Tonight, I watched the first, hour-long, episode of the four-part BBC
dramatisation
of the rule of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In terms of dramatic tension and
characterisation, I found it a lacklustre production, filled with the
usual nonsensical superficialities - rather like an American TV movie
from the late 1970s about
Arabs.
It smacked of design by a committee of script editors. There was far
too much 'telling' and a sure sign of narrative bankruptcy, cheap name
recognition - and here I paraphrase this dialogue only very slightly:
"Oh look, there goes Tariq Aziz, and he's a Christian". Or Saddam H's
mother: "My son, you must make the family strong". And much more in
that vein. At which point, as a writer I was on the point of screaming.
For a viewer, this incessantly puerile dialogue and narrative becomes
almost the metaphysical corollary of a session of 'enhanced
interrogation technique'. It was deeply patronising of its audience
on almost every level. It worked neither as a portrayal of the psyche
of the dictator nor as a straight political drama. It was just poor
quality, low-brow docu-drama.
In particular, there was absolutely no depiction
of the instrumentality of the West in the Iraq-Iran War (which no-one
now seems to remember - another act of historical amnesia
- at the time was actually known as 'The Gulf War'), in the supply of
chemical
and conventional weapons to the Hussein regime and the support rendered
to this CIA asset-aka-butcher in every other conceivable manner - why
wasn't Donald Rumsfeld dramatised visiting Iraq and shaking
blood-soaked hands with 'The Great Leader'?
The BBC has made a
propaganda piece aimed primarily at retrospective justification of the
destruction of a nation, the deaths of two million people. History has
been airbrushed out - in the same way in which the feature film, 'The
Kite Runner' censored by omission the absolutely central roles played
by the USA and UK in the destruction of Afghanistan. The film-makers
should
be ashamed of themselves, but because they are imperialists, they will
never harbour such sentiments. The irony is that there is a scene in
the movie in
which the making of a war propaganda film in Iraq is depicted, while
this production itself is little more than only slightly more
sophisticated - and therefore much more dangerous - state propaganda.
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