Search found 1 match: Annette Bening

Today it is virtually impossible to see Edward Zwick's The Siege (1998) other than through the prism of subsequent events. There is indeed something mildly prophetic about the film's concept of a large-scale terrorist campaign in New York City, but perhaps what this shows more than anything is that the terrorists of 2001, like everyone else, were susceptible to Hollywoodized patterns of thinking. Slightly more interesting is the film's attempt to imagine how such a campaign would provoke the creation and implementation of a massive security and surveillance apparatus. If the details aren't correct, this is mainly because movies prefer the clarity and unsubtlety of cages and army vehicles occupying the streets of a metropolis to the invisibility of legislation and data banks.

What the film really does, however, is stage an inter-institutional tussle as psycho-sexual melodrama. Specifically, a heroic, urban, but rule-governed black man (Denzel Washington, representing the FBI) gets involved in a courtship with a bright but hard-to-read woman (the CIA, played by Annette Bening), who is herself something like a quasi-daughter of a stiff and arrogant white man (the military, played by Bruce Willis). Just as he starts to get really excited about her, however, the hero discovers, to his dismay, that she has been sleeping with an Arab (i.e., that the CIA has a tainted history of involvement with Middle Eastern dictators and extremists). It thus becomes clear that this pre-existing relationship is the real source of the threat to the continued masculine protection of, and control over, the women and children of America.

The hero then begins to bicker with the woman's quasi-father about what to do about this, as well as confronting his potential girlfriend about her promiscuity. She begs to be allowed to "make it right", and the audience understands that, given the gravity of her infidelity, this can mean only one thing. But since the hero is bound to the veneer of civilisation, it is left to the woman's own quasi-paternal figure to mete out the necessary justice in a more primitive and violent (i.e., appropriate) manner. The proper order of things can be restored, and the husbands and fathers of America can ensure that their wives and daughters will not fall prey to pernicious influences, and that they themselves will not be corrupted by such influences, only by sacrificing not only the slender, seductive, smooth-talking foreigner, but also the generally well-meaning and attractive, but sexually over-confident, hussy as well. All's well that ends well.