AUGUST 2001: ARUNDHATI ROY
Nargis, the Indian movie queen of the 1950s, who later had a career in politics, once denounced the great film director Satyajit Ray for making films that offered too negative an image of India. In her own movies, she said, she had always celebrated the positive. When asked for an example, she replied, “Dams.”
Big Dams (defined as those over fifteen meters—41 feet—high) have long been an essential part of India’s technological iconography, and their role in providing water and power to the nation was for a time unquestioned, even unquestionable. Lately, however, there has been “an increasingly confrontational debate about the role that large dams have played in development,” to quote the chairman of the World Commission on Dams (WCD), South Africa’s education minister, Professor Kader Asmal.
One of the biggest new dams under construction is the Sardar Sarovar Project on the Narmada River in the state of Gujarat, with a proposed final height of 136.5 meters (375 feet). Among its most vocal opponents is the novelist Arundhati Roy. “Big dams,” she says, “have let this country down.” She objects to the displacement of more than 200,000 people by rising waters, to the damage to the Narmada Valley’s fragile ecosystem, and points, tellingly, to the failure of many big dams to deliver what they promised. (India’s Bargi Dam, for example, irrigates only 5 percent of the area promised.) She argues further that while the rural poor are the ones who pay the price for a dam, it is the urban rich who benefit: “80 percent of rural households [still] have no electricity, 250 million people have no access to safe drinking water.”
The recent report of the WCD largely supports Roy’s arguments. The WCD was set up by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union and based its report on surveys of 125 large dams. (Mysteriously, permission to visit the Sardar Sarovar Project was refused by the Gujarat state government.) The report blames big dams for increased flooding, damage to farmland, the extinction of freshwater fishes. It agrees that the benefits of dams go largely to the rich, that many dams fall short of their targets, and that of the forty to eighty million people displaced by worldwide dam building, few have received the compensation they deserve. Arundhati Roy and the Narmada Valley campaigners have long argued that alternative methods are capable of meeting Gujarat’s water needs; the WCD report echoes this view, stressing the need to focus on renewable energy, recycling, better irrigation, and reducing water losses.
The battle over the Narmada Dam has been long and bitter. However, there has been a surreal new twist. Arundhati Roy and two leading members of the protest movement, Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan, have been accused by five lawyers of having viciously attacked them during a December 13, 2000, protest, outside the Supreme Court in Delhi, against the Court’s decision to allow work on the Sardar Sarovar Project to proceed. Roy and Patkar allegedly called on the crowd to kill the lawyers, and Bhushan grabbed one by the hair and also allegedly threatened him with death.
All this somehow happened under the unconcerned noses of a large detachment of policemen. Curiously, the affray also passed unrecorded by the filmmaker Sanjay Kak, who was covering the demonstration with a video camera. And it was later revealed that Mr. Bhushan had in fact been somewhere else entirely at the time.
In spite of the demonstrable absurdity of these charges, however, the Supreme Court decided to entertain the lawyers’ petition and served the three activists with criminal-contempt notices. In doing so it ignored its own stipulated rules and procedures. The lawyers’ petition was incorrectly filled out and did not receive, as it should have, the written support of the attorney general. Most important of all, the Supreme Court did not try to authenticate the claims in the petition, even though video and eyewitness evidence was readily available.
Summoned to court, Arundhati Roy delivered a characteristically trenchant affidavit in which she said that the Court’s willingness to haul her and her colleagues up before it on such flimsy charges “indicates a disquieting inclination on the part of the court to silence criticism and muzzle dissent, to harass and intimidate those who disagree with it.” The Supreme Court insisted that she withdraw this affidavit; she refused, and the Court is now considering contempt-of-court charges that could send her to jail. She is, as she told a British journalist, “now deeper in the soup.”
The Court should realize that by pursuing Arundhati Roy, Medha Patkar, and Prashant Bhushan in this fashion, it places itself before the court of world opinion. The U.S. Supreme Court has just disgraced itself internationally by carrying out the judicial coup that made George W. Bush “president.” (Two authoritative new books, by Alan Dershowitz and Vincent Bugliosi, leave no doubt that the U.S. Supremes made a politically motivated judgment that already looks like very bad law.) Can it be that the Supreme Court of the “world’s largest democracy” will emulate that of the world’s most powerful country by revealing itself to be biased—in this case against free speech—and prepared to act as the “muscle” for a particular interest group—in this case the powerful coalition of political and financial interests behind the Narmada Dam?
Only by abandoning its pursuit of Arundhati Roy and the Narmada Valley campaigners can the Supreme Court escape this judgment. It should do so at once. *28
SEPTEMBER 2001: TELLURIDE
In the beginning were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the little town of Telluride, Colorado—originally To Hell You Ride, so named by the nineteenth-century silver miners who tobogganed down the mountains to what was then a wild place full of whorehouses—was the site of their first bank robbery. Then came the movie, and Robert Redford named his Sundance Institute after his most famous role. The Sundance Film Festival became a celebrated showcase for new, independent filmmakers. Telluride itself became the USA’s other most famous festival for independent cinema, playing the role, you could say, of Butch to Sundance’s Sundance.
I’m writing this in Telluride’s thin air, amid spectacular mountain scenery, at the end of the town’s twenty-eighth such film festival (to declare an interest, I was this year’s guest director). Over the past four days, a feast of good movies has been reminding crowds of passionate moviegoers why they fell in love with the cinema in the days before the coming of the giant multiplexes and the domination of the first weekend’s gross.
Anyone who’s been going to the movies lately could be forgiven for thinking it might be more fun to stay home and stare at a wall. Planet of the Apes is, well, unkind to primates. A much-praised thriller, The Score, turns out to be a pedestrian, do-it-by-numbers heist movie. (The hackneyed figure of the old pro on his one last big job can also be seen in a somewhat better British film, Sexy Beast.) The Julia Roberts–Catherine Zeta-Jones “comedy,” America’s Sweethearts, is a movie-biz in-joke that nobody got. Blow sucks. The one genuine movie thrill on offer of late has been Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Redux, and even this contains disappointments. The restored “French plantation sequence” is the biggest; it’s too expository, not fabulist enough, for its place close to the heart of darkness. It’s merely eccentric at a point in the film when insanity ought to rule. And Brando’s performance as Kurtz hasn’t improved with time (and a little re-editing). Still, given the high ambition of the filmmaking, and performances such as the great Robert Duvall’s (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”), and given, above all, the dross on offer elsewhere, it’s easy to forgive its trespasses. Apocalypse is a Himalaya among anthills.
Listen to young filmmakers in L.A., and even the most talented of them will tell you that they have no choice, they have to bow down before the power of the marketplace and dilute their art to make their films commercially viable. There’s an answer to this playing to packed houses in Telluride: the smash-hit French film Amélie, the story of an isolated girl who has always lived in her imagination until one day she starts trying to impose her startling inner reality upon the external world. The film bursts with visual inventiveness and a gently surreal cinematic wit, and its huge European success stands as a reproach t
o all those filmmakers who find compromise an easier option than originality.
The daring and radicalism of the feature films being financed by the cable-television channel HBO, a selection of which has been a highlight of the Telluride festival, stand as a further reproach to the pusillanimity of so much big studio fare. (Look out in particular for Agnieszka Holland’s Shot in the Heart, an adaptation of Mikal Gilmore’s brilliant book about his murderer brother Gary.) And some fine films from places not thought to be at the center of world cinema offer further proof that the center does not hold. I was particularly impressed by the style and grace of Danis Tanovic’s first feature, No Man’s Land, in which wounded Bosnian and Serb soldiers, caught in a trench between opposing front lines, become a vision in microcosm of their vicious, absurdist war. It’s as if Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon were bleeding in a trench, and when Godot comes, he turns out to be wearing the impotent blue helmet of the UNPROFOR troops. (“Here come the Smurfs!” is the movie’s funniest line.) It struck me that Hollywood would have insisted that the wounded soldiers should gradually befriend each other, their common humanity overcoming the craziness of their war; and one of the most tough-minded, as well as bitterly funny, virtues of Tanovic’s movie is that he makes the opposite happen, leading to a bloody climax as blackly satirical as Catch-22—so “feel-bad” an ending that no L.A. producer would have tolerated it.
In Telluride, this year, we screened Andrei Tarkovsky’s great movie Solaris, to honor a sci-fi masterpiece before the contemporary plague of remakes comes to obliterate it. This exploration of the unreliability of reality and the power of the human unconscious, this great examination of the limits of rationalism and the perverse power of even the most ill-fated love, needs to be seen as widely as possible before it’s transformed by Steven Soderbergh and James Cameron into what they ludicrously threaten will be “2001 meets Last Tango in Paris.” What, sex in space with floating butter? Tarkovsky must be turning in his grave.
Another success from the past was Satyajit Ray’s enchanting film for children, The Golden Fortress, a film whose lack of international recognition always distressed its great director. Perhaps its huge impact here will finally earn this neglected film a release. Today Telluride, tomorrow the world?
There are two kinds of film festivals: there are the mega-hyped, hoopla-infested selling circuses like Cannes and even Sundance; and there is Telluride, where no prizes are given, and where, if people have come to buy and sell, they keep pretty quiet about it. It is extraordinarily exciting, in this age of the triumph of capitalism, to discover an event dedicated not to commerce but to love. And if that sounds old-fashioned and starry-eyed, so be it. The cinema was always in the business of gazing at the stars.
A POSTSCRIPT
To Hell You Ride, indeed. On September 11, 2001, just eight days after the end of the film festival, two terrorist-hijacked civilian aircraft brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. A third smashed into the Pentagon. In Pennsylvania a fourth plane crashed short of its target, thanks to the selfless heroism of its passengers, who fought the terrorists and frustrated their designs. How idyllically innocent our Telluride days at once began to seem: as if we had been cast out of Eden, holding the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in our trembling hands.
OCTOBER 2001: THE ATTACKS ON AMERICA
In January 2000’s column I wrote that “the defining struggle of the new age would be between Terrorism and Security,” and fretted that to live by the security experts’ worst-case scenarios might be to surrender too many of our liberties to the invisible shadow-warriors of the secret world. Democracy requires visibility, I argued, and in the struggle between security and freedom we must always err on the side of freedom. On Tuesday, September 11, however, the worst-case scenario came true.
They broke our city. I’m among the newest of New Yorkers, but even people who have never set foot in Manhattan have felt her wounds deeply, because New York in our time is the beating heart of the visible world, tough-talking, spirit-dazzling, Walt Whitman’s “city of orgies, walks and joys,” his “proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!” To this bright capital of the visible, the forces of invisibility have dealt a dreadful blow. No need to say how dreadful; we all saw it, are all changed by it, and must now ensure that the wound is not mortal, that the world of what is seen triumphs over what is cloaked, what is perceptible only through the effects of its awful deeds.
In making free societies safe—safer—from terrorism, our civil liberties will inevitably be compromised. *29 But in return for freedom’s partial erosion, we have a right to expect that our cities, water, planes, and children really will be better protected than they have been. The West’s response to the September 11 attacks will be judged in large measure by whether people begin to feel safe once again in their homes, their workplaces, their daily lives. This is the confidence we have lost and must regain.
Next: the question of the counterattack. Yes, we must send our shadow-warriors against theirs, and hope that ours prevail. But this secret war alone cannot bring victory. We will also need a public, political, and diplomatic offensive whose aim must be the early resolution of some of the world’s thorniest problems: above all the battle between Israel and the Palestinian people for space, dignity, recognition, and survival. Better judgment will be required on all sides in future. No more Sudanese aspirin factories to be bombed, please. And now that wise American heads appear to have understood that it would be wrong to bomb the impoverished, oppressed Afghan people in retaliation for their tyrannous masters’ misdeeds, they might apply that wisdom, retrospectively, to what was done to the impoverished, oppressed people of Iraq. It’s time to stop making enemies and start making friends.
To say this is in no way to join in the savaging of America by sections of the Left that has been among the most unpleasant consequences of the terrorists’ attacks on the United States. “The problem with Americans is . . .” “What America needs to understand . . .” There has been a lot of sanctimonious moral relativism around lately, usually prefaced by such phrases as these. A country that has just suffered the most devastating terrorist attack in history, a country in a state of deep mourning and horrible grief, is being told, heartlessly, that it is to blame for its own citizens’ deaths. (“Did we deserve this, sir?” a bewildered worker at “ground zero” asked a visiting British journalist recently. I find the grave courtesy of that “sir” quite astonishing.)
Let’s be clear about why this bien-pensant anti-American onslaught is such appalling rubbish. Terrorism is the murder of the innocent; this time, it was mass murder. To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions. Furthermore, terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate complaints by illegitimate means. The terrorist wraps himself in the world’s grievances to cloak his true motives. Whatever the killers were trying to achieve, it seems improbable that building a better world was part of it.
The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. These are tyrants, not Muslims. (Islam is tough on suicides, who are doomed to repeat their deaths through all eternity. However, there needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains. If the West needs to understand its Unabombers and McVeighs, Islam needs to face up to its bin Ladens.)
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no-brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World
Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I’m against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list—yes, even the short skirts and dancing—are worth dying for?
The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his worldview, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.
How to defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized. Don’t let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.
NOVEMBER 2001: NOT ABOUT ISLAM?
This isn’t about Islam.” The world’s leaders have been repeating this mantra for weeks, partly in the virtuous hope of deterring reprisal attacks on innocent Muslims living in the West, partly because if the United States is to maintain its coalition against terror it can’t afford to allege that Islam and terrorism are in any way related.
The trouble with this necessary disclaimer is that it isn’t true. If this isn’t about Islam, why the worldwide Muslim demonstrations in support of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida? Why did those ten thousand men armed with swords and axes mass on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, answering some mullah’s call to jihad? Why are the war’s first British casualties three Muslim men who died fighting on the Taliban side?
Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 Page 39
