Evil Arabs in American Popular Film: Orientalist Fear

3. Black Sunday: The Loss of Frontier Heroism (1976)

3 Black Sunday the loss of frontier heroism (1976) nlike Rollover, with its entrepreneurial heroes, John Frankenheimer ’s Black Sunday has no American heroes.1 It is their very absence that proves to be important in revealing a sense of anxiety for the American Orientalist audience. In their place is the Israeli hero, Major David Kabakov (Robert Shaw), a leader of an antiterrorist commando unit, who has come to America to foil an Arab terrorist plot against the United States. This plot entails an attack on Americans where they feel most at home and where it will hurt them the most: at the Super Bowl game. However , Kabakov’s Israeli methods seem rather extreme to and are definitely not appreciated by American law enforcement despite his attempt to protect Americans. FBI agent Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver) sternly points this out to Kabakov and his partner, Robert Moshevsky (Steven Keats), ‘‘Yes, well, I’m going to have to give you a warning. In your own operational circle in Israel, I understand behind your back they call you ‘The Final Solution’—a man that takes things to their ultimate conclusion and beyond . . . . Yes, well you’re not going to do it here. Whatever you may think of our methods, you’ll play by our rules or leave. In fact, you’ll be lucky to be allowed to leave. I mean it. It applies to both of you.’’ The American Corley, as Moshevsky later states, needs a bit of ‘‘Israeli advice.’’ Neither Corley nor any of the other American characters in the film display any heroic characteristics. In fact, they can be considered as characters that disappoint an audience versed in the ideology of American exceptionalism and the American frontier myth. To make matters worse, one of the villains and engineers of the attack is a disenfranchised and deranged American Vietnam veteran who has painstakingly planned and designed the assault on his own country. Frighteningly so, Black Sunday’s cinematic America is on its path to a mood of ‘‘malaise,’’ a term President Jimmy Carter would later use in diagnosing the real America. Orientalist fear develops when Arab terrorists creep into the country, take advantage of this situation, and victimize the American people.This ailing cinematic America is, in essence, subject to its own incompetence, Arab infiltration, 94 ‘‘evil’’ arabs in american popular film and surprise attack while shackled and weighted down by demoralization and dysfunction. Black Sunday appeared in American theaters at a time when, as described by Richard Slotkin, the ‘‘American frontier myth’’ no longer de- fined crises and provided scenarios of resolution for the nation. The myth had been shattered after such experiences as Vietnam, Watergate, the Arab oil embargo, and stagflation.2 Furthermore, Melani McAlister points out that by 1976, ‘‘the public image of the U.S. military was quite low, and the assessment of Vietnam as a misguided intervention and an unwinnablewar was commonplace.’’3 However, she adds that with the Israeli victories over the Arabs in 1967 and 1973, the Israeli will to fight Arab terrorism , and the successful raid on Entebbe in 1976, American culture became enthusiastic about and vicariously riveted to the young, small, but victorious Jewish nation. McAlister notes, ‘‘After Entebbe, and after Saigon, Israel became a prosthetic for Americans; the ‘long arm’ of Israeli vengeance extended the bodyof an American nation no longer sure of its own reach.’’4 Similarly, the Israeli Kabakov in Black Sunday becomes a protagonist who has to take on the role of the frontier hero for the Americans in order to save America from itself and from the opportunistic treachery of the Arabs. The ‘‘Israeli advice’’ that Moshevsky is talking about is an act of reminding America of its need to recapture its lost frontier spirit. Slotkin’s work is important in understanding the American sense of frontier and the concomitant use of violence, and it provides an interesting paradigm useful in reading the actions and motivations of characters and the cinematography in Black Sunday. The American frontier myth, according to Slotkin, centers on the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the native peoples who originally inhabited it so that ‘‘we’’ Americans might achieve ‘‘national identity, a democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy, and a phenomenally dynamic and ‘progressive’ civilization.’’5 The myth deals with the redemption of the American spirit as something to be achieved through a scenario of separation from civilized life, temporary regression to a more primitive or...