Old Feelings in the New World

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Americas pre-attack lack of interest in things beyond our shores wasnt only political. Culturally too, and for decades, we have ignored the rest of the world. Fifty years ago, a broad minority of Americans went regularly to foreign movies and imported plays, listened to the French chansonniers, read Camus and Moravia. Midcult European culture was familiar enough that Sid Caesar and his crew could devise comedy skits parodying it. That couldnt happen today. The culture has devolved into an insular entertainment, needing no infusion of foreign blood. When it comes to pop culture, we arrogantly think: we are the world.

Oddly, so does the world. If America is an empire, its an empire of entertainment. In nearly every country where our movies may be freely shown, they are more popular than the local product. Our popular music is everywhere, and our fashions and sub-fashions; walk down any city street in Europe or East Asia or Latin America and you will see somebody in a Hard Rock Cafe T shirt or a Harvard University sweatshirt. You could even say that pop culture was an important tool in capitalisms victory over Soviet communism. Our icons were Hollywood and rock n roll and the Gap; theirs were Moscow and coveralls. Pop culture, in its flaming vigor and naughtiness, is one reason most of the world wants to be us — and one excuse for Islamic fundamentalists to hate us.

But we lost something when we relied on ourselves for almost all our cultural input. We missed out on the infinite variety of other melodies, images, visions, voices. It amounted to a kind of cultural censorship, where even to propose paying attention to anything outside the great American culture machine was to risk derision. In the TIME magazine Arts cluster, I could usually raise a titter or groan by suggesting a review of a new Iranian film; others thought of the movie output of the Islamic Republic only as my silly special interest, my annoying little quirk. I was almost embarrassed to acknowledge, when I came back from the Cannes Film Festival this May, that my favorite film was Iranian: Mohsen Makhmalbafs "Kandahar," about an Iranian womans trek across the sands of Afghanistan to rescue her sister. Yet scenes from the film continue to haunt me. I think, if the film were ever to be released here (it currently has no U.S. distributor), they would haunt you.

In a village school run by the Taliban, one comely lad loads a Kalashnikov rifle and obediently proclaims its virtues — it "kills the living and mutilates the dead" — as a mullah praises his recitation. ("Weapons," a visiting American says, "are the only modern thing in Afghanistan.") The desert is pocked with landmines; some are concealed in dolls that lure children to pick them up and lose a hand. At a Red Cross outpost, artificial legs rain from the sky in parachutes dropped from a plane, and the one-legged Afghani men scramble out of the shelter and across the dunes to retrieve them. A kind of "Lawrence of Arabia" of the worlds underclass, "Kandahar" uses its gorgeous vistas as an ironic backdrop for its depiction of a people struggling to exist on the meanest terms, bartering for food and prostheses, soldiering through whats left of their lives.

There are many reasons — some frivolous, some not-so — for Americans to ignore or dismiss "Kandahar." It doesnt star George Clooney and Julia Roberts; Tim Burton didnt direct it; the closing credits are not underscored by a power-pop ballad. Also, it was supervised not by Jeffrey Katzenberg but by the clerics and bureaucrats of a nation on the U.S. list of "state sponsors of terrorism." That makes it all the more remarkable that the film gives a human face to a horrifying situation. From the land of the militant imams comes an intimate, epic portrait of a peoples suffering. "Kandahar," which was shown at the Toronto Film Festival the very week of the attacks on New York and Washington, is a prime example of how a work of art from a distant culture can resonate, profoundly and pertinently, in our own lives. On a stretch of desert, or in the cities that symbolize American might, the images of atrocity and courage are eerily similar.

III. KEEP LOOKING

Can one remain myopic in these murine days? Its possible, even for people who should be in the know. Consider Dan Rather. He made news, and earned sympathy, by choking up twice on David Lettermans first show after the disaster. It was a touching scene. It was also a scary one, because of three points Rather made during the conversation. He twice said that, in the Gulf War, America was within 12 to 24 hours of "finishing the job" — presumably, assassinating Saddam Hussein and reducing Baghdad to rubble — when in fact our job, as part of a United Nations mission, was only to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. Forgetting the journalists goal of objectivity, Rather pledged his support for President Bush: "wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where." And when Letterman asked him, "Why do these people hate us?", the anchor and managing editor of CBS News had just one answer: "Theyre evil."