If London ever fell

In recent times, movie-makers in the West have found a common film template: Terrorists attack some country, institution, or place, and some hero, usually a Caucasian, comes to the rescue. In the process, of course, the radicals, with very specific looks and outfits, are blown to smithereens, their ideology denounced, and, finally, a cinema hall filled with people leave with some stereotyped messages about terrorist acts and their perpetrators. A few days ago, went to watch a movie called London Has Fallen. Unfortunately, I did not take a few shots of neat Vodka beforehand, which is my regular habit in case I find myself watching a Bengali/Hindi commercial film. Within 20 minutes of the movie, I regretted not having taken that much needed libation -- absolutely essential when one has to put the brain and common sense out of function. Therefore, I was in a cinema hall, watching a whole lot of utter excreta, with the mind refusing to turn blank. Interestingly, in all the terrorism-related movies that I have had the chance to watch, I found that, in a majority of cases, the protagonist, or in this case, the saviour of the world and society, is inevitably a white person. Juxtapose this with real life terror attacks, where often unsuspecting victims were given shelter by immigrants working at shops or restaurants. During the Paris attacks, Safer, an Algerian-Muslim hotel worker, gave shelter to others at the risk of his life and, while only a few of these people ever get to be featured in media, a lot of others, who do not endorse extremism, also do their duty as humans during emergencies, remaining, in the end, out of the spotlight. Interestingly, when terrorism-related films are made, the template is a common one: It’s us and them, a clear polarisation between Western people and terrorists who are portrayed as Arabs or immigrants with ties to some Muslim country. In London Has Fallen, the demonised state is Pakistan/Afghanistan. Someone in a desert is hatching and overseeing a large-scale terror attack on London, which leaves the city under the control of fanatics. In reality, terror attacks are usually found to be planned within a European country, in most cases, by homegrown radicals. Brussels has become a focal point for security operations though -- in the movie, no European links can be shown, lest it harm the image of the place. By constantly presenting certain places as terrorist hubs, these films, with their formulaic approach, implant in the mind of the common viewer a set of stereotyped ideas. Mother, can I invite a bearded student from university who happens to come from the Helmund Province? What!? London has Fallen shows that the British PM has been assassinated, which, for some absurd reason, was hushed up by the intelligence. First of all, if such an event ever occurred, the news would spread in seconds, and, in the wake of the killing of the PM, Britain would never organise a full-scale funeral, inviting all the top leaders of the world. I began to think: Why did they come up with such a flimsy plot? Wait, in a few more minutes, I started to question my sanity since the movie showed foreign dignitaries roaming about London prior to the funeral without adequate security, with the Japanese PM caught in a traffic jam like all other commuters and the Italian one cavorting on a rooftop with a woman. After a lot of utter rubbish, which also included Royal Guards firing at civilians and the German chancellor, the movie fell into the much-used format: All hell’s broken lose, Muslim radicals have attacked, and now, a white security guard (the White Knight) has to save not only London but the US president. Wonder if Donald Trump’s buddies had anything to do with the film’s funding … Hypothetically speaking, what if London came under attack? What is possible are isolated incidents where violence is perpetrated not by foreigners but by the homegrown disaffected lot, who would get into an extreme scheme, expecting to get killed in the process. If radicals are not from within the UK then they will possibly be from some other European nation, as real-life events have shown us in the recent past. The toxic element is within, not somewhere else, and to deal with it, each European nation has to evaluate/acknowledge not only their rather unsavoury colonial past but the very sketchy issues of failure in integration, resulting from decades of subtle prejudicial treatment meted out to immigrant communities. I am sure someone sitting in a desert in Afghanistan won’t be pressing buttons on a computer to unleash apocalypse; the demons are much closer. The movie showed the London Met being infiltrated by radicals, with no loyal officer left. There’s a limit to being preposterous. Anyway, the bottom line is: Films like these only feed into Islamophobia. Curiously, while terrorism by Muslim radicals is a staple movie plot, regular school/college killings by sociopaths aren’t. When was the last time I watched a film featuring demented psychological killers going into an indiscriminate killing spree? Um, well … can’t remember. In the end, there is one lingering question: Why are the saviours of the world always Caucasian? Are we to believe that heroism in extreme circumstances cannot come from a commoner, an immigrant, a woman in a veil, or even a tourist who happens to be an agnostic?