Terror, Theory, and the Humanities

6. Films about Terrorism, Cinema Studies and the Academy

There is no doubt that 9/11 has had a significant impact on film studies. Thousands of people linked catastrophic trauma with the cinema in saying of 9/11 that “it looked just like a movie”—although in this reversed linkage the genre of disaster films precedes the historical event. Ruby Rich, in an essay somewhat ambiguously entitled “After the Fall: Cinema Studies Post-9/11,” summarized this impact succinctly:

Some teachers have responded by creating courses that directly confront traumatic events and the hegemony of mainstream cinema—courses with titles such as “Critically Reading the War on Terrorism” (Long Island University), “Post-9/11 Cinema: A Cultural History of the Present” (University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign), and “Alienation, Revolt and Terrorism” (University of Alabama). New methodologies are apparent already in the titles: critical questioning of the “political, economic, historical, cultural, and personal aspects of the terrorist attacks” (Brady 96), a cultural embedding of the texts and films, and a challenge to “convenient binaries: cowards and heroes, terrorists and freedom fighters, evil and godliness, us and them,” which has been called by Benjamin Barber “Jihad vs. McWorld” (qtd. in Brady 96). A special issue of Cinema Journal, published in the winter of 2004, focuses on pedagogy and terrorism. Several of the essays indicate students’ reluctance to discuss 9/11 or to transcend emotional responses and consider it analytically. Sarah Projansky, who taught “Post-9/11 Cinema: A Cultural History of the Present” in spring 2003 at the University of Illinois suggests that her students’ unwillingness or inability to consider 9/11 critically arose from their deep investment in the socio-cultural context of the events (106). In her essay in the same issue, Ruby Rich refers to “the terrible flattening of complexity in U.S. attitudes toward the rest of the world and its own history” and argues for courses on terrorism that would provide analytical models for addressing these potentially dangerous simplifications (113). [1] In an essay that appeared four years later, Karen Espiritu and Donald Moore, still dealing with 9/11 and pedagogy, inquire whether 9/11 might, in fact, be “unteachable” (202). Noting a post-9/11 resurgence of anti-intellectualism in the U.S., the authors consider unteachable as a synonym for prohibition and cite the example of the conservative watchdog ACTA (American Council of Trustees and Alumni), which blacklisted academics who called for “analysis and education” following the events of 9/11 (203). Given the strong visual orientation of many (American) students as well as the continued popularity of film courses, one might look to cinema studies as a site where the socio-political agenda of Third Cinema and the need to approach terrorism analytically converge.

One of the major shifts in cinema studies since 9/11 has been the foregrounding of Third Cinema films within the discipline in terms of Third Cinema films in general and terrorism films in specific. Not all Third Cinema films deal with terrorism, but a large number of films about terrorism falls under the rubric Third Cinema. As British film critic and teacher Mike Wayne has noted, Third Cinema first emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and became an official part of the film studies curriculum in the 1980s (1). In their now-famous essay “Towards a Third Cinema” written in 1969, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, two Argentinian filmmakers/scholars, wrote:

In further comments, they reveal an acute understanding of the obstacles faced by the new cinema:

The subsequent worldwide production of a body of Third Cinema films at least partially answers these questions posed by Solanas and Getino. It is true that the most salient examples developed in the Third World, but Third Cinema, which is a socio-political designation, should not be conflated with Third World (or Third World Cinema), which is a geographical designation. Third Cinema, irrespective of the country in which it is produced or which country it takes as its subject, is considered a cinema of socio-political and cultural critique. Its modes of production and the avenues of its distribution and reception are also singular. As Mike Wayne points out in Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema “Third Cinema has pioneered collective and democratic working practices. In particular, it has sought to foster the participation of the people who constitute the subject matter of the films” (3). Wayne also refers to the “constraints within which Third Cinema works, squeezed as it is between monopoly capital which dominates production, distribution and exhibition, and/or state interference. In extreme instances of danger or crisis, Third Cinema…has pioneered ‘guerrilla filmmaking’” (3). Third Cinema, which has also been called imperfect cinema (Espinosa), [2] has also taken a proactive role vis-à-vis First Cinema (dominant, mainstream) and Second Cinema (art, authorial/auteur); rather than rejecting these precursors, it seeks to transform them and develop their sublimated potentialities (Wayne 10). The result is that one rarely finds a film that belongs solely to one of the three types of cinema; most are hybrids. Some even change their genres as the contexts change. Ruby Rich asks for example: “What does it mean that in today’s context The Battle of Algiers has begun to look like a recruiting film for Al-Qaeda?” (111). Finally, Third Cinema seeks to create, in Brechtian fashion, engaged spectators. Comparing Third Cinema films, which display an activist function with news reportage, film theorist Bill Nichols notes that the latter “urges us to look but not care, see but not act, know but not change. The news exists less to orient us toward action than to perpetuate itself as commodity, something to be fetishized and consumed” (Bill Nichols, qtd. in Bennett 113). Third Cinema films on the other hand, reflect Lukács’s idea that “the social world is in process and that realist art must ‘uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society’” (qtd. in Wayne 35). This anticipates Julio Espinosa’s call for Third Cinema to “show the process which generates the problems” (81). Žižek’s distinction among three types of violence: subjective, symbolic (as in language), and systemic helps clarify the Third Cinema project (1–3). Third Cinema films’ raison d’être is the exposure and indictment of the underlying economic framework and socio-political system, the “network of relationships” that enable violence. It thus becomes obvious that independent or non-mainstream directors who seek to make films about terrorism might well turn to the ethical practices, methodologies, and tools of Third Cinema. [3]

These Third Cinema directors have, in their films, effectively challenged the production values, Weltanschauung, and cinematic narratives of Hollywood. The result has been an iconoclastic cinema that developed independently in different parts of the world, for example in South Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. This apparent challenge has, however, been tempered by a simultaneous incorporation and reformulation of Hollywood cinematic conventions themselves. The resultant films thus exhibit an interesting tension that centers on factors such as narrative perspective, casting, genre fusing, linguistic authenticity, anti-anti-terrorist rhetoric, and realistic endings. In his 1988 essay “The Essential Terrorist,” Edward Said provided a critique of the ideological and cultural battle against terrorism, citing two problems with this battle: “first, its selectivity (‘we’ are never terrorists no matter what we may have done; ‘they’ always are and always will be), and second, its wholesale attempt to obliterate history, and indeed temporality itself. For the main thing is to isolate your enemy from time, from causality, from prior action, and thereby to portray him or her as ontologically and gratuitously interested in wreaking havoc for its own sake” (154). Third Cinema films about terrorism have broken all of Said’s taboos, subtly shifting concepts of “we” and “they” while stressing causality, history and temporality.

To illustrate these points I look more closely at three films from different regions of the world: Four Days in September (Brazil, 1997), The Terrorist (India, 1999), and Paradise Now (Palestine, 2005), demonstrating how, thematically and cinematically, these works challenge the status quo. For example: they tend to merge distinctive genres (such as documentary, drama, thriller, and romance), even incorporating humor and irony; they are filmed on location and in native languages (Portuguese, Tamil, and Arabic respectively); the terrorist roles are cast with very appealing actors—a fact emphasized by the pronounced use of extreme close-up shots; the films’ narrative perspective is that of the terrorists (which problematizes “we” and ‘they”); and the process of becoming a terrorist is delineated logically and rationally, and in one case is linked to earlier abuse and betrayal through flashbacks. In all three examples, history and causality are emphasized, and the roles of victim and perpetrator are interestingly confounded. In two of the films, both belonging to the subgenre of suicide bomber films, the role of the handlers also becomes paramount in the associative process. Unlike Hollywood films about terrorism such as Syriana (2006), [4] which adopt an anti-terrorist heroism approach, the Third Cinema films stress the perspective of the terrorist(s) and are replete with doubts, debates, and questionings. Their open-endedness also challenges the Hollywood films’ typical closure. Edward Said wrote in “The Essential Terrorist”: since terrorism “has displaced Communism as public enemy number one the concept has been used to institutionalize the denial and avoidance of history. If we are terrified enough, the argument goes, we do not ask questions about the public causes of terrorism or about the measures our government adopts for stamping it out.” Films from the world of Third Cinema, by humanizing terrorists and by revealing causal relationships, have undercut these feelings of being “terrified” and have thus helped foster a questioning both of the causes of terrorism and of the government’s anti-terrorist response.

My choice of these three films as examples was to some extent arbitrary since the number of films that center on terrorism seems to grow from day to day. I want, through my selection, to suggest the breadth of the genre as well as the depth of particular films. I hope by choosing films from countries as diverse as Brazil, India and Palestine to suggest the ubiquity of the phenomenon I am describing. I also want to indicate the diversity within the category of Third Cinema terrorist films: one centers on a hostage taking, one follows a guerrilla fighter turned suicide bomber, and the other pursues two volunteer suicide bombers, one of whom carries out his mission while the other does not. [5] In an aside on suicide attack narratives, I would note that my students have found this subgenre of terrorist works more compelling than say lyrical responses to terrorism, hostage-taking narratives or more general terrorism narratives that might include bank robberies, torture, shoot outs, even chase scenes (I think here in particular of works about the Baader Meinhof group in Germany). [6] Several factors may be operative. Suicide is taboo in some religions and may therefore carry the allure of the forbidden. Suicide-for-a-cause may also be exotic in its politicized foreignness to many American teenagers. Suicide bomber films (this is a shorthand term since not all political suicides are bombings, and suicide bombers would use different language to name themselves—perhaps martyrs, warriors, or jihadists) may also represent for many students the fascination-with-evil-phenomenon characteristically associated with high enrollments in Holocaust courses. [7] My “Terrorism in Literature and Film” course (taught four times between 2003 and 2010) has had substantial enrollments.

All three films I have selected are perhaps unusual in that they feature strong, revolutionary female figures, which reopens the debate about Third Cinema and the representation of gender issues. It is characteristic of Third Cinema works that they engage issues of sexism, racism and classism within revolutionary movements as well as their manifestations in colonialism. Two of the three films are based on actual historical events which are fictionalized in the screen retellings. In summary then, I hope to illustrate, through my three examples, how these films about terrorism embrace and explore Third Cinema production values and themes.

Bruno Barreto’s 1997 film Four Days in September is based on Rio de Janeiro journalist Fernando Gabeira’s political memoir O Que E Isso, Companheiro? Which is also the title of the original Brazilian version of the film (English translation: Oh what is this, comrade?). The original title has been purged of its ambiguity and provocativeness in the innocuous sounding “four days in September.” The film follows Fernando as he joins a group of revolutionaries, the MR-8 group, which is fighting governmental oppression and censorship. They rob a bank and then successfully kidnap the American ambassador to Brazil, Charles Burke Elbrick. Their demands for the release of fifteen political prisoners are finally met by the military government, but they are ultimately captured themselves. The concluding scene shows them being released from prison in exchange for the German ambassador to Brazil, who has been kidnapped. This film which has been called a “political thriller” (Davis), does indeed exhibit elements of that genre, but it is considerably more complex due to its borrowings from other genres. It is a thriller plus romance plus Bildungsroman plus docudrama, at the very least, with some noir elements thrown in as well. As a literary adaptation of a memoir with extensive documentary footage and Brechtian-style informational banners throughout, Four Days in September leans heavily toward an informational kind of authenticity. The NY Times reviewer, Stephen Holden, has called the film “an uneasy hybrid of political thriller and high-minded meditation on terrorism, its psychology and its consequences.” Holden’s use of the word “hybrid” underlines the film’s formal challenge to First Cinema types of films. And “uneasy” suggests one of the effects the film has on viewers. Other elements contribute to the creation of this uneasiness as well.

Undercutting Hollywood’s tendency to separate types of characters into immutable good and bad categories, Four Days in September seems to call almost everyone and everything into question: the revolutionaries fight among themselves both ideologically and otherwise; the hostage, the American ambassador, superbly played by Alan Arkin, is portrayed both negatively and sympathetically; some of the kidnappers develop a relationship with the hostage and oppose executing him; and one of the secret service agents, Henrique, who specializes in torturing the dissidents, feels remorse for his actions, which he expresses both to his wife and to his colleague. Rather than as hardened criminals, the kidnappers are repeatedly described as a bunch of kids or as amateurs. Henrique tells his wife “Most are kids with big dreams.” And one of the more experienced revolutionaries tells his colleague that “They are middle-class kids seeking adventure.” This ethical ambiguity and ideological wrangling directly contradict the official anti-terrorist discourse current in Western countries in the 21^st century. The scenes of torture cast a negative light on the government agents as does the concluding scene. Barreto filmed a soccer match at the Maracana stadium in Rio which demonstrated growing Brazilian patriotism through the wild enthusiasm of the fans; this scene stands in stark contrast to the governmental repression in the streets.

The first five minutes of the film set the tone both formally and thematically. Four Days in September opens with an informational banner or intertitle: Rio de Janeiro. Early 1960s. The viewer then sees a sequence of black and white stills as The Girl from Ipanema plays in the background (but a jazz band version, not a Latin band version). The informational banners revealingly use present tense verbs. The black and white images fade into footage of a student demonstration with the actors superimposed. As the demonstration turns violent, police arrive with horses, shields and clubs. The next banner says: July 20, 1969; we see an astronaut landing on the moon. This neutral event is politicized by the anti-American commentaries of the three young men who are slowly revealed watching the television broadcast. Applause is used as an auditory segue from the apartment to a reception at the residence of the American ambassador where guests are watching the same television broadcast, but express quite different reactions. This difference reminds me of the question posed by Teshome Gabriel in an essay on Third Cinema: “Have you ever watched a Third World film with native viewers of that culture?” (“Colonialism” 42). The socio-political oppositions and the government’s ruthlessness are thus established early on. The ending in which nothing seems to have been accomplished but at a very high cost—for example Maria has been injured in police custody and is in a wheelchair—lends even more ambiguity to a film that seems to want us to root for the underdog. Stephen Holden writes:

To give a slightly different perspective on the film’s message, Clare Norton-Smith, in a BBC review of the film, had the following to say:

In probing deeply into the motivations and psychological profile of his characters, Barreto exhibits a characteristic that, I would argue, is common to all contemporary terrorist narratives.

Indian director Santosh Sivan, in his 1999 film The Terrorist, documents throughout the 95 minute film the slow evolution of the protagonist Malli from guerrilla fighter to suicide bomber to mission aborter. She encounters a succession of people who make her question her mission and ultimately decide to renege. Sivan has said that he wanted to understand how someone could commit such an incomprehensible act. Like Four Days in September, The Terrorist was based on an actual event, in this case the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, in 1991. Just as Norton-Smith observed about Bruno Barreto’s film—and in almost the same words—the NY Times reviewer of Sivan’s film concludes that the director has focused on humanizing the story: “In spite of the political volatility of its subject matter, the film is less interested in politics than in psychology. It seems to have been inspired by a basic, exquisitely difficult question: what kind of a person would do something like that? And by choosing to answer the question as literally and painstakingly as possible, Mr. Sivan has accomplished something extraordinary: he has given political extremism a human face.” (Scott para. 3). The precise political conflict, the identity of the leader of the guerrillas, the target of the suicide bombing—all are left unspecified in the film—although we know events occur in a jungle somewhere. These factors combine with the director’s fondness for extreme close-up shots of the protagonist’s “unforgettable face, with her wide, full mouth and enormous dark eyes…often filling most of the screen, as if we might be able to find our way into Malli’s mind through her pores” as one critic has noted (Scott para. 4). The result is an emphasis on the protagonist’s psychological development. In this regard, The Terrorist might appear to be a less political film than Four Days in September. However through repeated use of flashbacks, viewers are introduced to government troops’ atrocities against the revolutionaries, including torture. Through flashbacks we also relive the death of Malli’s older brother, also a guerrilla fighter, and the murder of her guide Lotus’s entire family. Sivan’s interest in the psychological elements along with the political serves to make the film more complex in terms of genre but also as an example of a “terrorist” film.

Typical of Third Cinema films, according to definitions put forward by Solanas and Getino as well as Teshome Gabriel, would be The Terrorist’s production conditions. It was the first feature film directed by Santosh Sivan, and it was shot in just 17 days (on locations in Kerala and Madras—not in a studio) with a budget of only $50,000. In addition, the cast was entirely made up of nonprofessional actors. While Four Days in September enjoyed more substantial funding, and the actors were professional, the make-up was done in a way to make them look like ordinary people. Fernando is represented, with unkempt hair and thick black-plastic glasses, as a stereotypical intellectual-bordering-on-nerd. In a non-Hollywood move, Sivan works openly with symbols, particularly with water. This is a very wet film, filled with streams, lakes, rivers, tears, showers and rainstorms. In another such move, Sivan lets the screen go black in instances of psychic distress. Sivan comments on the cultural influence of the West when Malli preens in front of a mirror, striking poses like the Western movie stars in posters on the wall. This scene occurs just before she decides not to go through with the bombing. Distribution is also an important issue for Third Cinema films, and The Terrorist, has an interesting history. John Malkovich discovered it at the Cairo International Film Festival in 1998 and undertook to find the film a distributor. It took producer Mark Burton and Malkovich several months to locate Phaedra Cinema to distribute the film in North America. Malkovich introduced the film in a lengthy New York Times article in January 2000, thus ensuring the film some exposure. [8] In summary, The Terrorist, like Four Days in September, challenges the status quo of First Cinema both thematically and cinematographically.

In our final example we move to Palestine, which already marks a challenge geographically. Palestine is an occupied land and its film directors have little access to resources under the unstable conditions. Despite this, director Hany Abu-Assad managed not only to film on location—despite the kidnapping of his location manager and the near hit of an Israeli missile that caused five German technicians to return home—but also to create a work with fairly high production values. The hybridity of which we have spoken is exemplified already in the director’s identity: he was born in Nazareth and carries an Israeli passport, but identifies himself as a Palestinian. Like The Terrorist, filming was relatively fast: a total of about 40 days. In the spirit of revolutionary filmmaking “collectives” as discussed by numerous Third Cinema critics (Solanas/Getino; Anthony Guneratne; Teshone Gabriel), this film, Paradise Now, was co-produced by a number of European firms, and the film crew of seventy people came from seven different countries. Like the other two films, Paradise Now is interested in both personal psychology and politics. It traces two boyhood friends in Palestine who are asked to make good on their promise to carry out a suicide mission in Israel. After a failed initial attempt, one of the friends returns to complete the mission. Hany Abu-Assad said in a 2005 Cinéaste interview: “the majority of people have one of two views on the suicide bombers: either the bombers are criminals or super-heroes. My film is about destroying those prevailing perceptions, those images, to build a new perception…. We are disturbing their established perceptions” (17). Abu-Assad reflects in this observation Bakhtin’s important “argument for disruption as a method of intellectual advancement” (qtd. in Rich 112). Like the preceding two films, the director claims to be telling the story “from a human point of view” (17). Abu-Assad rightly notes that he allows viewers “to experience things they will never experience in their own lives” (17). Rather than showing difficulties of everyday life in the West Bank, the director decided to shed light on a dark place, as he explained: “What we don’t know is the experience of the last twenty-four hours before people blow themselves up. So I wanted to light up that place” (18). Paradise Now is ideologically as fraught as Four Days in September. Different political opinions and attitudes toward violence, including suicide bombing, emerge from discussions between the two friends, between them and a moderate woman named Suha who has returned from abroad with a different perspective, and between the two friends and their handlers. Abu-Assad said that he did not necessarily want to change people’s opinions but he wanted them to be affected. When asked what he hoped Israelis would see in the film, he responded: “Israeli or not, I hope they come out with a shock. This is what I wanted…. I want people to leave speechless…. Every human should be shocked watching a movie that lights dark places” (18). In Brechtian fashion, the director appears to hope that viewers will go straight from the movie theater to the barricades.

One area in which all three films challenge not only First Cinema but also Third Cinema itself, is the role of women. In writing about the combination in world cinema of two transnational genres, the melodrama and the action picture, Annette Kuhn mentions that sometimes the twist is that the action ‘hero’ is female. This same twist has been appearing in films about terrorism recently. We had the early example of three women bombers in Pontecorvo’s Battle in Algiers, but that was merely one episode in the film. Recent films have centered on women revolutionaries and terrorists. In Four Days in September, the leader of the MR-8 terrorist cell is a strong woman named comrade Maria. Late in the film, she is humanized and breaks down crying and tells Fernando that she is afraid of dying. The Terrorist opens with a violent scene in which Malli executes a traitor followed immediately by a second violent scene in which she kills a government soldier. The humanization and feminization occur slowly throughout the film. And finally, in Paradise Now, a key role is played by Suha, who appears to be very worldly because of her time spent outside the country. She lives independently instead of with her family and defends her political beliefs in an articulate manner. Hany Abu-Assad said in the Cinéaste interview that he intentionally cast Suha’s character as someone from outside and as a woman: “I believe women, in general, have more reasonable thoughts about killing. In matters of life and death, they are more compassionate. They care about life more than men do” (18). One cannot overlook the reductionist, even essentialist nature of Abu-Assad’s comment, and yet these female figures expand the very definition of Third Cinema by taking on gender issues once considered extraneous to social conflicts.

In his forward to Part II of Rethinking Third Cinema, Anthony Gueneratne refers to the “symbolic use of women’s bodies as signifiers of nation and of national intergrity and fecundity,” a topic pursued at greater length in one of the essays in that section. This topic invites us to look afresh at Third Cinema films but also at terrorist films. For example, the suicide bomber, Malli, in The Terrorist, becomes pregnant in the course of the film, a fact that assumes growing importance (pun intended) in her decision whether to carry out the mission. Instead of killing the Indian VIP, she gives life to the next generation of Tamil guerrillas—a choice that heralds a new political agenda in Third Cinema films.

In summary, terrorism, because it is an inherently fraught subject matter, offers a space in which third Cinema films can challenge the official “we/they” discourse of Western governments. The films’ iconoclastic function rests on the following four strategies: 1) presenting terrorism from the terrorists’ point of view, 2) portraying terrorists themselves sympathetically, 3) demonstrating causality in terrorist acts, and 4) representing the worldview of the oppressed. Importantly, this group of terrorist films is iconoclastic not only in its alternative way of understanding terrorism. The films also challenge current definitions of Third Cinema by moving beyond the ideas of Solanas and Getino and others in ways that both question and expand on the core characteristics (and inherent limitations). First, let me enumerate the factors that identify this group of terrorist films as works of Third Cinema, and then conclude with the ways in which I think they transcend Third Cinema. The films all exhibit at least some of the following characteristics—both thematic and cinematographic: low budgets, rapid filming, filming on location (non-studio productions), non-professional actors, use of documentary footage, genre hybridity, renunciation of a non-diegetic sound track, use of intertitles, and a basis in actual historical events. The films transcend Third Cinema in the following ways: 1) instead of choosing a political focus over a psychological one, they merge the two, using psychological interest for political ends; 2) they present a non-monolithic political position, opting rather to expose internal dissension and reflect arguments, debates, and doubts; 3) as mentioned above, they often present women as equal or even primary figures, and they expose gender issues; and, to end on a note of greater levity given the grim nature of terrorism in general, 4) a number of the films use humor, including two of my examples: Paradise Now and Four Days in September. During the kidnapping in the latter work, one of the hostage-takers has trouble driving the getaway car, and the protagonist Fernando is not allowed to participate in the abduction because he can neither shoot nor drive—hardly the marks of a hardened revolutionary. In the Palestinian film, the handlers incongruously eat sandwiches in the background as one of the two suicide bombers, Khaled, tapes his martyr video. When he is finished, they discover there was no film in the video camera. And finally, at the end of his martyr video, he gives his mother advice on where to buy the least expensive water filters, which adds a poignant twist—a revealing zeugma—to the taping. The use of humor appears to humanize the terrorists at the same time as it problematizes the purely political agenda of both Third Cinema and terrorist films. In sum then, and in light of all the aforementioned factors, I would like—at the very least—to suggest that the two genres of Third Cinema films and terrorist films intersect in a way that is mutually elucidating. Both are contributing to the revitalization and politicization of film studies.

As terrorism studies or terrorology—as I have heard our research called—become more institutionalized, and as terrorism increasingly pervades popular culture, we can expect more Third Cinema style films about terrorism to be created. “On the political significance of film” Walter Benjamin wrote,

Thus we have the means to reach not only our students but also the masses of which Benjamin speaks; it remains to find the right methodology. I close with a kind of “call to arms” by Ruby Rich, which I partly cited earlier and which suggests some aspects of just such a methodology:

While the nexus that connects terrorism and film studies is Third Cinema, that which links terrorism to our students might be called, to paraphrase Kant, the pedagogical imperative. Third Cinema films are postmodern in Lyotard’s sense of questioning the existence of a single, monolithic meta-narrative. We owe it to ourselves, our students, and to Benjamin’s “masses” to pursue this skepticism rigorously.