Warning: Spoilers for much of Season 1 of Lioness
- and much of Episode 7 ‘Wish the Fight
Away – below.
I never expected that
the most blatant rejection of how we’ve been fighting the War On Terror for
nearly a quarter of a century would come not from Michael Moore or even a filmmaker
like Steven Spielberg but Taylor Sheridan. I especially didn’t think I would
see it Lioness a show which is, at least ostensibly, about a special ops
unit that has been designed to take out Muslim terrorists on foreign soil by
using women to get where males can’t.
But Lioness is,
in many ways, a completely repudiation of not only how we’ve been fighting the
war but how the CIA operates and how the entire U.S. government has been taking
the wrong approach to everything in the Middle East before the war even
officially started. While the series makes this clear many times in its first
season I think the clearest contrast can be seen in the penultimate episode of
the series Wish the Fight Away.
The series has been
following Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira) in her mission to try and reach a terrorist
who we have been told multiple times is the biggest fundraiser in Saudi Araba ‘since
Bin Laden’. To do so Cruz has been getting close to his daughter Aaliyah
(Stephanie Nur) who is about to be married off. Cruz, as we learned in the
pilot, was the victim of domestic abuse both from her parents and her boyfriend
and gave herself to the Marines when they saved her life. Cruz is the moral
conscience of Lioness because she’s the only person whose soul has not
been worn away by the mission the way everyone around her has. Joe (Zoe
Saldana) has made it very clear almost since the start of the series that she
views the people who are operators solely as the means to an end. Consequently
she has no interest in not only coming close to them but even considering them
human beings. In the second episode she ‘puts Cruz through the ringer’ and has
no remorse about doing so either to Cruz or the soldiers who did. Cruz is
basically alone in this and Jo and her team give her no real support, not psychological.
As Aaliyah gets closer
to her wedding say she and Cruz become closer. We learn over time that Aaliyah
has no real friends and sees her impending marriage as the end of her independence
as a woman. On the night of a sleepover where both women are vulnerable the two
women kiss and start having sex. The relationship deepens when they go to
Manhattan and it is here Cruz genuinely feels vulnerable.
After her handler hears
her the two of them having sex for three hours – something he nonchalantly
reports to Jo later – Cruz freezes at Aaliyah’s pledges of commitment and walks
out of the room into a nearby hotel. Cruz is clearly falling apart and she
makes it very clear she doesn’t know if she can go through with this. Joe is
called in from the mission prep about this and honestly doesn’t seem that
thrilled that her recruit is a human being.
When she ends up in
Manhattan Joe looks at Cruz as she falls apart and offers the opposite of
sympathy or even humanity. “You have no family, no friends, you’ve never known
love,” she said matter-of-factly. She tells Cruz that this isn’t real and she’s
believing the lie. When Cruz tells her that Aaliyah genuinely seems empathetic Joe’s
words are dismissive, saying that is her last bit of freedom “an adventure
before she becomes a breeder.”
There is a hypocrisy
to Joe’s words that is staggering. During the last few episodes Joe’s 14 year
old daughter was in a car accident and was discovered to be pregnant. Joe has
been a mostly absentee mother and has been infuriated that her husband has been
letting her getting away with a boyfriend. When she goes to see her daughter in
the hospital she apologizes for her absence saying that her daughter “has been
one of the sacrifice she makes for the good of her country.’
Yet it’s clear in her
discussion with Cruz that she sees this woman’s soul as another necessary sacrifice.
Worse considering that Jo is a woman of color and that she knows more than
anyone how repressive the Saudi regime is even to women of stature her
dismissal of Aaliyah shows that at the end of the day she essentially views her
in the same breath as her father, even though to this point we’ve seen no
evidence of that and Sheridan has gone out of his way to make Aaliyah infinitely
more sympathetic than almost every other character on the show, save for Cruz. It
makes it very clear that for Joe she truly does view that American
exceptionalism must prevail and that the ends will always justify the means.
She drives this point
home later by saying that Aaliyah’s father is the worst terrorist we’ve seen
since Bin Laden who ‘was also a father’. That Cruz feels remorse about what she
might have to do is considered a weakness to her. When she says this will break
Aaliyah Joe says simply: “It’ll break
her anyway.” Nothing could make it clearer
about Joe and in effect the entire War on Terror is argued by saying that
American lives will always be more important than the lives of anyone else or
that no one in the Middle East is an innocent bystander.
It's worth noting this
speech does nothing to convince Cruz of the righteousness of her mission: for
the rest of the episode it’s an open question whether she’ll go through with it.
Even when Kaitlyn (Nicole Kidman) makes it clear that their best bet is
probably a missile strike Joe says she doesn’t agree. She intends to waken the
marine. And her methods later on are even crueler: she shows Cruz footage of
all the confirmed attacks they know Aaliyah’s father is responsible for. “It’s
an eight hour flight” she tells her. “You won’t get close to finishing it but I
want you to try.” In other words Joe
wants to turn her into a cold killing machine and if that means destroying
whatever residual humanity she might have, well, that’s just a case of the ends
justifying the means.
This is a harsh enough
statement from Sheridan. What makes all the more damning is a speech that’s
takes place just before the plane flying to the location of the wedding takes
off. Throughout the series we’ve watched the puzzling marriage between Kaitlyn
and her husband Errol (Martin Donovan). Errol is a financial expert who seems
indifferent to what his wife is doing and who Kaitlyn is more than willing to
trade information to learn what she needs to help her giving away little in return.
Before she leaves, however, Errol drops
the dance he’s been doing and tells her why he’s been warning about the mission
he’s on. In it he reveals that even without the intelligence briefings Kaitlyn
has been getting he has a better understanding of the Middle East then she does
– and maybe anyone in the CIA.
He tells her, in no
uncertain terms, about the situation in Saudi Arabia. He gives us the
statistics that less than one percent of the population controlled a vast majority
of the nation’s wealth while more than 40 percent are well below the poverty
line. He makes it clear that the Saudi royals need to make sure that if the
populace ever stops to think about this for long they might decide to revolt and
that in a sense the War on Terror has been basically a distraction by the
wealthy for the religious elite. He also implies very bluntly that America and
the West is willing to indulge this -
and he mentions 9-11 in all but name – in recognition of the vast oil reserves
in Saudi Arabia and their fear that if there is a religious war, Saudi Arabia
will end up becoming Iran.
Errol is blunt that
until the world comes up with an alternative to fossil fuels the entire Middle
East must be handle with delicacy and that any disruption – like the assassination
of Aaliyah’s father – will lead to consequences that will reverberate
throughout the entire world and possibly World War III. “Everyone’s wondering
why the world won’t do anything about climate change,” he finishes his speech. “Honestly,
I don’t think the world will survive long enough to die from climate
change.”
Errol’s speech,
delivered with almost no emotion by Donovan, is arguably the darkest thing in
the entire series. It argues that the War on Terror is a lost cause not because
we’ve been fighting it wrong or that we don’t know what winning looks like
(though Sheridan makes it clear that those are very much part of the reason)
but because the entire thing is essentially is a staged event by both parties
to maintain status quo. I’ve heard many arguments as to the American reasoning
for the war being built entirely on oil; Sheridan argues just as strongly that
the Saudis are doing it for exactly the same reason. And part of the reason I
find it believable is because as long as America is dependent on oil as a
natural resource we’re going to be spending a lot of money that will end up in
Saudi Arabia. And that in turn will eventually end up in the pockets of men
like Aaliyah’s father. We’re funding both sides of the war to a great extent
and we’ll never win that way.
Kaitlyn’s reaction is,
like almost everything else we’ve seen in Kidman’s performance, perfectly
neutral. “Thank you for taking away any doubts about the moral high ground of
this.” But by this point we know Kaitlyn well enough to know that, because she’s
closer to the ground than Jo is, that she is shaken by this. She knows better
than Jo the costs this job has on a person - in the previous episode she offered Joe a
station position because she know how high the cost is to both her and her family. She spends the
entire season basically as a buffer to Joe (I’m reminded of the relationship
between Saul and Carrie in Homeland) emotionally supportive when she
needs to be, chewing her out when its necessary. But she knows very well the
moral high ground is all she has.
Errol has essentially
told her – and the viewer – that the entire arc we’ve seen and perhaps the
mission statement for the series is in the grand scheme of things, inconsequential.
It doesn’t make Joe or the Lioness teams less heroic – they go into that
episode knowing all too well that they may all end up dead or in a foreign
prison, and yet they go anyway. What Sheridan makes very clear in Lioness is
that this is pointless because the CIA’s victories are all essentially short
term and do nothing for the long-term. Their job, as we see over and over, is
to make America safe right now. They don’t care if the consequences of
their actions lead to America facing a different threat a year or even a month
or later. I can’t help but be reminded of Munich. After Eric Bana asks
Geoffrey Rush the immortal line: “Did we really accomplish anything?” Rush
responds: “My toenails keep growing back. Does that mean I stop cutting them?”
In a sense that could just as easily apply to America’s entire strategy (I use
the term very broadly) when it comes to the Middle East.
And 9/11 will always
be people like Joe’s justification. I don’t know if Kaitlyn ever tells her
husband’s blunt opinion of it but I seriously doubt she ever will. The attacks
on the Twin Towers have been for 23 years, our government’s de facto blanket justification
for every single thing that has been done in our name since. Joe uses it as a
trump card, indirectly, to convince Cruz to move forward. Errol says not only
that it’s an excuse but that it was practically inevitable given the economy of
both regions. Lioness argues not that we lost our moral high ground when
we started the War on Terror but that we never really had it in the first
place.
The second season of Lioness
will begin airing on Showtime on Monday and I look forward to it for many
reasons. In addition to be exceptionally written, directed and acted it acts,
indirectly as both a mirror image and a repudiation of 24 which began
its run at the start of both Peak TV and the post 9/11 world. For nearly a
decade we cheered for Jack Bauer as he saved the world every day and blatantly
refused to play by the rules under the doctrine of ‘the end justifying the
means’. Now 20 years later we watch Joe and the rest of her team break many of
the same rules for the mission but Sheridan is always making it clear that we’re
breaking our laws in the name of some larger purpose, that there is no
oversight or consequences for the people who do so, and that the ends that everyone’s
fighting for are so vague that not even the people doing so really know what
they are any more. For what shall it profit our nation if we win the world and
lose our soul, Sheridan keeps asking the viewer with every episode? Lioness argues
that not only have lost the collective soul of our nation we don’t even know
what winning looks like or if we’re just cutting our collective toenails no
matter how much bigger and uglier they grow back each time.
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