“Tangsir” - Amir Naderi (1974)

Tangsir (1974) was an early action/adventure film of writer-director Amir Naderi and concerns the “heroic” actions of a man in response to his having been swindled out of his life savings. The story is based on Sadegh Chubak’s novel Tangsir (1963), which is set in the southwestern Iranian coastal province of Bushehr around 1935.  Naderi’s film was a hit with the public, presumably because it evokes emotive feelings about justice, honor, and patriotism.  But the primary emotion  that hovers throughout the story is that of revenge.

Revenge is often a key element of adventure narratives.  Some wrong or injustice has been committed early on in the piece, and the protagonist in the story strives to put things right.  The visceral urge to wreak revenge may be a driving force among some of the characters, but the main goal is usually to regain what has been lost and to reestablish harmony.  However, there is a narrative subgenre that is totally devoted to revenge, itself.  The whole point of the revenge film (or revenge narrative, if you will) is to build up a sense of righteous wrath in the viewer and to have that angry tension released at the end of the story by depicting vengeful punishment on the evildoers.  Such films are often dismissed as exploitation, “drive-in theater” films and not considered to be worthy of our admiration.  Nevertheless, Tangsir belongs to that category.

There is something about Tangsir, however, that is distinct from most revenge films.  The typical revenge film devotes most of its story – say, 80% of the running time – to depicting the cruel injustices on the part of the evil perpetrators.  This builds up the frustration on the part of the viewer, who longs for justice to be reestablished.  Then at the end comes a short, cathartic climax that supposedly sets things right.  In Tangsir, though, the temporal weights are reversed.  About a quarter of the film is devoted to showing the injustices, and the remaining three-quarters are devoted to an excruciating orgy of vengeful slaughter.

The story of Tangsir concerns Zar (Za’er) Mohammad, a sturdy workman from the Tangestan area of Bushehr province.  People from that area are apparently referred to as “tangsirs” and known for having a characteristic tribal commonality of toughness [1].  Zar Mohammad feels that it is his duty to uphold the honor of the tangsirs.  The film’s narrative progresses through four sections, or acts.

1.  Zar Mohammad’s Misery
This first act relates the details of how Zar Mohammad was cheated.  This occurred two years prior to the film’s beginning when Zar Mohammad invested his life’s savings of 2,000 tomans, the results of 20 years of hard labor, in a business venture with a merchant, Abdoul Karim, from the local bazaar.  But the merchant declared bankruptcy and informed Zar Mohammad that all his money was lost, even though the merchant has continued operating his stall in the bazaar as before.  Actually, there were four people involved in setting up this swindle.

• Abdoul Karim, the bazaar merchant
• Ali, a lawyer who apparently keeps track of legal aspects of business affairs
• Sheikh Abou Torab, a local mullah who prepared and authorized the original papers of the deal.
• Rajab, another merchant and friend of Sheikh Torab, who also participated in the original arrangement.

Zar Mohammad has been beseeching all four of these characters for justice, but they all dismiss the man as a loser and abusively turn him away. Zar Mohammad begs the sheikh on hands and knees, kissing the man’s hand and asking him to have pity on him, saying he would even accept 300 tomans in return at this point. He then goes further and tells them that he would even accept a pittance of 2 rials a day so that he won’t be ashamed in front of his own people.  As it is, he says he is a laughing stock of his tribe.  In response to Zar Mohammad’s plight, they all laugh at the poor man and kick him out of the sheikh’s residence.  Seeing this humiliation, Zar Mohammad vows revenge.

We see what Zar Mohammad’s real concern is. It is primarily a matter of his dignity in front of others of his community.  He is most concerned about losing face.  This is evidently a major theme of the original novel: maintaining face was deemed more important than anything, including one’s family [2].

2.  Acts of Revenge
After consulting a mullah, who advised him to put his faith in the Koran, Zar Mohammad does that and, as a result, decides what he is going to do: kill the four men who have humiliated him.  As he tells his father-in-law, he will kill them

“not for the money, but because they took away my honor. Everyone mocks me.”

The father-in-law approves of the plan and adds further that a true tangsir should never die of old age, but in battle.

Zar Mohammad then digs up his old rifle that he had used 20 years earlier to support the vain attempt of a famous tangsir, Rais Ali Delvari, to resist a British invasion of Tangestan in 1915 [2]. This rifle, along with a trusty hatchet, will be Zar Mohammad’s weapons of war against his tormentors. 

His wife is horrified by her husband’s intentions, but she offers her full support.  Her main concern is the almost certain upcoming death of her husband.  As she tells him, if her two children were to die, she could accept it, because she could always get another child.  But, she says, he is irreplaceable for her.  (Such an attitude strikes me as more likely coming from the male authors than from a woman, at least the kinds women that I know.)

Anyway, Zar Mohammad goes to Abdoul Karim’s stall in the bazaar, sticks his rifle barrel in the man’s chest, and shoots him dead. He then goes to Sheikh Torab’s quarters and points his gun into that man’s chest, too, which again elicits terror and whimpering begging for mercy from his victim.  Zar Mohammad clearly relishes humiliating the man, as he watches with satisfaction while the terrified cleric prostrates himself and kisses Zar Mohammad’s feet.

But that’s only for a few seconds, as Zar Mohammad then blows the sheikh away with a rifle shot. Finally, Zar Mohammad goes to the lawyer Ali’s quarters and carries out another point-blank assassination on him in the same fashion as the others. 

Mounted police finally arrive, firing randomly into a crowd that has gathered to follow Zar Mohammad’s actions.  In the ensuing  melee Zar Mohammad shoots and hacks his way out to temporary safety – a hiding place behind the counter of a corner food shop.

3.  Growing Support
After Zar Mohammad’s murderous mayhem, one might think that the local populace would be horrified, but quite the opposite reaction is observed.. People seem to regard him as a hero and begin chanting his praise, calling him “Shir Mohammad”, which means “Mohammad the Lion”.
 
The breadth of Zar Mohammad’s appeal is illustrated in this section of the film by showing the support he gets from the Armenian owner of the shop where Zar Mohammad is hiding.  The Armenian sells alcohol at his shop and presumably represents a wider and more nonpartisan social view. Even some of the police support the killer.  A police lieutenant confesses to Zar Mohammad’s wife that he disobeyed orders from his captain so that he could give the killer enough leeway to complete his killing spree.

4.  The Final Murder
The fourth target, Rajab, is now hiding in the home of Seyyed, a descendent of the Prophet and therefore a presumed holy man.  Zar Mohammad gains entry to Seyyed’s home and drags the whimpering Rajab out onto the street, where a supportive crowd is waiting for Zar Mohammad to finish the job.  After shouting out to the crowd that they should never allow themselves to be cheated by usurers, Zar Mohammad points his rifle into Rajab’s chest and finishes him off like all the others.

The mounted police arrive, and begin shooting indiscriminately.  The crowd angrily resists in  support of Zar Mohammad.  What started out as an individual dispute has now become a full-scale insurrection.  In the resulting chaos, Zar Mohammad manages to jump into the sea and begins swimming away as the film ends.

Tangsir does have some good production values, with fine acting from Behrouz Vossoughi, in the role of Zar Mohammad, as well as excellent cinematography on the part of Nemat Haghighi and good music from Loris Tjeknavorian.  On the other hand the acting performances of the four doomed swindlers are so exaggerated and artificial in their attempts to portray contemptible characters that they wind up being ludicrous. 

However, Tangsir has more fundamental problems than with any specifics of the technical production.  The film’s overall message is both wrongheaded and reprehensible. It pretends to extol the virtues of a man fighting for the rights of the people.  But the hate-filled protagonist in this story is not so noble as that.  He merely feels personally cheated on his investment and therefore humiliated. So he decides to murder those who made him lose face.  The film’s message purports to applaud his actions, as if he represents a firm and virtuous path towards social justice.  Nonsense.  Zar Mohammad’s murderous rampage is only undertaken to support his own pride, not social welfare.  He even admits to this in the film.  And the tortuous and torturous way he carries out his vengeful acts reflects a man who revels in punishment and thinks it should include torture [3]. If a legal system is corrupt and does not offer a reasonable path towards remedying injustice, then joint, cooperative social action is required, not self-justified murder.

We need films that send just the opposite message, those that promote love and compassion. Zar Mohammad and his wife had already possessed the greatest of all treasures – love for each other.  And the man threw it all away because he had lost money and therefore felt so ashamed that he felt he had to kill to restore his honor. This is the kind of demented mindset that promotes honor killings. His violent, selfish path is not something that the general populace should admire and is not a model for social justice.

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Notes:

1. When Tangsir was released to English-speaking areas, its English language title was “Tight Spot”, an apparent reference the Farsi word “tang”, which means “tight”.
2. Laleh Khalili, “Tangsir”, The Gamming, (18 October 2014).
3. Regrettably, there are prominent political figures today with the same attitudes.

"The Secret" - Rhonda Byrne and Drew Heriot (2006)

The Australian documentary film, The Secret, is concerned with self-fulfilment, but the degree to which it reflects the current disturbing drift of our Western culture may be more significant than its explicit subject material. Its full production credits say that it is produced by Rhonda Byrne and Paul Harrington, directed by Drew Heriot, Sean Byrne, Marc Goldenfein, and Damian McLindon, and written by Rhonda Byrne and Hayley Byrne. Although the film can be categorised as a documentary film, it belongs more specifically in the category of self-help and new-age media offerings. Basically, it consists of a series of interviews, occasionally interspersed with a few diagrams, that describe the pseudo-scientific “Law of Attraction”, which has supposedly been secretly understood by various spiritual messengers over the ages and is finally being revealed to the wider world by means of this film. The “Law of Attraction” is simple and basically comes down to this: if you want something, all you have to do is visualize it and believe that you will get it; and then it will come to you automatically. That’s it. You can consult Wikipedia pages on The Secret and the “Law of Attraction”, but you will only get an elaboration on what I have just stated.

From this description you may wonder why I would cover it at all, but there are a few aspects to this particular film that make it stand out and be worthy of further consideration. First of all the film is professionally photographed and, though relentlessly “talky”, has satisfactory production values. In addition, it features a number of well-known or reasonably professional witnesses who supply their testimony (and are presumed to endorse the “Law of Attraction”), including:

• Jack Canfield, a self-motivation speaker and author well-known for his Chicken Soup for the Soul;
• John Hagelin, a high-energy physicist with a PhD from Harvard, who has published in the professional physics literature, but who has become interested in consciousness;
• Fred Alan Wolf, another high-energy physicist (PhD from UCLA), who has been a resident scientist for the Discovery Channel and who, like Hagelin, is fascinated with a possible connection between quantum phenomena and consciousness.

These elements perhaps give the film a certain seductive cachet that adds to the persuasiveness of the message and that has helped generate an enthusiastic reception on the part of many viewers.

Examining the Internet Movie Database Web site (IMDB – http://www.imdb.com), it can be seen that a strikingly high percentage, 34%, of the user ratings are at the highest level of 10. Compare this, for example, to the 10-level ratings of recent films that I would consider to be among the best, Chicago (19%), The Constant Gardiner (16%), Babel (17%), and The Curse of the Golden Flower (13%). Certainly, The Secret has generated a positive response of unprecedented degree. However, note that another 26% of the user ratings are at the lowest possible value, 1, and this degree of dismissal is also highly unusual for the IMDB site: either people love it, or they loathe it. This partitioning into two camps, though, isn’t just a matter of aesthetic taste, which would normally generate a smoother variation between love and hate responses. No, it’s a situation where some people are “buying in” to the film’s message, and others are rejecting it as utter nonsense and charlatanry. For many people it’s not a matter of pretty or not pretty; it’s a case of correct or incorrect.

If you haven’t seen this film and you are a bit cynical, you might wonder why they don’t apply the “Law of Attraction” to finding beautiful girls or to getting rich. In fact, the lecturers in the film do talk about these subjects at length. They tell you that their approach is a sure-fire way to score with members of the opposite sex, and you can also acquire enough money to buy a big house with a swimming pool. You might imagine that this level of materialism would be a turn-off and drive away anyone with a sound mind, but it apparently doesn’t. For many weeks, the book version of this film was the #1 seller on Amazon.com.

The intriguing thing for me about The Secret, though, is not so much whether it is right or wrong (and make no mistake, it is profoundly wrong), but the clear-cut way that it reveals the failure of our educational system, and ultimately of our culture, to understand what is true. We know that all cultures have many stories or theories about the world that are offered to help guide people towards the “true”, and ultimately towards a satisfactory life situation. Some of these stories are mystical or religiously based and cannot be demonstrated as “factual”, but for various reasons we may decide to believe in these theories anyway and feel that they are superior to other, competing theories about the world. But Western culture, particularly during the last four hundred years or so, has developed systems of scientific explanation that can be repeatedly demonstrated by empirical confirmation. This scientific and technical culture has enabled Western societies to build tall buildings, jet planes, and telecommunications systems. But it has not been able to provide empirically testable models that cover all aspects of the world in which we live, and so consciousness, mind, and many other realms of human life lie outside the scope of our scientific model-building. For these other areas of life, we, whether scientists or not, must form our beliefs based on other cultural models that are not completely scientific. Thus we may believe that a god created the universe, even though this cannot be demonstrated scientifically.

Now a key characteristic of our scientific models is its “mechanical” nature – mechanical in the sense of following strict, logical rules, like a machine. These rules are what make the predictability of the models reproducible in various circumstances. Unfortunately though, although many people in our society have been exposed to and have memorised some of these scientific models, they have not been taught or have understood the nature of scientific thinking in general. As a consequence, these people may prize bogus mechanical models without considering their falsifiability and potential for empirical validation.

And this is this precisely where The Secret is not only wrong, but is actually pernicious. It presents its simplistic model, the “Law of Attraction”, as a “scientific” model and insists that its secret is not something associated with mystical or religious belief, but is provably correct. It then goes on to show interviews with quantum physicists and various “philosophers” in order to put a stamp of authority, supposedly scientific authority, on the message. And this is why people who have a some superficial, schoolbook familiarity with science may be more susceptible to The Secret's falsehoods than others.

But couldn’t I be more generous and just dismiss The Secret as harmless nonsense? After all, don’t we delight in telling our children that there is a Santa Claus who will bring them presents every Christmas? Well, the Santa Claus story is not told to adults and is not presented as a scientifically correct model on which to base life decisions. Furthermore, we gradually instruct our children to appreciate the “Christmas spirit”, rather than to focus on selfish and materialistic gains. OK, what about of being positive, of believing in yourself, like Rocky, that discipline and perseverance will pay off? Shouldn’t we permit this film to let us dream a little and say “yes, we can”? No, not when it makes false promises designed to feed greed and avarice and makes unsubstantiated claims that these promises have a scientific backing. If you want to say, “yes, we can”, you need a sound pathway to follow in order to accomplish what you want. I do in fact believe that human mental states associated with love, meditation, and positive thinking can have a real tangible and beneficial effect on our surroundings. But there are at present no empirically reproducible findings (despite claims of qigong practitioners) that establish a sound scientific model in this area. And Sufism, Buddhism, and other spiritual practices and belief systems that can potentially guide us in a positive way are infinitely more sophisticated than the mindless candy of the “Law of Attraction”.

Moreover, The Secret is almost a distillation of why it is misleading to lump many of philosophical belief systems into the single term of “religion”. Here’s why. Throughout human history there have appeared enlightened masters or prophets who have had great insight into the nature of human existence who have attracted devoted disciples. The teachings of these masters are so profound that they are not easily (perhaps not even possibly) expressible in terms of the linguistic categories of our spoken and written languages (which are always founded on down-to-earth human interactions). But despite the inherent difficulties, the attempt is invariably made to document those teachings into a canon, and they wind up being expressed as rules, precepts, and warnings, which over the years lose all contact with the contexts in which they were originally uttered. Thus yet another religion is established that comprises another collection of mechanical rules that have lost the original profound insights of the master. Some of these established religions promise their followers that if they follow the mechanical rules carefully, they will be rewarded in heaven with various materialistic pleasures and beautiful companions. These mechanical, rule-based religions are just a set of behavioural rules, with no real connection to a spiritual foundation and hence somewhat arbitrary, yet these same religions stubbornly assert their preeminence and accommodate no modification once they are solidified. We have a term for the practice of blindly following arbitrary rules based on custom – “superstition”, and we distinguish this from true religion. I argue that the insights of the original enlightened masters, passed on from master to disciple, are what constitute true religion, and that the mechanical, rule-based religions that have followed in their wake are of a fundamentally different nature and are primarily superstitious.

One of the great virtues of the rise of Western science has been the procedures that it has established for empirical validation of new models and theories. Wherever a set of beliefs wanders into the realm of empirical verification, it can be put to the test and, if not confirmed, can be dismissed as false or superstitious. This has enabled scientists to toss astrology into the dustbin, because its predictions are empirically false. Moreover, those belief systems that make unfalsifiable predictions can be dismissed as useless, too – psychoanalysis is a notorious example of this from our cultural past. But, unfortunately, we have a problem in our attempts to provide a common, mass education to our citizens. We are only teaching them to memorize rule-based systems, and not concentrating on the nature of empirical verification and falsifiability. As alarming proof of this, there are studies showing that over 50% of US PhD holders actually believe in astrology.

But there is nothing quite so blatantly wrong-headed as the “Law of Attraction”. This is presented as a scientific theory and supposedly endorsed by quantum physicists. Instead of doing what traditional religions do by taking the profound insights of an enlightened master and reducing them to a banal set of rules, The Secret, with its “Law of Attraction”, dispenses with the religious authority altogether and directly claims to rely on scientific authority. But it doesn’t rely on science, because it can’t. It gives you a simplistic, unfalsifiable rule (unfalsifiable, because if you don’t get what you wanted, you didn’t visualise and believe hard enough) and presents this as hard science. The fact that many college-educated people fall for this absurdity is not only disappointing but also offers a pointer to something profoundly wrong with our educational system and our culture. With a citizenry so ill-equipped to spot fraudulent reasoning, our culture could easily be susceptible to accepting arguments advocating torture and preemptive military strikes on innocent people.
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