The President's Cake, Iraqui Film, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Dictatorships, Coming of Age
We watched this Iraqi film on the day that the United States
started bombing Iran. It is a film set
in 1990 that purports to document the hardships endured by the poorest people in Iraq, the
peasants, as a direct result of the sanctions that the US and other countries had
applied to Iraq. The people were caught
between a leader who was, at best, indifferent to them, and foreign powers who
flew overhead in multimillion-dollar planes that seated on or two people while
they scrounged for basic necessities.
The film centers on a day when a nine-year-old girl is tasked
with finding more than necessities. This
girl, Lamia, who is cute as a button, is an orphan. She lives with her grandmother, her Bibi, in
the marsh country in Iraq. She travels
to school in a beautiful but very simple canoe-like-boat with a high prow and aft that is like those of everyone else, that
she pushes, paddles and steers with a single long oar. Her Bibi has instructed her on various ways
to avoid the raffle that will take place in school, one where the “winner” will
be required to bake a cake on Saddam Hussein’s birthday – an annual
ritual.
Despite her arriving late to school, but not, unfortunately,
before the raffle, and despite her telling the teacher that she has to go to the
bathroom at the beginning of the raffle, she is forced to write out her name
like all the others and put it into the pot.
Her friend, Saeed, the son of a cripple – almost as humiliating as being
an orphan like she is – suggests she should have said that she had
diarrhea. In any case, as we expect, she
wins the lottery, meaning that she must find flour, sugar, eggs and baking soda;
all nearly impossible to come by.
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| Bibi & Lamia Hitchiking |
Bibi takes her by the hand and leads her to the city. The only way to get there is by hitch hiking and they are picked up by a taxi/mail/wedding/funeral driver who introduces himself as a saint and a devil, depending on how you see him, but in the movie he plays the role of the family’s patron saint, helping them out of various jams across the course of the day, and ultimately helping them return home that night.
I was reminded, in the film, of interviewing for my first
job as a paraprofessional. When I decided
to apply to graduate schools in psychology, I thought it would be a good idea
to do some clinical work to see if it suited me and if I was good at it – could
I help people? I applied to work at a
halfway house for runaway teenagers and the head of the agency, when
interviewing me for the position, informed me that if teenagers would not phone
their parents to get permission for us to house them or, if the parents didn’t
give permission, they would have to return to the streets and he wanted to make
sure that I was OK with that. I assured
him I was.
“What if they are twelve and it is late at night,” he
asked. I felt terrible. I had been picturing a 17 year old high school
senior stopping by in the middle of the day.
I must have looked crestfallen, because that was, in fact, what he was
looking for. He trusted that I would
follow the rules, but he wanted to know that I got it that we were dealing with a
vulnerable population and that sometimes we would not be able to protect them
from the vagaries of the world and that this would (of necessity if we were suited to work there) be distressing to us.
This is, in many ways, a coming of age story. We have been exposed to these ever since we
read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. It is a
different thing to see a nine year old navigating a world that is much more
complex and frightening than she is prepared for, but also one that is, I
trust, generally more supportive than we might fear.
This film
has been criticized by an Iraqi critic as one that “rehearses known
stereotypes and corresponds to little that is real. Instead, it fulfills
misconceptions of morbid Oriental cities reduced by despotic regimes to
decadent theaters for the corrupt.” It
is certainly, in his telling, a mishmash made for the foreign audience. He particularly objects to both the careless
connections across time and space (Baghad, where Bibi, the girl and the boy
face all kinds of difficulties, is far removed from the marshes and the kind of
corruption depicted did not occur until later), but I do think that the film
speaks to a larger truth, if only found in our country when children confront
ICE members: those on the margins are not able to protect their children from sociopolitical
harm that corrupts cultures and individuals that would once have sustained
those selfsame children.
I don't object to the use of geographically distant places to be mushed together. This happens in dreams, but also in movie making. My home city (where Mark Twain claimed he wanted to be when the world ends, because everything here happens 15 years after it happens everywhere else) is frequently used a set for New York in the early 1900s, as in the movie Carol, because our skyline is so dated. His point is a little more subtle than that, but still, I think some license is warranted. But I am more curious about the salutes to Saddam - both in the classrooms and on the street. Is this a warning to us about the cult of Trump and what we might be in for in a dictatorship or is this a realistic representation of daily life in that particular dictatorship at that time?
Of course, as I was watching the film, I was unaware of the very broad license that was being taken to pull at my heart strings – I just felt them being pulled, as I did in the interview at the agency where I personally never had to turn away a 12-year-old runaway during the year that I worked there, though I’m certain that it happened. Instead, I experienced anger at a President who cared more for his own well-being than that of his country and the people in it (and in that sense I do think the film is intended to speak to both an Iraqui audience and an international one).
Btw, the Iraqi reviewer was using the empty theater where he saw the film in Iraq as evidence that it wasn't a realistic representation of Iraqi life, but there were only two other people in the theater with the reluctant wife and me here - I think this level of despair is hard to muster a large audience to be enthusiastic about on any continent and in any city.
But there was a lot more to it than that being a depressing movie about a dictatorship and its consequences. This is a tragi-comedy. This girl is plucky and I won’t spoil all the
ways that she sees through the shenanigans and plots of the adults around here,
though I will say that she has seen the cruelty of children – including her
friend, the crippled man’s son. His
inconstancy and meanness to her is countered by their loving connection and
pleasure in each other’s company. Their
game, of staring into each other’s eyes until the one blinks – a game the boy
always wins – is the image we are left with at the end of the film when, rather
than staring into the fate that awaits them, they stare into each other’s eyes
and the boy doesn’t call the game when she blinks, but they keep staring.
Last night, at a local French restaurant, they were playing
a French farce in the background without sound.
It was clear that the ineptitude of the police was central to the
humor. This film relies on this and similar
tropes, but in a much grimmer and more unsettling background. This is not farce, even though it borrows
from it. It portrays a world that still
has remnants of the threads that bound a great civilization.
Yes, as
Freud pointed out, these threads restrain us, but they are also what allow
us to travel unmolested – and to raise children who are trusting but wary. These threads allow us to offset the base
drives that Freud encountered beneath the civilized veneer – pure aggression
and sexual desire – with other, powerful but more subtle drives, like
attachment. Just as in My
Friends, a book by Fredrik Backman, it is the children who step in with the
attachment when the adults fail. Coming
of age involves transitioning from a defensive position of harming others to
protect oneself – pointing out anything that others do that sets them apart so
that they can be ridiculed – to recognizing one’s vulnerability as similar to
those around us and banding together with others who realize this to protect
the group – and sometimes that is just the dyad – through mutual support, rather
than through attacking others.
This developmental process is enacted over and over in films,
books, and plays because, I think, adults wish to pass this knowledge along –
to get the developmental process started early, to teach and prevent the
continuity of the cruelty that is a seemingly earlier and more powerful force –
the force that comes from fear and isolation and that ends up powering some of
us to rise through the corporate and political ranks to the pinnacles of power.
It has been said that Buckminster Fuller wondered if our technology’s useful products could stay ahead of and prevent or remediate its destructive aspects. He thought that, if we were to survive, this would be a neck and neck race to the end. I think similarly the race between our goodness, affection and attachment to each other is in a similar race with our more dangerous aspects. Films like this, though they may collapse complicated components of that balance into familiar tropes and generalizations, portray our vulnerability and the importance of banding together in ways that are, I think, on balance useful to us as a global community.
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