Blowing Smoke - by Judith Miller > Tablet Magazine
A still from Carlos.
Film en Stock
Modern terrorism has shaped our world in dramatic and obscure ways:
Washington’s unbridled power to read our emails and tap our phones,
President Barack Obama’s extraordinary decision to kill an American
citizen hiding in Yemen because his sermons have inspired terrorist
attacks, the lines at airport security as federal agents confiscate such
potentially lethal items as toothpaste, cuticle scissors, and Diet Coke.
But long before al-Qaida and Sept. 11, long before virgin-seeking
suicide bombers began blowing up embassies, U.N. offices, churches,
mosques, and weddings, long before beheadings made Islamist terror
synonymous with barbarism, long before IEDs and VBIEDs exploded into
Western consciousness, and long before the lines of bearded fanatics
were injected with tranquilizers and packed off to Guantanamo and CIA
black-site prisons, there was Carlos.
“Carlos the Jackal,” as the press fawningly called Ilich Ramirez
Sanchez, was the first modern terrorist superstar. For nearly 20 years
beginning in the mid-1970s, he staged or masterminded spectacular,
made-for-the-media attacks, initially for the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine, a radical splinter of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine
Liberation Organization. Then, after becoming a radical superhero on a
par with Che, he took refuge in the Eastern Bloc and ended his career as
a thuggish, bloated egomaniac paid to kill on a fee-for-service basis by
some of the Mideast’s most odious regimes.
Now the attention he so fiercely coveted has finally been paid with
Carlos, a five-plus hour French film that won acclaim at Cannes last
spring. But he is still not satisfied. The film is not accurate, he
recently complained in a jailhouse radio broadcast from Poissy high
security prison, in France, where he is serving a life sentence for the
1976 murders of two French secret agents and an informer. His commando
team, for instance, was not a bunch of “hysterical men waving submachine
guns and threatening people,” as the film suggested, he said. They were
“professionals,” he declared, “commandos of a very high standard.”
French filmmaker Olivier Assayas evidently disagrees. His bio-epic of
the life and times of the Venezuelan-born revolutionary—brilliantly
portrayed by Edgar Ramirez, another Venezuelan who is not related to his
namesake—depicts Carlos as a brutal, charismatic narcissist who
pleasures himself through violence. Members of his band of international
revolutionaries are portrayed as vicious, fanatical amateurs.
Filling three DVDs at a running time of 5 hours and 19 minutes, Assayas’
film requires stamina and a strong stomach for violence and talk about
political violence. But the film is far from hagiography—and it is, in
its own way, a masterpiece that not only provides a riveting portrait of
a celebrity-seeking killer but indicts the intellectuals and media
promoters who helped transform a vain thug into a romantic figure,
helping perpetuate the leftist myth of the terrorist as freedom fighter.
Though al-Qaida is never directly mentioned in the film, Assayas clearly
sees a connection between the leftist assaults of the ’70s and the
religiously inspired terrorism that would supplant it 30 years later.
Although I haven’t seen the two-and-a-half-hour-long condensed version
prepared for commercial distribution, the longer, uncut film is a
nuanced portrayal of the descent from alleged revolutionary fervor into
self-satisfied, self-serving violence justified in language
long-stripped of meaning or relevance. Carlos may talk the talk, but he
knows all too well that his ideological justifications for revolutionary
terrorism are a simply a pretext for doing what comes naturally to
him—killing.
Carlos has flaws. But it is hard to think of a better recent film about
the nature of modern terrorism or its practitioners. In December, the
New York Film Critics Circle awardedCarlos its prize for the best
foreign-language film.
The movie, divided roughly into three parts, opens curiously, with
Israel’s assassination of Mohammed Boudia, a leader of the militant
Palestinian Black September group, in June 1973. The car-bomb murder
outrages the brash young Carlos and prompts him to try to advance his
fledgling career by asking to succeed the murdered martyr as the Popular
Front’s London terror chief. No mention is made, however, of the
massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich the year before—an
outrage that stunned the world and led Israel to dispatch a hit team to
kill Boudia and others who planned or conducted the operation.
Waddi Haddad, then the Popular Front’s Beirut-based leader, quickly
senses possibilities in this brash young Westerner. Carlos is given
membership in the Front, a small pistol, and only five bullets—yet
another suggestion that this Palestinian terror group, which ran very
profitable extortion and protection rackets in the Persian Gulf and
received large subsidies from various Arab governments, was made up of
desperate and impoverished fedayeen.
The film quickly shifts to “new left” London, where Ilich, the son of a
Communist-sympathizing Venezuelan lawyer, has just chosen “Carlos” as
his nom de guerre. In a posh restaurant, he argues revolutionary
doctrine with his gorgeous girlfriend, a fellow leftist. Chiding Carlos
for not having attended a protest against Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet, she says the Chilean people need his support. Demonstrations
bore him, he replies. They serve no purpose. Chile’s generals and the
CIA don’t care about their protests. War demands action. She must commit
to the revolution, which means supporting his new group and its as yet
unspecified actions against the imperialists.
Guerrilla action against well-armed states is doomed to failure, she
tells him. The balance of power is against the terrorists. But Carlos
insists that the under-armed Viet Cong had crushed the “gringos.” His
path, too, will lead to glory.
“Is that what you want?” she shoots back, accusing him of “petit
bourgeois arrogance.”
True glory, he replies, is acting without credit on behalf of the
revolution.
Anyone politically active in the late ’60s and ’70s will recall such
heated discussions, which Assayas recreates with such perfect pitch that
one feels the director’s own sense of nostalgia, if not for the violence
that such conversations justified then for the rhythms of the talk. The
heady counter-culture is faithfully depicted—the free, guiltless sex,
the pounding strains of rock and seductive South American ballads.
Carlos’ sideburns are neatly trimmed; his cream-colored suit, with no
tie, exquisitely cut, his black leather jacket is well worn with a
pistol shoved into his skin-tight jeans. The Belmondo of terror sports a
black “Che” beret and trademark sunglasses. It’s all a far cry from the
caves in Tora Bora.
Yet the idea of a more perfect form of human existence is equally alive
to these amoral hedonists as it is to their dour successors. No TV sets
are to be seen in Assayas’ version of the radical underground.
Revolutionaries prefer playing guitar, dancing, and singing together as
equals. Friends and fellow killers drink, talk, and chain smoke before
and after sex and their terrorist attacks, which are portrayed in the
film with equal demonic fervor. There are lengthy static shots of Carlos
nude, basking in his own virility. The alternation of narcissism,
white-walled art-gallery-like spaces, and sudden violence sucks the
viewer into a cold place that destroys any romantic illusions about
political violence that the art direction of the movie might nourish.
The second part of the film is a highlight reel of Carlos’ terrorist
career, in which the achievement of deadly spectacles requires the
intricate manipulation of—and finally, manipulation by—cynical Middle
Eastern regimes, the former Soviet Union, its Eastern European
satellites, and Palestinian revolutionary groups. The linchpin of this
segment is Carlos’ notorious attack on OPEC headquarters in Vienna and
his kidnapping of several dozen oil ministers in 1975. The attack is
brutal, but this is a more innocent time—an era before concrete Jersey
barriers surrounded official buildings and private security guards
manned the entrances to company headquarters and wealthy homes. Carlos
and his multinational crew of fanatics simply barge into the building
and quickly seize control. (KSM, eat your heart out.)
After three guards are killed, Carlos flies his hostages to the Middle
East in a borrowed jet. But he’s outmaneuvered by duplicitous Algerians
and loses control of his operation. Cornered, he accepts a lucrative
deal to release the hostages, and he is exiled to a popular Front terror
camp in Yemen, where he is ousted by Haddad for insubordination.
Carlos and his mostly German comrades then go freelance and focus
increasingly on finding work and well-funded patrons. Syria pays the tab
for a while, helping Carlos create arms-shipment routes through eastern
Europe in exchange for attacks on designated targets. For a brief time
in Budapest and Damascus, Carlos lives what seems a semi-normal
life—marrying Magdalena Kopp, his beautiful German-revolutionary
companion, and fathering a child. He dotes on his daughter when he is
not busy killing on demand and philandering in the name of revolution.
While Carlos and his pals continue espousing their commitment to
“fighting for socialism” and utter such slogans as “the only struggle
that matters is between the oppressed and imperialists,” the words ring
hollow. A sense of desperation builds.
The film’s turning point is the destruction of the Berlin Wall and
collapse of the Soviet Union. Suddenly Carlos and his not-so-merry
mercenaries are a risky embarrassment to their patrons. The world has
changed, a cynical Syrian paymaster tells them coolly, ousting Carlos
and his group’s German co-founder from their villas. Even the CIA
considers him a “historical curiosity,” a “Communist windbag.” Carlos
and his gang are forced to live by their wits and their not
inconsiderable linguistic resources: English, German, French, Spanish,
and Arabic are all spoken convincingly by Ramirez and the other actors.
The last third of the film depicts the betrayal and capture of an aging,
paunchy Lothario, still sufficiently vain to undergo liposuction on his
love handles in a Khartoum hospital. Magdalena has gone—taking their
child to live with Carlos’ wealthy brother, Lenin, in Venezuela. Another
younger revolutionary tends lovingly to his needs. He tells visiting
Iranian agents that their struggle against American imperialism is his
fight too, and that he and his new wife have become Muslims, a
conversion of obvious convenience that fails to impress his polite but
indifferent new patrons.
Carlos still pretends that he is the cock of the walk, but visions of
feather-dusters now surround him. The era of leftist revolutionary
terror has ended. Counter-terrorism is rising along with the new world
order, which is closing in on him.
In fact, Carlos has long become indistinguishable from the prostitutes
who pleasure him, all in the same business. The film deftly makes the
point in Europe, when a prostitute he has struck for daring to demand
more money turns out to be a confidential informer for a security
service.
Sudan’s Islamic government, led by the suave, crafty Hassan al-Turabi,
offers Carlos protection but then sells him out to France. In 1994,
acting on an American tip, French police employ Sudanese soldiers to
kidnap him from a Sudanese government guest house as he recovers from
surgery. Bound and drugged, Carlos is bundled onto a private jet and
flown to France, where he has been incarcerated since.
Although the movie ends with a scroll of the deaths, disappearances, and
incarcerations of the various members of Carlos’ gang, France has
permitted the Jackal, now 60, to operate his theater of the absurd from
his cell. Earlier last year, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, his latest wife and
also his lawyer, sued the film’s producers to block its release because
he had not been given the right to vet or edit it. The judge sided with
the film’s producers. But Carlos would not relent. He didn’t give “a
damn” about the “myth of Carlos,” he told his radio audience. But he did
care about historical accuracy. It was Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s erratic
autocrat, and not Saddam Hussein who had ordered the OPEC attack, he
insisted. And he didn’t smoke cigarettes. “I have smoked cigars since
1969,” he said in the radio interview. “Everyone knows that.”
A scene from Carlos, showing the 1974 bombing of the drugstore Saint
Germain in Paris:
--
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/56970/blowing-smoke/
Via InstaFetch
A still from Carlos.
Film en Stock
Modern terrorism has shaped our world in dramatic and obscure ways:
Washington’s unbridled power to read our emails and tap our phones,
President Barack Obama’s extraordinary decision to kill an American
citizen hiding in Yemen because his sermons have inspired terrorist
attacks, the lines at airport security as federal agents confiscate such
potentially lethal items as toothpaste, cuticle scissors, and Diet Coke.
But long before al-Qaida and Sept. 11, long before virgin-seeking
suicide bombers began blowing up embassies, U.N. offices, churches,
mosques, and weddings, long before beheadings made Islamist terror
synonymous with barbarism, long before IEDs and VBIEDs exploded into
Western consciousness, and long before the lines of bearded fanatics
were injected with tranquilizers and packed off to Guantanamo and CIA
black-site prisons, there was Carlos.
“Carlos the Jackal,” as the press fawningly called Ilich Ramirez
Sanchez, was the first modern terrorist superstar. For nearly 20 years
beginning in the mid-1970s, he staged or masterminded spectacular,
made-for-the-media attacks, initially for the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine, a radical splinter of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine
Liberation Organization. Then, after becoming a radical superhero on a
par with Che, he took refuge in the Eastern Bloc and ended his career as
a thuggish, bloated egomaniac paid to kill on a fee-for-service basis by
some of the Mideast’s most odious regimes.
Now the attention he so fiercely coveted has finally been paid with
Carlos, a five-plus hour French film that won acclaim at Cannes last
spring. But he is still not satisfied. The film is not accurate, he
recently complained in a jailhouse radio broadcast from Poissy high
security prison, in France, where he is serving a life sentence for the
1976 murders of two French secret agents and an informer. His commando
team, for instance, was not a bunch of “hysterical men waving submachine
guns and threatening people,” as the film suggested, he said. They were
“professionals,” he declared, “commandos of a very high standard.”
French filmmaker Olivier Assayas evidently disagrees. His bio-epic of
the life and times of the Venezuelan-born revolutionary—brilliantly
portrayed by Edgar Ramirez, another Venezuelan who is not related to his
namesake—depicts Carlos as a brutal, charismatic narcissist who
pleasures himself through violence. Members of his band of international
revolutionaries are portrayed as vicious, fanatical amateurs.
Filling three DVDs at a running time of 5 hours and 19 minutes, Assayas’
film requires stamina and a strong stomach for violence and talk about
political violence. But the film is far from hagiography—and it is, in
its own way, a masterpiece that not only provides a riveting portrait of
a celebrity-seeking killer but indicts the intellectuals and media
promoters who helped transform a vain thug into a romantic figure,
helping perpetuate the leftist myth of the terrorist as freedom fighter.
Though al-Qaida is never directly mentioned in the film, Assayas clearly
sees a connection between the leftist assaults of the ’70s and the
religiously inspired terrorism that would supplant it 30 years later.
Although I haven’t seen the two-and-a-half-hour-long condensed version
prepared for commercial distribution, the longer, uncut film is a
nuanced portrayal of the descent from alleged revolutionary fervor into
self-satisfied, self-serving violence justified in language
long-stripped of meaning or relevance. Carlos may talk the talk, but he
knows all too well that his ideological justifications for revolutionary
terrorism are a simply a pretext for doing what comes naturally to
him—killing.
Carlos has flaws. But it is hard to think of a better recent film about
the nature of modern terrorism or its practitioners. In December, the
New York Film Critics Circle awardedCarlos its prize for the best
foreign-language film.
The movie, divided roughly into three parts, opens curiously, with
Israel’s assassination of Mohammed Boudia, a leader of the militant
Palestinian Black September group, in June 1973. The car-bomb murder
outrages the brash young Carlos and prompts him to try to advance his
fledgling career by asking to succeed the murdered martyr as the Popular
Front’s London terror chief. No mention is made, however, of the
massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich the year before—an
outrage that stunned the world and led Israel to dispatch a hit team to
kill Boudia and others who planned or conducted the operation.
Waddi Haddad, then the Popular Front’s Beirut-based leader, quickly
senses possibilities in this brash young Westerner. Carlos is given
membership in the Front, a small pistol, and only five bullets—yet
another suggestion that this Palestinian terror group, which ran very
profitable extortion and protection rackets in the Persian Gulf and
received large subsidies from various Arab governments, was made up of
desperate and impoverished fedayeen.
The film quickly shifts to “new left” London, where Ilich, the son of a
Communist-sympathizing Venezuelan lawyer, has just chosen “Carlos” as
his nom de guerre. In a posh restaurant, he argues revolutionary
doctrine with his gorgeous girlfriend, a fellow leftist. Chiding Carlos
for not having attended a protest against Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet, she says the Chilean people need his support. Demonstrations
bore him, he replies. They serve no purpose. Chile’s generals and the
CIA don’t care about their protests. War demands action. She must commit
to the revolution, which means supporting his new group and its as yet
unspecified actions against the imperialists.
Guerrilla action against well-armed states is doomed to failure, she
tells him. The balance of power is against the terrorists. But Carlos
insists that the under-armed Viet Cong had crushed the “gringos.” His
path, too, will lead to glory.
“Is that what you want?” she shoots back, accusing him of “petit
bourgeois arrogance.”
True glory, he replies, is acting without credit on behalf of the
revolution.
Anyone politically active in the late ’60s and ’70s will recall such
heated discussions, which Assayas recreates with such perfect pitch that
one feels the director’s own sense of nostalgia, if not for the violence
that such conversations justified then for the rhythms of the talk. The
heady counter-culture is faithfully depicted—the free, guiltless sex,
the pounding strains of rock and seductive South American ballads.
Carlos’ sideburns are neatly trimmed; his cream-colored suit, with no
tie, exquisitely cut, his black leather jacket is well worn with a
pistol shoved into his skin-tight jeans. The Belmondo of terror sports a
black “Che” beret and trademark sunglasses. It’s all a far cry from the
caves in Tora Bora.
Yet the idea of a more perfect form of human existence is equally alive
to these amoral hedonists as it is to their dour successors. No TV sets
are to be seen in Assayas’ version of the radical underground.
Revolutionaries prefer playing guitar, dancing, and singing together as
equals. Friends and fellow killers drink, talk, and chain smoke before
and after sex and their terrorist attacks, which are portrayed in the
film with equal demonic fervor. There are lengthy static shots of Carlos
nude, basking in his own virility. The alternation of narcissism,
white-walled art-gallery-like spaces, and sudden violence sucks the
viewer into a cold place that destroys any romantic illusions about
political violence that the art direction of the movie might nourish.
The second part of the film is a highlight reel of Carlos’ terrorist
career, in which the achievement of deadly spectacles requires the
intricate manipulation of—and finally, manipulation by—cynical Middle
Eastern regimes, the former Soviet Union, its Eastern European
satellites, and Palestinian revolutionary groups. The linchpin of this
segment is Carlos’ notorious attack on OPEC headquarters in Vienna and
his kidnapping of several dozen oil ministers in 1975. The attack is
brutal, but this is a more innocent time—an era before concrete Jersey
barriers surrounded official buildings and private security guards
manned the entrances to company headquarters and wealthy homes. Carlos
and his multinational crew of fanatics simply barge into the building
and quickly seize control. (KSM, eat your heart out.)
After three guards are killed, Carlos flies his hostages to the Middle
East in a borrowed jet. But he’s outmaneuvered by duplicitous Algerians
and loses control of his operation. Cornered, he accepts a lucrative
deal to release the hostages, and he is exiled to a popular Front terror
camp in Yemen, where he is ousted by Haddad for insubordination.
Carlos and his mostly German comrades then go freelance and focus
increasingly on finding work and well-funded patrons. Syria pays the tab
for a while, helping Carlos create arms-shipment routes through eastern
Europe in exchange for attacks on designated targets. For a brief time
in Budapest and Damascus, Carlos lives what seems a semi-normal
life—marrying Magdalena Kopp, his beautiful German-revolutionary
companion, and fathering a child. He dotes on his daughter when he is
not busy killing on demand and philandering in the name of revolution.
While Carlos and his pals continue espousing their commitment to
“fighting for socialism” and utter such slogans as “the only struggle
that matters is between the oppressed and imperialists,” the words ring
hollow. A sense of desperation builds.
The film’s turning point is the destruction of the Berlin Wall and
collapse of the Soviet Union. Suddenly Carlos and his not-so-merry
mercenaries are a risky embarrassment to their patrons. The world has
changed, a cynical Syrian paymaster tells them coolly, ousting Carlos
and his group’s German co-founder from their villas. Even the CIA
considers him a “historical curiosity,” a “Communist windbag.” Carlos
and his gang are forced to live by their wits and their not
inconsiderable linguistic resources: English, German, French, Spanish,
and Arabic are all spoken convincingly by Ramirez and the other actors.
The last third of the film depicts the betrayal and capture of an aging,
paunchy Lothario, still sufficiently vain to undergo liposuction on his
love handles in a Khartoum hospital. Magdalena has gone—taking their
child to live with Carlos’ wealthy brother, Lenin, in Venezuela. Another
younger revolutionary tends lovingly to his needs. He tells visiting
Iranian agents that their struggle against American imperialism is his
fight too, and that he and his new wife have become Muslims, a
conversion of obvious convenience that fails to impress his polite but
indifferent new patrons.
Carlos still pretends that he is the cock of the walk, but visions of
feather-dusters now surround him. The era of leftist revolutionary
terror has ended. Counter-terrorism is rising along with the new world
order, which is closing in on him.
In fact, Carlos has long become indistinguishable from the prostitutes
who pleasure him, all in the same business. The film deftly makes the
point in Europe, when a prostitute he has struck for daring to demand
more money turns out to be a confidential informer for a security
service.
Sudan’s Islamic government, led by the suave, crafty Hassan al-Turabi,
offers Carlos protection but then sells him out to France. In 1994,
acting on an American tip, French police employ Sudanese soldiers to
kidnap him from a Sudanese government guest house as he recovers from
surgery. Bound and drugged, Carlos is bundled onto a private jet and
flown to France, where he has been incarcerated since.
Although the movie ends with a scroll of the deaths, disappearances, and
incarcerations of the various members of Carlos’ gang, France has
permitted the Jackal, now 60, to operate his theater of the absurd from
his cell. Earlier last year, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, his latest wife and
also his lawyer, sued the film’s producers to block its release because
he had not been given the right to vet or edit it. The judge sided with
the film’s producers. But Carlos would not relent. He didn’t give “a
damn” about the “myth of Carlos,” he told his radio audience. But he did
care about historical accuracy. It was Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s erratic
autocrat, and not Saddam Hussein who had ordered the OPEC attack, he
insisted. And he didn’t smoke cigarettes. “I have smoked cigars since
1969,” he said in the radio interview. “Everyone knows that.”
A scene from Carlos, showing the 1974 bombing of the drugstore Saint
Germain in Paris:
--
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/56970/blowing-smoke/
Via InstaFetch
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