“It’s all fictional,” my father interrupted when I told him I had seen Stephen Geghan’s Syriana. I tried to explain that I understood that the film was fictional, but he continued defensively.
“It’s a polemic. It’s like Michael Moore.”
As the former CEO of Mobil Saudi Arabia, he is used to being portrayed as the bad guy. The irony was that he had not seen the film, and that there are in fact no clear -cut “good” or “evil” characters in the film, not even the scheming oil execs. Unlike Moore’s movies, Syriana is not a harsh judgement, but rather a warning.
I grew up in Saudi Arabia. My father worked in Jeddah for almost six years and later in Riyadh for over two years. The lilting call to prayer, soft green mosques’ lights on the desert horizon, poolside family gatherings and even the strawberry juice served in lieu of alcohol at business functions were all as familiar to me as the streets of New York City. In Syriana, Geghan excels at comparing parallel clips of separate characters, stories and cultures, as different as Beirut and Manhattan, and showing how they intersect and relate to one another. The tagline for the film is “Everything is connected,” and this is where the element of nonfiction comes in.
The West and the Arab world have more in common than we realize. The prince who makes a business deal in the desert while tending to his falcon drew a laugh from the man next to me, yet it was not unlike the next scene in which a Texan oil executive talks shop while hunting on his ranch. Later, a CIA agent hands off a picture of the honest, but not pro-American Prince Nasir and says, “I want you to take him from his hotel, drug him, put him in the front of a car and run a truck into it at 50 mph.” This, to me, is not all that different from terrorism.
Oil is the greatest natural resource the world has ever known; much of what’s left is in the Middle East. The measures that our government will go to for it are astounding, and the Middle East must suffer the consequences. I have seen this not only in the papers and now from Hollywood, but in my own childhood as well.
Matt Damon plays the American business man who becomes the aid to Prince Nasir. He reminds me of my father, maybe not for his looks, but surely for his charisma and certainly his intelligence. Unlike many of the characters in the film, my father seemed truly concerned about both sides of the table when he did business in Saudi.
Damon’s character yells at the prince, “You want to know what the business world thinks of you? We think a hundred years ago you were living out here in tents in the desert chopping each others heads off, and that’s exactly where you’re gonna be in another hundred.” The prince turns to him and replies, “Tell me something I don’t already know.”
Together, Damon and the prince plan to build the country’s infrastructure so that when its oil runs out, this prediction will not come true. Yet the film ends with violence and corruption, from both the Arab and American sides. Disillusioned, Damon returns to his family in the United States.
My father retired and also moved back to the States where my mom and I had been living for the past year. Now, he is on the board of AMIDEAST, a nonprofit which strengthens the ties between Americans and Arabs, and ANERA, which provides education, medical supplies and job training to Palestinians and Palestinian refugees. These groups aim to improve conditions so that someday the plot of Syriana might seem less plausible.
Many people have no idea what is going on in this part of the world, but it is all over the paper. It is where our troops are, the home of the fastest-growing religion, the source of the power for our cars and the heat for our homes. It is what influences almost every piece of legislation in the government. We need to begin to see these connections and see how our actions are affecting the rest of the world because, if nothing else, the rest of the world will eventually affect us.
