Alcatraz
Few wars have been as mystifying to Americans as the ones that dismembered Yugoslavia during the 1990s. We don’t have to think very hard to figure out Iraq, Afghanistan, or Israel: religious fanaticism notwithstanding, they’re all comprehensible in terms of familiar geopolitical motivators like energy, land, and security. Even the horrific convulsions of African states often refer back to oil or diamonds. But Yugoslavia? It just seemed to come apart–spitting out eccentric little entities called Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bosnia that promptly began to attack one another with a staggering belligerence. In their most bewilderingly vicious phase, some of these entities resorted to genocide: on the day I write this, a Serbian soldier is testifying at the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic, claiming that after the fall of Srebrenica in 1995, about 7,500 Moslem Bosnians were “lined up in rows” and massacred with machine guns.
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That experts kept saying the conflicts went back centuries only made them harder for us to understand. This was a fight about the past–a remote and arcane regional past at that. And Americans don’t do pasts. It’s what we came here specifically to avoid. Ours is the land where Archie Leach becomes Cary Grant. We can barely remember all the way back to the last episode of The Sopranos, and we’re proud of it. Looking at the former Yugoslavia, we simply couldn’t figure out why these folks would get so worked up over stuff that happened, like, ages ago.
Obviously what we’ve got here is a political allegory. Neil isn’t just an American but America; Sylvia, not just a Bosnian but–well, you name it: the Balkans, the Islamic world, southeast Asia. She’s the perennially inscrutable Other who meets what we like to think of as our enthusiasm, generosity, industry, and love with her own set of dark assumptions, which we couldn’t fathom even if we were aware of them. Neil’s got a jovial Russian sidekick, Igore, who tries to warn him off Sylvia–based, no doubt, on his own experience with inscrutable Others. But does Neil listen? Did Clinton? Might Dubya? Alcatraz comes at an all-too-apt historical moment, when the consequences of our disregard for the past–both our own and others’–are painfully evident in the rising American body count in Iraq, the land we were going to liberate. The sad irony is that, given the compulsive nature of that disregard, just about any historical moment since the end of World War II would be equally apt.
