Syriana confuses the viewer. In the opening scenes, we move rapidly from the middle of the desert, to a Teheran nightclub, to a Georgetown garden, to a board room, to a family breakfast table in Geneva, Switzerland; from a bus loading workmen, to a missile sale, to a man cutting flowers while explaining oil deals, to a corporate argument over a merger, to a young American family eating breakfast. We are continually given snippets of conversation, passed off rapidly. We are introduced to multiple characters, with names thrown around like a juggler’s batons. We struggle in each scene to understand what is going on and in most cases can’t complete the task before we are in the next scene, having to re-assimilate. We are left with an impressionistic flow of visual and auditory stimuli. We can make some sense of it, but are at the same time aware that we are missing important details. One of the film’s earlier titles was “See No Evil”. In fact, we often are not sure what we are seeing.
This is no accident of editing. There are devices that appear deliberately to confuse us: notes that cannot be read in normal viewing time, characters who are not easily identifiable from one part of the film to another, dialogue in multiple languages at the same time with subtitles at some points and not in others. There was one minor character who seduces two middle eastern boys into a terror plot involving a stolen missile. I realized that he was the same man who took the missile in the opening scenes only after I’d read the list of characters in order of appearance and paused on his character in that opening scene; this after having seen the film several times. As another personal example, I had reviewed the film repeatedly in detail and looked at websites related to it before I caught on to the fact that they were pumping natural gas, not oil, in the film’s fictional emirate. Even the film’s title is obscure, apparently taken from a term “used by Washington think tanks to describe a hypothetical reshaping of the middle east,” according to the IMDb website. In the unlikely event that this confusion was an accident, it was a happy accident, an accident by unconscious design.
The effect is to put the viewer into an uncomfortably familiar position, the position of an outsider looking in, a novice observing those who understand, a child trying to figure out the world of adults. Simply through the form in which the film is presented, we are made to feel that we are being given a glimpse of a world of greater sophistication than our own, a world of hidden meanings, one that is obscure to us, but understood and mastered by a very few. We are made to feel like the powerless child confronting a primal scene, sensing that it is exciting and important, but unsure if we fully understand its import. Like that child, we are drawn into wanting to understand, wanting to share in some of the power that is being denied us. We are both pulled into the film and into a desire to know more about the geopolitical intrigues of the oil industry. This also contributes to our frustration and anger at the film’s outcomes. It is a film that we need to see only once to feel the impact, but must view and re-view to understand.
As we begin to look more closely, we see that this is a world of men. There are two women with significant speaking roles: a bumbling member of the CIA who appears to always be two steps behind what is happening and a young mother and wife who wants no part of the world of international intrigue. The film creates the sense that there is a world of powerful men whom we, the childlike viewers, may only watch with bare understanding.
The story revolves around five of these men.
We first see Bennett Holiday in a Georgetown garden introducing himself to the head of his firm, Dean Whiting. Whiting, bent down, taking cuttings of flowers, says, without preamble and without even looking up at Bennett, “A very big company, Connex, our client, loses a huge natural-gas contract. At the same time a smaller company, Killen, somehow gets the rights to Kazakhstan, one of the largest untapped oil fields in the world. The big company, our client, merges with Killen. Justice wants to know how Killen got those rights. You’ve been scrutinizing exactly those types of deals, so if there’s something to find, I expect you to get it before they do. Then come straight to me.”
As the story develops, it becomes Bennett’s job to uncover corruption in the Kazakhstan deal so that he can give the U.S. Attorneys a sacrificial lamb. The assumption is that such a deal requires corruption and that the government must uncover enough corruption to be convincing so that the deal can be approved.
Prince Nasir Al-Subaai is the older son of the Emir of the Persian Gulf state that lives off its natural gas supplies. He is the one who has arranged to sell the gas rights to the Chinese, the highest bidder, moving out the American firm, Connex.
Bob Barnes is a CIA agent who is sent on a mission to arrange for the assassination of Prince Nasir.
Bryan Woodman is a young financial analyst working for a company that would like to do business with the Emirate. At an outdoor party thrown by the Emir, Bryan’s son is killed in an accident. Through that accident, Bryan gets to meet Prince Nasir and becomes his personal economic advisor.
Wasim Khan is a young Pakistani born man who was working for Connex in the Emirate. When he loses his job and cannot find work, he gravitates to the Moslem school, which offers food as well as education.
These men live in a world of duplicity, corruption and betrayal. They are each part of an organization—the corporations, the C.I.A., the Emirate and the terrorist group—which is willing to sacrifice its individual members. Bennett’s investigation turns up a payoff by a Killen partner named Danny Dalton. The head of Killen, Jimmy Pope, is reluctant to sacrifice his old friend and loyal partner, but agrees to it nonetheless. Bob Barnes’s mission to kill Prince Nasir results in Barnes being tortured and almost killed because his handlers in the CIA had sent him to a contact in Beirut whom they didn’t know had turned to the Iranians. When that same contact threatens to spread news of the attempted assassination, the CIA decides to blame it all on Barnes, even claiming that he had engaged in an earlier assassination on his own. They cut him loose. Wasim is brought into the friendly circle of the Moslem school, but is ultimately used by the man who befriends him there as a martyr to the cause. Prince Nasir, and Bryan with him, are undermined not only by the CIA, acting for the interests of Connex-Killen, but by Nasir’s father, who agrees under pressure to name his younger, weaker son his successor as Emir.
As analysts, we have been taught by Freud, Arlow and others to look for the superfluous detail, particularly if it is repeated. In this relatively taut drama, there are two relationships that seem to be superfluous to the plot. They each involve a father and son, and, as if to emphasize their similarity to one another, in each, father and son have the same name.
At the very beginning of Syriana, Bob Barnes is sitting in a restaurant in Teheran talking with a man with whom he is doing business. As the conversation is opening, the other man asks, “How’s the kid?” Bob answers in a lowered voice, very tentatively, “He’s fine. He’s … he’s fine.” The question and Bob’s seeming discomfort with the answer are superfluous to the story. He will shortly assassinate this man and his brother with a car bomb after selling them missiles. The question and answer about Bob’s son is a personal touch, ostensibly for effect, but it calls our attention to a disquieting relationship in Bob’s life.
We see Robby Barnes only once, in a scene in which Bob picks him up at his prep school and takes him for lunch. The conversation is strained and spasmodic as they talk about where Robby will spend his senior year of high school and where he will go to college. Father and son appear to be talking at cross purposes.
“Maybe you’ll get made ambassador to somewhere cool, like France or Italy or Ghana. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility, is it?”
“How’s your mom?”
“Great. She’s great. … So I know it’s still a year away, but I’ll have to have a car. A decent car, nothing too fancy, but it has to run so that I can get into Boston and New York.” (He talks about some school that has a crew team.)
“Robby, listen. I live in Maryland, which means that you have residency in Maryland, for the University of Maryland.”
“I just want a normal senior year, Dad. I want a normal house. I want Cinemax and prom. You know what prom is like in Pakistan? Prom sucks.”
“OK, it’s complicated, you know? I may have really screwed up at work.”
“How?”
“I was supposed to keep my mouth shut and I didn’t.”
“What does Mom do, again, that we have to live in Islamabad?”
After a pause. “She’s a secretary.”
“Secretary.” Robby picks up his book bag and starts to leave the restaurant.
“Robby.”
“Both my parents are professional liars.”
“Hey!”
In contrast, Bennett Holiday is the son in his father/son pair. Bennett senior is an alcoholic. We first see him sitting on Bennett’s front steps in D.C. as Bennett gets out of a cab carrying suitcases. The film makers seem intent on distracting us from the interaction, first by placing it after a very emotional scene in which Bryan Woodman and his wife are trying to revive their son who has been electrocuted in the Emir’s pool. Within the scene, we hear and sometimes see a constant stream of dialogue from a television as Danny Daulton testifies to a Congressional committee on the realities of doing business and the unfairness of labels of corruption.
Bennett walks right past his father, but leaves the door open. Bennett Sr. is a well dressed, good looking black man. (To me he looked like a cross between Nelson Mandela and Jackie Robinson.) Father and son don’t look at each other, but convey a sense of disapproval in word and expression. The dialogue, again, is somewhat at cross purposes, said over the constant stream of talk from the TV screen.
Bennett Jr. says, “I didn’t make this coffee for you. Making it for me. You, I’m making oatmeal, and then you sleep.”
“You look like shit.”
“Are you working?”
“I had a little trouble at work.”
“I left beer in my fridge for when you wake up so you won’t die on my floor of DT’s, please don’t smoke in my house.”
Bennett Sr. proceeds to smoke nonetheless as he examines his son’s diagrams of the Connex-Killen case on a board on the wall.
I’ve highlighted a point of similarity between these two father/son dialogues: “I may have really screwed up at work”; “I had a little trouble at work.” We have two fathers who are failing.
We see Bennett Sr. again much later in the film. Bennett Jr. is interrupted in his work by a phone call that takes him to a bar. When he explains that someone had called him, he is handed a card that we cannot read in real time, but when paused reads, “If you find me call my son, Bennett Jr. at this number …” Bennett finds his father slumped in a chair, his head on the table, unconscious, in the back of the bar. The scene immediately shifts to Bob Barnes, naked, tied to a chair, about to be tortured by the turncoat contact, Mussawi. Once again, the two men have been linked in their failure and degradation.
We next see Bennett Sr. again sitting on his son’s front step. Bennett had been picked up while jogging by the federal attorney in his limousine in order to discuss the case and tell Bennett that they need another scapegoat in addition to Dalton. As Bennett gets out of the car, he sees his father holding a paper, smoking a cigarette. Bennett’s opening words suggest his feeling of his father’s disapproval.
“What are you looking at, man?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“That’s cause you have nothing to say.”
They stand nose to nose eyeing each other angrily until the father pushes the son aside and walks away, dropping his paper. The son goes to pick up the paper, saying “You fucking asshole,” and the father sticks up his middle finger as he walks on, not looking back.
In each of these pairs, we have a father who is failing and a son who is angry and disappointed with his father.
Wasim Khan’s father is a dreamer.
“When I was your age, in Pakistan, there was always in the distance …”
The son finishes the sentence with him, “snow covered mountains” and adds, “Yes, I know, Papa.”
“That’s right. Three hours away, but right there across the entire sky, like you could reach out and touch them. Snow covered mountains. As soon as we can, we’ll get a house and bring your mother here. I promise.”
His promises are empty. Father and son are trapped in the Persian Gulf without jobs after the Chinese takeover of the natural gas facilities. The father is not only unable to help his son; he gets him into trouble. Waiting on a line, looking for work, an old man complains that he cannot hear what is being said. Wasim’s father tells him he must be quiet, but the guard, who does not speak his language, confronts him for speaking up. Wasim defiantly defends his father and is beaten by the guards while his father looks on helplessly.
Wasim and his friend are drawn by the promise of food and good conditions to the Moslem school where they are subtly recruited by a terrorist. In his last meeting with his father, he has come to ask for money for the bus. His father is at bat, playing cricket and talking about bobsleds. He doesn’t understand the intense hug his son gives him. He remains in a cloud, loveable but ineffectual, while his son sacrifices his life to realize the father’s promise to bring Wasim’s mother, reuniting the family.
Prince Nasir’s relationship with his father is central to the plot of the film. Unlike the others, Nasir has a younger brother. As with Bennett, Bob and Wasim, there is no mother to temper the male relationships. We see the brothers in deadly sibling rivalry over control of a kingdom. Nasir has made himself the enemy of American interests by selling the gas rights to the Chinese. For this, Dean Whiting ignites the sibling rivalry, while sipping brandy with Nasir’s younger brother.
“Prince, is there anything that we can do for you?”
“Hah, Americans are always happy to drill holes in other people’s countries. I’ve heard of you, Mr. Whiting, the cat’s-paw of the Saudi princes.”
“I know your brother, the foreign minister. He’s very bright. I know your father, too. He threw the second creepiest party I’ve ever been to in Washington. And as far as I can see, you could probably use a bit of the cat’s-paw yourself. Second-born son, so beaten down by his family he can’t even tell me what he wants when he’s asked straight out. A grown-up baby who’s afraid of his brother … and maybe wants to be king? Well, Prince, are you a king? Can you tell me what you want?”
The Emir, like the other fathers in the film, proves too weak to help Nasir, succumbing to the American pressure. When Nasir is told by his father that he has chosen his younger brother to be Emir, he reacts angrily.
“You cannot do this. He is barely qualified to run a brothel, much less a country.”
“I like Europe. I will be happy to stay here. My decision is final and I ask you to support your brother.”
“I cannot do that.”
Four stories, four sons struggling with the yoke of a weak father.
The fifth story, that of Bryan Woodman, is more ambiguous, but the result is the same. Like the Emir, he has two sons; but, we do not see them engaged in sibling rivalry. Bryan appears to be a good caring father, but he cannot protect his older son, Max. When handed an invitation to the Emir’s huge outdoor party on his Spanish estate, Bryan hesitates because it is Max’s birthday. His partners convince him that there will be plenty of food and fun for the kids. As Bryan and his wife sit near the pool, Bryan wants to intervene when some other children are urging and teasing Max to dive into the pool, but his wife tells him that Max has to learn to work things out for himself. In neither case does his lack of resolution appear to be unreasonable, but for Max, the decisions prove fatal.
Later that night, Max again hesitantly dives into the pool to play the “shark” in a children’s game. There is an electrical short in the pool lights, (which had been set up by Prince Meshal, Nasir’s younger brother) and Max is electrocuted. Bryan jumps in to get him, but it is too late.
When Prince Nasir offers him a large sum of money, Bryan’s first instinct is again to defend Max’s memory as he asks, “How much for my other son?” However, the Prince continues the dialogue, which results in his making Bryan his chief economic advisor. Bryan’s wife accuses him of profiting from his son’s death. She leaves him, taking his younger son back to the states. The intentions are different, but the result is the same; Bryan is another father who cannot protect his older son, and ends up benefiting from his death.
The pattern is remarkably clear, five subplots in which a father is too weak to help his son or himself. In three of these families, the son dies; in a fourth, the father dies. The film has cultivated a particular version of the Oedipus complex. To what end?
Altogether, we have a confused complex plot that tends to make us feel like children trying to make sense of a sophisticated adult world; organizations and governments that betray their loyal workers and their people; fathers who betray, undermine, neglect or are simply incapable of protecting their sons. It is a construction seemingly designed to make us feel mistrustful of our fathers and leaders.
As it develops, it is also designed to inspire fear and resignation. As we trace the fate of the five central characters,we find a simple pattern: those who attempt to defy authority or to challenge the Oedipal dynamics die; those who who want to survive, must submit or leave the conflict.
Wasim Khan sacrifices his life in a suicide attack. He does it for the cause, but also to provide for his family. As he and his friend are contemplating the act, Wasim’s friend tells him that this act will allow his father to bring his mother from Pakistan. Through his self sacrifice, he unites his parents, making himself an Oedipal martyr.
Bob Barnes and Prince Nasir both die in acts of defiance. After learning that his father intends to name his brother Emir, Nasir organizes a coup. He is leading his followers through the desert to take power, when he is killed by a C.I.A. missile.
Bob Barnes finds out through his contacts that Dean Whiting has been behind the attempt to kill Nasir, and, in effect, Barnes’s own destruction in the C.I.A. He finds a way to confront Whiting, threatening him that Whiting, his wife and his son will be killed if Barnes should die. He gets Whiting to get him back his passport that had been taken away and heads to the Emirate with the apparent intention of warning Prince Nasir. He reaches the Prince in time to be destroyed in the same missile attack that kills Nasir.
Bryan Woodman narrowly escapes being killed in the same explosion. He gives up his dreams of power as Nasir’s advisor to return to the states and his wife and younger son. He survives by leaving the inner world of male rivalry and violence in order to keep his family intact.
There is one seeming exception. Bennett Holiday achieves an Oedipal victory, but his battle is not fought directly with his father.
In one of the opening scenes, we see Bennett standing in waiting beside Dean Whiting who is giving him instructions without looking up from what he is doing. Whiting gives a little dismissive wave of his hand signaling the end of the meeting, but as Bennett starts to walk away, Whiting suddenly looks up and addresses him personally, calling him back for a moment:
“Bennett.”
“Sir?”
“At my firm I have a flock of sheep who think they’re lions. Maybe you’re a lion everyone thinks is a sheep.”
We shall later see Whiting goading the younger prince to be a king. With Bennett, he is gentler and possibly more prophetic than instrumental.
Bennett works directly under Sidney Hewitt. As with all relationships in this film, we see Bennett and Hewitt together only in brief snatches of conversation scattered throughout the film. A relaxed Hewitt introduces an anxious looking Bennett as his associate at an acrimonious meeting of Connex and Killen executives. The scene shifts to Bennett and Hewitt on a plane, where Hewitt talks about the importance of the merger and getting government approval. He tells Bennett that this deal will buy many houses on the Vineyard, “Maybe even yours.”
We learn more about their relationship when Bennett meets with the U.S. Attorney investigating the merger. As always, we are distracted from focusing on the relationship by the focus on the merger and the government’s investigation, but there is enough to give us a feeling of Oedipal conflict between older boss and younger aspirant. At first, the government attorney is condescendingly friendly.
“How the hell are you?”
“Well, you know, can’t complain.”
“That’s not good, kiddo. That’s suffering quietly.”
It’s a throwaway line, but it does focus us for a moment on Bennett’s lifestyle and reserved demeanor. In fact, the government attorney’s next question is about a wife and children, the life that Bennett does not have. He tells Bennett that the Kazakhstan deal could not have been pulled off without a payoff, becoming tougher when Bennett tries to get information from him. Moving forward to the edge of his desk, in Bennett’s face, he says,
“Either you don’t find anything because you don’t know how to look, or you do, and they carve you out and light you on fire. That’s gotta be the play, here, right? Bennett Holiday, Sidney Hewitt’s new boy. How many of those have I seen? Six? Seven? They’re all gone. He’s still Sidney-fucking-Hewitt.”
The film cuts to Hewitt playing racqetball with Bennett as they discuss the case. Hewitt announces the score, 14-11, as the scene begins and twice announces, as he is about to serve, “match point.”
Sidney Hewitt is a powerful, ambitious father who will defeat his organizational “new boys”, using them for his purposes and then disposing of them.
But Bennett achieves an Oedipal victory and establishes himself as “a lion that everyone thinks is a sheep.” As the film’s five plots are racing towards their conclusions, Sidney Hewitt and Bennett Holiday, dressed in tuxedoes, are in an elevator heading for a final meeting with Lee Janus, the head of Connex. They sit down, and Bennett explains to Janus that the government wanted to approve the merger and the Kazakhstan deal, which is in the interests of the American people, “So all they asked is that we give them something a little meaningful, which we did, and they got out of our way.”
Janus asks, “Somethin’ besides Dalton?”
Bennett answers as he opens his briefcase, “Unfortunately, yes. And the best option seemed to be a secret deal for excess Iranian pipeline capacity that I uncovered during the diligence, a little side deal benefiting the lead lawyer involved in the Connex Killen merger approval process.”
Hewitt speaks up. “What … do you think you’re doing?”
Bennett speaks on, “Of course, it’s illegal for an American to control these rights.”
Hewitt says, “Stop right now.”
But the deed is done. Bennett has proven himself to be a lion and “Sidney-fucking-Hewitt” the scapegoat.
In the film’s last scene, Bennett comes home at night after his victory to find his father sitting on his steps with his head down. In a soft tone, putting his hand gently on his father’s back, he says, “Come on, man. Leave the beer.” Picking up the beer, he follows his father into the house.
Perhaps this father/son pair is spared because Bennett has displaced his Oedipal victory to his business father, allowing him to temper his aggression towards his actual father.
But even this Oedipal victory is achieved with the approval of the film’s arch villain, Dean Whiting, a powerful father who seeks a son who is a “lion” under his control. As viewers, we are left feeling hopeless, frightened and angry at the injustice and abuse of power we have witnessed. Perhaps, we leave the theater relieved at having personally survived. What we are not fully aware of at the time is that our feelings about the geo-politics of oil have been reinforced with a connection to the power politics of childhood.