Afghan Muscles (review)

Afghan Muscles is a timely film to watch as the U.S.A. and other foreign governments gear up to send in additional troops to prevent Afghanistan from further destabilization by the Taliban and Al Qaeda. It is an almost elegiac film that presents body building as an intense embodied art form providing for dreams and the materialization of honor in Afghanistan. It is a truly beautiful and important film that every soldier serving in Afghanistan should see.

Set in 2004, it tells the story of Hamid, a humble security guard who dreams of becoming the next reigning bodybuilding champion of Afghanistan, of eventually owning his own gym, a burgeoning industry there, and thus of fame and power and honor for his clan. Through following the course of his training we gain a most unlikely insight into Afghanistan that is very different from the impression one gets through the media with its focus on the war on terror as opposed to the quotidian as captured here. As the U.S. military attempts to capitalize upon lessons learnt in Iraq and as the media begins to focus on the successes and failures of this expanding operation, it is fascinating to learn how urban Afghan men are focusing on their biceps and triceps, their deltoids and buttocks and how to be as “beautiful” as possible.

All over Afghanistan, men are investing everything they have in their bodies and in dreams about their bodies. We cannot know from this film what the women think of all this as they are simply not present, except for two exuberant non-Afghani audience members at the Men’s Bodybuilding Championship in Bahrain, where the national team gets stuck in the airport for a week, thus missing the nationals and trashing Hamid’s dream, while miraculously opening the field to other lesser contenders. Despite the tragic outcome of going abroad, it does provide the film with a deeply poignant turning point toward closure for reflecting on the value of dreams in a shattered and dusty but striking land. As the camera returns to capture something of Afghanistan’s poverty, its stunning natural beauty and authenticity in such stark contrast to Bahrain’s crude modern wealth, wildly expensive golden airport chocolates and glittering gilded metal camels, history’s infrastructure rising with erect certainty and laughing Western girls in skimpy bikinis on camels at the beach in the global village, Hamid is glad to return home to the country he loves despite all of its problems. As he says: “One cannot help but love one’s country.”

Above all, this film is particularly fascinating for the insights it provides into muscular men’s concept of beauty and fortitude. It takes us into the realm of a peculiar conjunction of dreams and flesh and economic development that constitutes a national obsession. These men are not interested, it seems, in women so much as in their own and other men’s bodies. It is in this fascinating to see how excited they become as they watch Herculean body builders flex and glisten, to hear their exclamations of how beautiful these men are, and to learn of vital small details such as how to oil and slap muscles to maximum visual effect. This climactic scene will inevitably move any audience, even those who might find it hard to take such narcissistic expression and physical rather than intellectual discipline seriously.

There is a magnificence and surreal intensity of the climax and joy of all that effort in Bahrain. Moreover, it is seamlessly and deftly sewn together with alternatively spiritual, pulsing and, at competition’s end, diminished vibrating music. In this the scene is emblematic of how music is used throughout the film to skillfully weave together vignettes of life in Afghanistan. There, a constantly moving montage of short but powerful cinematic scenes shifts effortlessly from glistening Afghan body builders to U.S. military in battle gear, from civilians going about their daily lives to prayers at peaceful lovingly tended mosques. Indeed...