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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

I never knew what to think of Four Lions. It's a hugely politically charged topic (suicide bombers, islamist terrorism, particularly perpetrated by UK residents/nationals). I watched it 10 years ago so perhaps I misremember it, but it didn't feel to me that the movie had any particular political agenda, it was just making fun of a band of clumsy terrorists.

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It picks up a political agenda near the end when it shows the authorities to be clueless, and suspecting entirely the wrong people, but more generally the film has political origins.

When 7/7 happened, we saw the CCTV footage; Yorkshiremen getting on a train at Luton. Three of the four bombers were from Leeds, they were born in the UK, what on earth possessed them to go to London and try blowing it up? Fanciful notions of being a mujahideen? Some disconnect of belonging to the UK when they were clearly brought up fully within it?

I'm pretty sure Morris said he made the film to answer that question.

Monkey Dust series 2 (broadcast 2003, two years prior to the attack) had a similar examination with its Abdul and Shafiq sketches. Their friend Omar preaching to them about jihad but their lives mainly revolving around what's on telly and their mum feeding them turkey twizzlers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhxQT1d1AvE

And of course, even Omar isn’t very keen on doing any of the jihad stuff himself.

The key point that Four Lions makes is that the terrorists are not the highly devoted, strict followers of Islam that they claim to be. They are bored, directionless clowns and the devout want nothing to do with them. This is highlighted in the ringleader Omar's relationship with his brother - Omar and his wife tease and mock his brother for his strict adherence to Islamic customs. The devout brother tries to persuade Omar to abandon his terrorist plans, but is later targeted by the security services because they too assume that it's the strict, devout muslims that are behind it all.

Not the key point, I would say, but an important point.

It returns to OP's missing that the movie may have «any particular political agenda»:

there is a political point, which is "outcasts in search of an identity conflictually with their environment may have a political agenda, which causes a political problem". Disregarding such problem implies potential tragedy.

Edit (wrote in a rush): hence, that if there is a risk, quite worth of assessment, you'd better see things flatly, for what they are.

A sort of "favorite" of mine is this speech by an anthropologist about muslim extremists.. indeed you can apply it to white supremacist terrorists too, they join up to the cause for a feeling of belonging and purpose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlbirlSA-dc

I thought of it as satirising the picture painted by the security services of terrorist groups as Mission Impossible-type bad guys who were amazingly organised and professional, so they needed loads of money for counter terrorism. Don't get me wrong, I do value (some of) the work of the security services, but I think this kind of portrayal too easily allows people to ignore the fact that "terrorists" are often just directionless people drawn into that kind of world almost by accident. The Day Shall Come, released nine years later, expands on that idea.

I am not sure you can get that message from the movie. In the end it does show them as dangerous, murdurous criminals. It doesn't take a PhD or lots of means to kill a large number of people. Which is also the difficult challenge posed to those security services.

I didn't (intentionally) say they didn't end up as dangerous, murderous criminals. I said that they were directionless people - they weren't criminal masterminds in a glamorous world of high-tech equiment and fast cars, they were tragic characters who got sucked into a farcial which saw someone blow themselves up in a shopping precinct while dressed as a chicken. It's a fundamentally humanising film which hints at the reasons people join those kinds of organisations, which are much less high-tech and organised than the security services (intentionally or otherwise) paint them as.

Nobody is talking about a «political agenda» - art as a lucid portrait exposing salient traits is not involved in that -, and it was not simply «making fun».

The very fact that you write «a band of» suggests you are not seeing the universality of the depicted. It is not like the long dream in Mulholland Drive, that changes and deforms a reality: it is meant to be a description through a satirical lens. And it's not "wacky break": it's "Wackyland".

The right-winged that converts himself after studying the texts of the opponents with the original intent of deprecating them; the special radicalism of the converted "local"; the actual nature of the largely misunderstood special culture hosted in the alien lands; the tone based on constant references to actual events (those who hid weapons in a park and found them stolen; those who hid them in a playground and found the children playing with them; those who filled a boat with them and it sank...); the social and internal states, flow and dynamics of the involved... The causal relation leading to the "necessary conclusions". All of this is a portrait - an analysis.

And statements such as "I have hit them, so they must be the bad ones" are fed to the police - not the protagonists. «Clumsy» who? And the interrogator in the "extra-territorial" container, that seems to be imported directly from Joel and Ethan Cohen - «clumsy» who? No, not just "the protagonists".

Maybe, as suggested, you could check a few of the interviews that Chris Morris gave.

It was also written about complex cultural issues in ethnic minorities by people who weren't from those minorities. I am a big fan of Morris, but there is something inauthentic (edit: I originally wrote "slightly patronising" but I think the film was made in very good faith) about that. Also there are no shortage of voices from those communities represented, so why should it be left to a bunch of people removed from them to tell their story?

A good story can always use more writers, amirite?

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