from a U.S. audience’s perspective. As I watched The Kingdom, I tried to imagine how a jihadist might respond to it. The answer was chilling.

A View from the West

It is easy to see how The Kingdom could be viewed as a type of wish-fulfilling revenge flick – like the Rambo movies, re-writing Vietnam history, except this time the conflict is contemporary. When viewed in this light, the story is pretty straightforward. The bad guys blow up the gentle corporate softball players. Plucky FBI agents move, against the orders of an impotent American administration, to strike their own deal and handle what would otherwise be a botched investigation. The team is appropriately diverse: Ronald Fleury is an African-American male leader bent on avenging the death of his colleague, Grant Sykes is his Southern male evidence analyst, Janet Mayes is the assertive female pathologist who is good with a gun, and Adam Leavitt is the Jewish male agent who reluctantly goes along. Through superior investigative techniques, co-opting the local talent, savvy diplomatic maneuvering, placing themselves at great peril, and using up an incredible amount of ammunition, they finally take down the terrorist cell and head home.

Some critics have mentioned that The Kingdom attempts to argue for a kind of moral equivalency between the two cultures by having the main character on each side of the conflict declare the same overarching intention: to “kill them all.” While this analysis may have been apt for a film like Munich, which depicted the frustrations brought on by a kind of eternal game of assassination tag, in The Kingdom, only the actual words are the same – the meanings are monumentally different.

With a Jihadist Eye

The second time I watched The Kingdom, I was struck by the way the director, Peter Berg, crafted the juxtaposition between the two sides in the conflict: the Americans and the jihadists. In the opening segment, the Americans are, quite literally, playing a game. But the terrorist planners are at work. The mastermind sits atop a building, watching the action, and making certain that the young boy sitting with him has a front row seat for the destruction of the “infidels” who have dared to place their feet on holy Saudi soil. As the Americans scatter and die, cries of “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is great”) are heard. American children die, but the Arab child beside the older man is being trained to kill infidels – a good thing, from their perspective. What the audience in the theater sees as terror, the terrorist sees as effective jihad.

And from the terrorists’ position, why shouldn’t the jihadist seek the death of these infidels? The Kingdom portrays the FBI team as culturally insensitive. Their language is uniformly vulgar and profane. Janet Mayes wears clothing that anyone familiar with Arab customs would know they would find offensive. The prince that invites Fleury and his team (though not Janet – no women allowed) to his palace appears weak, and in league with the American enemy. And, above all, the FBI team is not Muslim, so their very presence in Riyadh is a desecration. All of this would appear, to the jihadist mindset, to justify the killing.

The film progresses like a cat and mouse game. As Fleury and company are poring over the crime scene, terrorists are carefully making new weapons of mayhem. The American state department official, eager to cry “victory” after a dubiously successful operation and to get the FBI agents back home, drops them directly into a meticulously executed trap that results in the kidnapping of one member of the team and the deaths of many innocent civilians.

Even in the end, when the FBI and Saudi agents manage to track the terrorists to their hideout, liberate their colleague, and kill the head of the terrorist cell, there is a way out for the jihadist looking for one. Sure, the Americans took out one bomb maker. But as he lay dying, he whispers to his son, “We will kill them all” – the very words that Fleury had whispered to Janet when they heard of the death of their comrade in the opening attack.

But look at the tally. The jihadists killed hundreds, while they suffered minor losses by comparison. What the FBI identifies as killing the bad guy, the terrorists accept as martyrdom. What is viewed by western authorities as “case closed” is but a jot in the never-ending story of war that the jihad terrorists intend to wage against the west.

Even the final line is telling. When Fleury tells Mayes that they are going to go over to Saudi Arabia and “kill them all,” what he means is all of the bad people responsible for the death of their friend. But when the terrorist leader tells his grandson that they are going to “kill them all,” he does not mean all of the Americans in the room. He means all of the infidels of the world, regardless of how long it takes. Two viewers, coming from entirely different cultures, could watch the same film and come to entirely different conclusions about who are the heroes of the story.

Worth the Wrestle

Ambiguity can be strategic when it forces us to analyze a film’s storyline more closely to ferret out the arguments it contains, and wrestle over their merits. By seeing both sides of The Kingdom we are left to ask ourselves about the advantages of our culture that make it worth defending. Life has to be more than oil contracts and softball games. It is thought-provoking that none of the Americans in The Kingdom were portrayed as overtly Christian, but instead pains were taken to make them vulgar and culturally incorrect. How would I want people from other cultures and religions to see me?

Conversely, film has a potent ability to take abstract ideas – such as radical Islam’s tenacious desire to destroy the governments of non-Islamic nations and instate a world-wide Caliphate – and make them real. The Kingdom gives western viewers a glimpse into a world under radical Islamic sway. How should Christians regard the children of Abraham through Ishmael’s line? How can we obey Christ’s command to love our enemies, while at the same time responding to God’s call to do justice and love mercy, and recognizing the state’s authority to wield the sword to punish those who do evil?

The Kingdom is fiction. The worldviews to which it alludes are real. As many of us sit safely in coffee houses outside of the theaters we frequent, we should allow films to work on us, to let the stories draw forth the kinds of questions that lead to discussions that shape attitudes and inform actions in the real world. Doing so honors those stories worthy of such discussions, and turns mere entertainment into meaningful dialogue. ExileStreet

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