A False Target

NCF director Peter Whittle was one of the guests on BBC 2's The Review Show with Kirsty Wark on Friday night. You can watch it here.

And in the new edition of Standpoint magazine, Peter reviews the new Chris Morris film Four Lions:

MORRIS DANCING AROUND REALITY

Last month, I reviewed here David Baddiel's flaccid movie about inter-racial identities, The Infidel, and complained about its pussy-footing approach to matters Islamic. Well, now we have Four Lions, another comedy set on roughly the same turf, directed and co-written by the satirist Chris Morris, whose credibility within the "cutting-edge comedy community" is unimpeachable. The aim of this exercise seems to be to see the funny side of a bunch of home-grown Muslim suicide bombers and our reaction to them. 

Who do you think you're kidding? Nigel Lindsay in "Four Lions" 

Is this a laughing matter? Morris, who ran the gauntlet of tabloid horror when he famously spoofed the hysteria surrounding paedophilia on his TV show Brass Eye in the 1990s, seems to think so. He told the Sunday Times that the film would seek to do for Islamic terrorism what Dad's Army, the classic BBC comedy, did for the Nazis by showing them as "scary but also ridiculous". In a director's statement produced in the production notes given to the critics, he says: "A bomb goes off. We tear about like headless chickens. Then we try to calm down. We lock the door on our dread...We change our laws. We restrict our freedoms. We lash out at strangers. Brilliant. Of course we long to laugh at our fears but we don't know how."

But is this true? How exactly are "we" lashing out at strangers? More importantly from the point of view of this film, do we really "long to laugh at our fears"? If you think that we are, and that we do, then you are Morris's audience. But I'm not convinced. Denying the possibility of a real threat, pretending that there's nothing really to be afraid of, that bombers are idiots and halfwits, that we ourselves might be to blame for our scattergun over-reactions — now that seems to me to be a far greater problem. 

Morris is beloved of media types whose understanding of Islam, Islamism and terrorism varies between skin-deep and non-existent. Anything which sounds like a good chuckle behind the bike shed is fine by them. They will laugh at Morris simply on principle: here is one of their tribe who has had the contrarian guts, the courage, to go where others fear to tread, who hits "raw nerves", etc etc. The points being made are, actually, beside the point: sending people and situations up is all that matters.

What Morris does, he does with skill. The dialogue in this movie is sharp, fast and a million miles from the "Doctor, doctor, I think I'm a Jew" humour of Baddiel's effort. The performances are good, the film is well structured and the everyday observations ring true. The four lions (in fact there are five) are a group of Doncaster would-be jihadists whom we first meet trying to make a video message prior to an attempt to blow up the London Marathon. Other than one of their number, a white malcontent of the kind to be found in the Socialist Workers Party, they could be the 7/7 London bombers. They're kept in line by Omar (Riz Ahmed) who, of all of them, has a spurious kind of authority founded on a half-baked, half-formulated sense of political grievance. Dry-runs and preparations reveal the sheer idiocy, the bumbling incompetence of the group. They couldn't organise themselves out of a paper bag. The police are revealed to be pretty stupid too, shooting the wrong man and then using tortured jobsworth logic to explain away the error. 

The general cluelessness of both conspirators and the forces of law and order is the source of the film's humour from the start and it never really deviates from this narrow vein. But the Dad's Army comparison is wrong. First, I don't remember the Nazis looming very large in that much-loved series. The humour arose from the amateurishness of a group of ordinary men whose honourable motives were never in doubt. It was rightly assumed that we were with them all the way, that we saw ourselves and our relatives in them, and that we felt enormous affection for the sometimes cackhanded ways in which they attempted to rise to the occasion. The self-appointed army in Four Lions, for all the humour wrung out of their dismal efforts, want to annihilate us. Laughing at their buffoonery doesn't detract from this fact one iota, and it ultimately makes watching the movie an oddly hollow experience.

Are terrorists so incompetent anyway? Apparently, Morris started to think about the film when he read of a plot to ram a US warship with a boat full of explosives that sank. There was also that cut-and-paste ramming of a car into the front of Glasgow Airport. Ha, bloody ha. The truth is that Islamic terrorism has shown itself to be extraordinarily well organised for a good 20 years now. 

Go ahead and laugh at Four Lions but in the real world of 9/11, 7/7, Madrid and Bali, you will truly be seeking refuge in a fool's paradise if you want to pretend that they don't know what they're doing.

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BBC 2 The Review Show

NCF director Peter Whittle is one of the guests on The Review Show tonight on BBC 2 at 11pm.

The other panellists are Ian Rankin, Yasmeen Khan and John Bew.

Under discussion will be Chris Morris's new film Four Lions, Iron Man 2, a new production of Peter Pan and television coverage of the election

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We are All Guilty!

Oh no we're not, writes Helen Szamuely

Monday’s event with Pascal Bruckner, author of The Tyranny of Guilt, newly published in English (see post below), played to a packed house in the building where NCF now has an office: 55 Tufton Street. Mr Bruckner read a passage from the book and was then interviewed by Peter Whittle, finally answering questions from the floor.

In summary, M Bruckner maintains that after the horrors of Nazism and the Second World War, Western Europe has decided to opt out of historical activity. It did so by imposing a feeling of permanent guilt upon itself with all events seen from the perspective of the horrors of Nazism and all history viewed from the point of view of European crimes and misdeeds. This has had the effect of a political and ethical paralysis on Western European countries. They can no longer defend themselves from those who try to undermine them, such as the more extreme Islamists who demand special treatment and a denial of the “Enlightenment project”; they can no longer participate with any strength in world affairs and resent those, like the United States who insist on doing so. They appear to be doomed to a permanent cycle of self-expiation.

The feeling of guilt that has been imposed on Western countries by the various elites (and elites matter, as M Bruckner said), coupled with a constant demand for self-denigration, is at the heart of the cultural malaise we are experiencing. However, its roots, as was mentioned in the discussion, lie in an important aspect of Western culture: it is one of self-analysis and, if needs be, self-criticism; it has been there from the very beginning, however far we can trace it. But we have to deal with cultures that do not have the same attitude and have not yet worked out a way of doing so.

Another aspect of the problem is more specific. While Western countries, particularly those of Western Europe are endlessly enjoined to confess to historic crimes and to expiate their guilt (often through international aid that helps nobody but bloodthirsty, kleptocratic tyrants), there is one subject about which silence reigns. There were two vicious totalitarian systems in the twentieth century: Nazism and Communism. Everything in Western history is related to Nazism; when it comes to Communism, its crimes and the support those crimes had in countries that were not under its yoke are passed over without a murmur. Yet, the feelings of guilt were first sown by the Communists and their fellow travelers well before the Second World War and until we face up to that problem it is unlikely that we can tackle the malaise Pascal Bruckner has diagnosed.

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Pascal Bruckner at the NCF

The French Philosopher and novelist Pascal Bruckner discussed his book The Tyranny Of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism for the first time in the UK at the NCF on Monday evening.

 An account of the event will be following shortly.

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