Terrorists Get Their Close-Up

By James Poniewozik

Before a terrorist attack can take place, a weapon must be assembled. Volatile ingredients must be combined, a trigger put in place, a timer set ticking. That weapon is the mind of the terrorist. But since 9/11--and before--pop culture has focused mainly on the other sort of bombs.

It's a shame. As much as we rely on the government for security intelligence, we rely on artists to offer moral intelligence about how evil works. "It's like they say, Know your enemy," says Ethan Reiff, a co-executive producer, with Cyrus Voris, of Sleeper Cell, a 10-hour Showtime mini-series (running over two weeks beginning Dec. 4) that goes inside an al-Qaeda cadre planning a WMD attack in Los Angeles. "In pop culture," says Voris, "terrorists have been simplistic bad guys who come from a country called Unnamedistan."

Immediately after 9/11--when seeing anything other than evil behind terrorism got Bill Maher and Susan Sontag lambasted--there was a limited audience in the U.S. for complex terrorists. But four years and a controversial war later, a few works are starting to hang flesh on those stick villains. In addition to Syriana and Sleeper Cell, there's The War Within, a film about a plan to blow up New York City's Grand Central Terminal, and Paradise Now, about Palestinian suicide bombers. Salman Rushdie has taken up the subject in his latest novel, Shalimar the Clown.

"We saw our roles as artists as touching the audience in a way beneath the hardened political rhetoric," says Ayad Akhtar, who co-wrote and stars (in his debut lead performance) in War Within. His character, Hassan, is a Pakistani who plans, coldly, to blow himself up. But he falls in love, is touched by suffering and speaks passionately about his cause. That, Akhtar recognizes, is a treacherous balance. "As an actor, I very much approached this as a portrayal of a suicide," he says. "As filmmakers, we always had to keep in mind that this was an act of murder."

Perhaps because of the tricky moral ground--and the potential for bolstering stereotypes--those terrorism scripts include sympathetic Muslims as audience surrogates. In Syriana there is a reformist Arab prince; in War Within, Hassan's childhood friend Sayeed (Firdous Bamji), an assimilated suburban dad, doesn't understand why Hassan can't leave his anger and piety back in the Old World. In its sweeping, 24-like thriller plot, Sleeper Cell depicts a wide range of extremists but also Darwyn (Michael Ealy), a devout Muslim FBI agent who infiltrates the cell and sees its members as foes of Islam.

The motives of the terrorists vary, from war atrocities to personal woes; in Rushdie's novel a Kashmiri Muslim murders a U.S. ambassador, but it's less a political act than payback for a personal betrayal. Often U.S. actions play a role. War Within's Hassan is radicalized after American agents snatch him in Paris as a terrorism suspect and send him to Pakistan to be tortured. In Syriana a young Pakistani immigrant can't find work in a rich Persian Gulf nation, so he joins an extremist madrasah, but the movie's sprawling story also faults the U.S. for supporting corrupt, oil-rich despots.

That is bound to strike some as America bashing; the attempts to flesh out terrorists, excuse making. But making them human shows us they are not superhuman: they make mistakes, they get emotional, they have doubts. Each of them may, at some point, be stopped. In Paradise Now, from Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, Said (Kais Nashif) seems like an ordinary slacker auto mechanic until he is chosen to undertake a suicide bombing, which he volunteered for long before. Said comes across not as a news-article composite but as a believable, mixed-up young man. In the U.S. he might have been the star of a coming-of-age story; in Nablus he ends up with a bomb taped to his chest.

That quotidian depiction of terrorism has made Paradise Now controversial, not just among Israelis. "Extremist Palestinians say by humanizing these people, there is nothing holy in them," says Abu-Assad. "My opinion is they are human beings, whether you like it or not." And like it or not, the need to understand them didn't begin with 9/11, nor will it end anytime soon.

With reporting by Lina Lofaro/New York