Morgan Spurlock (Michael Moore without the vitriol and bile), director of the outrageous and eye-opening Super Size Me, follows up his exposé on America’s fast food addiction with an ambitious sophomore project. In Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, the documentarian sets out to do what the U.S. military, intelligence services and countless bounty hunters have failed to accomplish: find the most wanted man on earth.
Leaving behind his extremely pregnant girlfriend (making the world a safer place for his soon-to-be-born child is the reason Spurlock gives for making the film), Spurlock becomes something of a bin Laden profiler, trying to get into the mind of the mass murderer to both dissect his ideology and ascertain where he might be hiding. After a crash course in self-defense and Arabic language and culture, Spurlock begins his manhunt through some of the most dangerous places in the world — Egypt, Morocco, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and finally Pakistan, where most experts believe bin Laden is hiding.
It’s no spoiler to reveal that Spurlock will fail in his quest. He knows it. We know it. And he knows we know it. When all is said and done, he is not really serious about finding bin Laden, and the overall hermeneutics of the film really suffers for the conceit. Remember the wise old saying about the journey being more important than the destination? Spurlock no doubt prays you do, because from the outset of his search-and-destroy gimmick, the journey is the only authentic part.
Where in the World… doesn’t introduce any new concepts. It rehashes the usual tent poles of propping up the dictators we now find ourselves fighting, the idea that the U.S. has globalized terror and created far more radicals than we’ve eradicated, and that religion is a powerful force for good unless held hostage by extremism. But promulgating these ideas was never Spurlock’s intention to begin with. He’ll leave that to Alex Gibney, Errol Morris and Charles Ferguson. Amidst a sea of very good, far more high-toned documentaries examining our government’s complacency, inanity and culpability in the current state of affairs, Spurlock alone seems to brush past all that and focus on what’s really important. Clandestine memos and surreptitious interviews are all well and good, but the only voice Spurlock wants to hear is that of the Semitic man and woman on the street, the average citizen. And it is here where Spurlock knew all along the power of his film resided.
The documentarian forms a picture of a Middle Eastern population both rational and radical. But for every imam who invokes God’s wrath against America (oddly enough, Spurlock’s worst treatment comes at the hands of ultra-Orthodox Jews), there is a poor laborer who embraces Spurlock in unconditional friendship. Spurlock’s interviewees do not reflect the conventional media stereotypes. The director (and the viewer) encounters people in mosques, on street corners and in homes who are not all that different than American families; people who share the same dreams and fears and want the same things for their children as Spurlock wants for his own.
Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? humanizes the very people most Americans have found it far easier and more convenient to simply demonize. It’s much harder to hate “the other” once you’ve truly looked into his eyes. America has abdicated its strategy to win the hearts and minds of the Middle East. We need a cultural strategy, this film pleads, not a militaristic one.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.