Primrose Everdeen, sister of Hunger Games trilogy protagonist Katniss Everdeen, was killed using similar tactics to those employed in some U.S. drone missile strikes

Note: This post discusses plot points from the Hunger Games trilogy, Harry Potter, and Song of Ice and Fires series.

The death of Katniss’ sister Prim is the emotional climax of the Hunger Games trilogy: She dies a martyr, caught in a wave of explosives designed to target first-responders while working as a medic on the front lines of the final clash between the rebellion and the government in the Capital City. While there’s some dispute about who was behind her death, and whether it was necessary, there is no question left in most readers mind’s that the tactic used was monstrous. And yet outside the realm of young adult fiction, U.S. drone strikes uses a very similar tactic known as the “double tap,” against terror targets.

A joint report from Stanford/NYU on U.S. Drone policy released in September noted:

“There is now significant evidence that the US has repeatedly engaged in a practice sometimes referred to as “double tap,” in which a targeted strike site is hit multiple times in relatively quick succession. Evidence also indicates that such secondary strikes have killed and maimed first responders coming to the rescue of those injured in the first strike.

The same pattern emerged in @dronestream’s tweets of U.S. drone strikes from 2002-2012. So, while whether or not the double tap is official U.S. policy remains unclear due to the secrecy surrounding much of the U.S. drone policy, all of the evidence suggests the U.S. repeatedly employed a tactic that results in first-responder casualties. And it’s not just a questionable tactic: UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings Christof Heyns calls the second strike in a double tap akin to a war crime. But while there are efforts to bring armed drone strikes “out of the shadows” for a larger conversation and widespread disapproval of U.S. strikes in the global community, there’s no sign of major changes to U.S. drone strike strategies on the horizon.

Of course, it’s not hard to understand why it’s easier to see the inhumanity of using tactics that hit first responders when the person in question is the protagonist of your favorite series’ sister (whose protection was the catalyst for the entire trilogy’s plot) than when those rescuers are people you’ve never heard of half a world away. By its very nature literature builds empathetic bonds between readers and sympathetic characters; we get to know them, care about them, and mourn for them if they’re lost. But literature can also explore our own humanity and help us have challenging discussions about the morality of the world we live in and the policies formalizing that morality.

And “double tap” is just one of many examples of the disconnect between the ideal morality we hold high (and try to teach our youth through young adult fiction) and the policies that define our culture. In the Harry Potter series using the torture curse, Cruciatus, carries one of the harshest penalties in the Wizarding world (though one that doesn’t appear to apply to our protagonist when he uses it in the name of good). But in our real world, the U.S. government used extraordinary rendition tactics a European Court recently said “amounted to torture” against a terror suspect and relied on “enhanced interrogation tactics,” the nasty euphemism for torture, throughout much of the war on terror.

Straying out of young adult fiction, A Song of Ice and Fire’s Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane is a brutal character living in a brutal world, but one of his most well known atrocities is the murder of two royal children during the collapse of House Targaryen. Even in this context, the moral characters such as Ned Stark think of the murder of the children (and the rape of their mother) as an ugly stain on Robert Baratheon’s rebellion, even if they acknowledge it as politically expedient. In our real world, most people’s gut reaction is that there is no context when the wholesale slaughter of children can be justified. And yet there are rumblings that children are being considered legitimate targets by U.S. forces in Afghanistan after a current military officer was quoted in a piece published in The Military Times titled “Some Afghan Children Aren’t Bystanders.”

There’s no question that these characters, and these bad acts, all provoke powerful moral reactions in readers. But it’s not clear yet whether these stories shape their fans’ opinions off the page as well as on it. As a generation of young adults grows up both on protracted American involvement in ugly conflicts abroad and fiction that tries to outline moral laws of war, it’ll be fascinating to see whether their moral imaginations stay fired after they close books and walk out of movie screenings.

This post discusses plot points through the December 10 episode of Homeland.

Judging from some of the things that I’ve heard you say in comments and on Twitter, a lot of you are frustrated to the point of quitting with Homeland. I’m not sure I’m at that point yet—there are too many good performances, and too many strong emotional moments for me to walk away from yet. But increasingly, it seems like a show that’s sacrificing its best potential to plot mechanics that don’t necessarily even make much sense, to the sense that it needs to be exciting, rather than deeply felt, or tender, or psychologically astute. The name of the show should lend itself to the considerations of inner life, our sense of home and what makes it and the threats that come to it from ourselves as much as from our enemies, all things Homeland did beautifully last season. But instead, it’s turning outward in a way that feels less distinct than the show once did.

There are good moments in this episode, but often, they aren’t enough. Carrie’s suspicions of Galvez, telling Quinn “He is a Muslim,” only to find out that he’s forced himself back into the field too soon, would have been a nice character moment for the show, and a good repudiation of the correlation between Islam and terrorism that the show’s dispelled only fitfully. But we don’t know Galvez at all as a person, only as a functionary of Estes’. He’s barely a character. The mole storyline has been so dormant until this episode that I was choosing to believe that the show had wisely decided to abandon it. Instead, the whole moment is a perfunctory bump on Carrie’s path to finding Nazir still hidden in the plant where he held her captive.

The best sequence, by contrast, was one between characters we’ve come to know well. “I don’t want to fight anymore, even for something. I’m tired of fighting,” Jessica told Brody as they returned from confinement, musing on how well they’d done for so long. “Since we were sixteen, and all we wanted was to be together. We were all okay.” Even if Brody had never been turned, the dissolution of their marriage after his return from war would have been a worthy subject for a television show, and it’s the storyline that Homeland has respected most, trusting its initial elements—Jessica’s relationship with Mike, Brody’s sexual brokenness, his affair with Carrie, Brody’s relationship with Dana—to be genuinely moving without ornamentation.. Brody’s admission that “I tried, too, to deal with everything that happened. But that was beyond me. I was fucked the moment I left for Iraq. We all were,” would have worked in that context, which may be why it carried the weight that it did.

And even though we know that’s not the case, the simplicity of the means by which they admit their marriage was over was beautiful even in their pulp surroundings. Brody seems about to tell the full truth to Jessica when he begins, “The time that Carrie came over here to the house, on the day Elizabeth Gaines was shot and Tom Walker died, Carrie said some crazy things to Dana and to you. She said things about what I was going to do.” And there’s a particular sadness to Jessica stopping him, explaining, “Don’t. Not now. For the longest time all I wanted was for you to tell me the truth. I wanted to know it all. I don’t have to know anymore. I just don’t want to…Carrie knows, right? She knows everything about you. She accepts it. You must love her a lot.” Again, if Brody were only a wounded veteran, it still would have been haunting to hear Jessica admit that she can’t handle knowing the fullness of what her husband suffered and who he became, to surrender him to a woman with a greater capacity to absorb his pain.

In a way, this episode made me realize something about Homeland: the show would be more interesting if it were willing to invest as much in exploring the perspective of someone who hates the United States as it has in exploring Carrie’s zeal to defend it, or Brody’s broken embrace of his family even as he takes pleasure in killing the vice president. That’s a risky thing to do, going truly inside the head of a terrorist without endorsing his or her perspective, though Showtime managed to pull it off to a certain extent in Sleeper Cell, aided by a tremendous performance from Oded Fehr. But Homeland has never really seemed interested in doing that with either Abu Nazir or Roya. That’s lead to both machinery that never really made sense or was explained, like Nazir’s work with Hezbollah. And it’s left psychological blank space in the show, as when Nazir gets Carrie alone and chooses to rail against…argula?

Carrie’s confrontation with Roya in this episode carried the same promise and the same lack of fulfillment. Carrie mentions Roya’s family losing land, but we don’t know any of the details, nor how she came to know and be recruited by Nazir, and the scene never gets there. Instead, Roya rattles Carrie, asking her “Have you ever had someone who takes over your life, pulls you in, gets you to do things you would normally never do?…Do you have anyone like that?” knowing full well, of course, that she does, and his name is Nicholas Brody. When Carrie admits that she’s been so influenced, Roya turns the tables on her. “Well. I’ve never been that stupid,” Roya tells her, declaring her independence of choice. “You idiot whore. You think you understand me or what my family have lost and suffered? You think is just some fucking game?” When she switches into Arabic, the only thing we learn about what she’s saying is a clue that makes Carrie realize that Abu Nazir is still in hiding, the show sacrificing a chance at psychological insight for plot mechanics. Carrie may think that she fucked up the interrogation. But Homeland botched the sequence, too, choosing story over its characters.

I’ve been looking forward to Star Trek Into Darkness, which, judging by the first trailer, looks gorgeous, and has appropriate amounts of Cumberbatchiness, though I am somewhat concerned about the levels of Karl-Urban-as-Bones:

One thing I’d note, though: I kind of appreciated the ludicrousness of the Red Matter-driven explanation for Nero’s actions in the last movie, if only because of the way they removed the movie from contemporary geopolitics. Nero was acting like a terrorist, but for reasons that had to do with failures of diplomacy, bonkers science, and personal grief. Star Trek Into Darkness looks like it could be considerably more engaged with our own environment, and I’m not sure how that will play out.

The voiceover from Benedict Cumberbatch’s villain here lays out are a sort of inverse of the current justifications for our security state. Currently, we convince ourselves—and pop culture plays a role in this, from the veneration of Abu Nazir on Homeland to Silva in Skyfall— that we’re under constant threat from hyper-competent terrorists, even though all of the potential attacks on the U.S. over the past couple of years were small-ball affairs that were easily foiled, in part because they were carried out by laughably incompetent figures. Cumberbatch, by contrast, tells Kirk (presumably) that his society is complacent, saying “You think your world is safe. It is an illusion. A comforting lie told to protect you,” and then setting out to prove it. Even though these sentiments come from different places, they’re both fundamentally oriented towards ramping up security, towards the maintenance of a certain level of paranoia. I’m looking forward to seeing how the movie handles that challenge, especially in the political context of the Federation, which is much more interconnected than our own world.

This post discusses plot points from the November 18 and 25 episodes of Homeland.

During last night’s episode of Homeland, as Peter/John removed his silenced revolver from his coat, preparing to dispatch with Brody should he no longer prove necessary, I grabbed my boyfriend’s wrist so hard he told me it actually hurt. It was an interesting moment for me and my relationship to this sometimes-miraculous, sometimes-confounding show. The moment was tense and well-constructed, but the prospect of Brody’s death was viscerally upsetting to me not because of the plotting and counterplotting taking place around him, but because of the simpler questions Homeland has obscured this season. What does it mean to be alienated from your country, your family, and the values you once devoted to yourself to protecting? What does it mean to understand the motivations of a terrorist?

Homeland has always been somewhat uneven when it tries to answer those questions, but that it tries to answer them at all has always made it a rather different animal from its counterparts and predecessors. In the first season, and in an inversion of how these things normally work, the show did better when Brody talked about what Abu Nazir meant to him than in the brief flashbacks that outlined his relationship with Issa. In this week’s episode, the discussion between Carrie, Peter, David, and Saul about whether the plot Brody had outlined to them made sense produced one of the most interesting moments the show’s had in some time: Carrie explaining that it made sense because of how it met Abu Nazir’s emotional needs and standards. It was mirrored by Abu Nazir’s explanation to Brody himself, that he could be hunted and killed like bin Laden, his legend reduced by the manner of his death, or he could bring his fight to American soil himself, carry out a plot on his own terms. Nazir’s explanation of his own motivations—apart from the actual plausibility of the mechanics of it—was one of the smarter attempts I’ve seen to imagine how bin Laden’s death has changed the world. Homeland‘s genuine interest in mysteries both large, like why Brody would turn on his country, and small, like how Nazir feels about his place in the world, is the thing that sets the show apart for me even when it delves into more prosaic territory.

And as niftily-constructed as Nazir and Roya’s plot against the vice president is, it’s prosaic. It’s a standard fantasy of hyper-competent terrorism that ignores how small-scale and ineffective plots against America have actually become, and how easily-thwarted those that actually make it to the execution stage have been. I understand that the demands of plot keep some of these fantasies alive on-screen. But those fears also animate policies in the real world: they’re kept alive by interests more powerful than American audiences’ addiction to artificially high stakes. And just as those fears crowd out rational conversations about everything from the Defense Department budget to airline security in the real world, the plot this season has crowded Homeland, too. Last year, the construction of a vest and Tom Walker’s possession of a sniper rifle were comparatively simple logistical concerns that served the contrast between the two men, how they’d responded to torture, and what waited for them on their return. This year, the complexity of the plot against America, and America’s plots against its potential attackers, has put layers in between Brody and his motivations, Roya in between Brody and Nazir, the munitions expert in between Brody and Walden, Quinn in between Carrie and Brody.

The scenes between Brody and Carrie are a constant reminder of how excellent Homeland is when it strips away that clutter and focuses on what draws the two of them together: their shared inability to truly and seamlessly integrate into the roles set out for them. Their difficulty makes them valuable, to a certain extent: Brody can play the hero tenably enough to be of use to Nazir, and Carrie is right often enough to be worth some of the trouble she causes David and her other colleagues at the CIA. But both of their masquerades have expiration dates. Carrie’s already hit one of hers. And Brody is very, very close to his. “I’m going to be in the cell next to you. Which, I have to admit, isn’t the future I imagined for us,” she told him during their sojourn to the motel. “If we saw this through togehter, if we finally stopped Nazir once and for all, that you’d be a real hero. And that fact would somehow make everything you did before not matter. That it would all just be about getting to there.” Quinn may hear “a stage five, delusional getting laid” in the sex he overhears between Carrie and Brody. But they’re clearer-eyed, if more wistful, than he imagines.
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I’m unsure about the voiceover used to sell the movie, but I remain pretty excited for Zero Dark Thirty, in part because of its focus on the role of female intelligence operatives. I’d have a proclivity for these kinds of stories in the first place, and it doesn’t hurt that, as Eli Lake recently recounted in a great feature for Newsweek on women and espionage, is actually an accurate reflection of how the hunt for bin Laden went down:

The most human moment in the trailer may be Chris Pratt asking Joel Edgerton “What part convinced you?” and Edgerton’s deadpan response, “Her confidence.” It’s a relatively new thing, this idea that we could trust women to give orders to men in uniform, and all of a sudden, we’ve got a lot of fascinating female intelligence operatives playing with that tension and those questions about reliability. In the current iteration of the James Bond movies, M stands for mother, to a certain extent, with Bond breaking into her apartment and playing fast and loose with her orders in a classic display of rebellious boundary-testing. On Homeland, Carrie Mathison is meant to seem unreliable because of her mental illness and the way it interacts with her gender, influencing her affairs with both David Estes, her boss, and Nicholas Brody, her target. But the show doubles up the reasons she shouldn’t be trusted, and then proves her right anyway. Now, Jessica Chastain, who doesn’t actually speak a word in this trailer, presented in profile, eyes huge or utterly obscured, is being presented as the person on whose shoulders the mission to get Osama bin Laden rested. That cleaving of the requirement that expertise be validated by machoness if not explicitly by gender, even by emotional stoicism, is fascinating and important. These are big, tense, horrible things the intelligence community sets into motion. And women seem to be the ones expressing the weight of that knowledge, and those decisions.

This post discusses plot points from the first episode of the second season of Homeland.

“Tonight is Thursday. I make dinner for the family on Thursdays. I’m making vegetable lasagna with vegetables I picked from the garden this morning,” Carrie Mathison says, with increasing desperation when the CIA comes for her, six months after they came for her job, six months after she burned out part of her brain to try to silence it. “I don’t want to see him. I’ve put all of this away.” Homeland, which won the Emmy award for best drama last weekend, much to my delight, is a plot-heavy thriller, but it’s also a deeply humane show about the pleasures and connections war denies us. And it makes sense to me that as it begins its second season, “The Smile,” from its titles to its details, constantly returns to questions of how its characters feel about their roles in the Great Game of story, and of the war on terror.

When we first met Carrie a year ago, she was living alone in a relatively anonymous town house, pursuing one-night stands, and flouting the rules of her agency to set up surveillance on Nicholas Brody, a recently-returned prisoner of war who triggered an old warning from one of her informants. The Carrie we meet outside of the agency is someone who has acknowledged her mental illness rather than managing it erratically in secret, who lives with her father and sister rather than by herself, who teaches rather than interacts, and who sees that Israel has struck Iran’s nuclear development sites, but observes rather than acting. When her mentor Saul recalls Carrie to active, if temporary, duty because one of her sources, a Lebanese woman who “had a weakness for American movies. She loved Julia Roberts,” there’s a deep cruelty and kindess in the call. Carrie has sacrificed the nimblest part of her mind (if not the best of her self) to the maintenance of her sanity, had it treated like trash by her mentors and enemies. Saul’s call offers a chance for Carrie to serve, and to reclaim some of her damaged reputation, but it’s freighted with two terrible possibilities: Carrie could fail and have her brokenness reaffirmed, or she could succeed but remain shut out of the place that to her was once a kind of tortured heaven.

In a sense, Carrie begins this second season in the same place Brody began the first: believing that she is the vessel for a mission she has neither the desire nor the political capital to shape. “Believe me, I wouldn’t be going if I had a choice,” she tells her sister, shoving choice away from her the way Brody initially did on his return to the United States. “You do have a choice. You always have a choice,” her sister begs her, but Carrie tells her “Not this time.” If last season was about Brody’s coming into a power he didn’t know he had, and in the process separating the CIA from its most valuable asset, this season of Homeland could follow Carrie on a similar journey, gaining the hard intelligence, the credibility, and the mental strength to prove Brody guilty and her detractors deadly wrong, restoring the proper balance to the situation. Her weapons are paltry: a fruit basket from Saul, a phone, a bad brown wig, a flimsily-constructed story about hockey fandom, a headscarf, the ability to throw a knee. And her only victory in this first episode is to throw a tail. Carrie catches no terrorists or torturers, but she does, crucially, catch herself when she falls, and watching her, I cheered, even though I know that for Carrie to return to the CIA would put her further from lasagna, from the garden, and the blue books, and her father’s gentle concern about her lithium.

At home, the plot lines, and the emotions, are more complicated. When I initially saw this episode, and I’ve watched it several time since, I didn’t like the decision to make Brody a potential vice presidential nominee because it struck me as a bit of implausibility that isn’t actually necessary to any of the points the plot seems to be trying to make. It’s one thing for John McCain, who was held as a prisoner in Vietnam, to be a viable presidential candidate years after his return home, and long after the conflict that resulted in his imprisonment and torture had ceased to carry the specific sting and suspicion for the American populace that the September 11 attacks still have for ordinary Americans. Brody is a fresher victim of a rawer conflict, six months into his service in an abruptly-vacated Congressional seat. His only political asset is also a potential liability, even for people who don’t suspect Brody as Carrie once did: his experiences in Abu Nazir’s custody.
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