Lessons from ‘The Horsemen’

The July 6 death of John Frankenheimer evoked well-deserved retrospectives. Film critics recalled “Birdman of Alcatraz,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Seven Days in May” and (the great director’s own favorite) “The Burning Season.” Attracted to extremes, Frankenheimer was a cinematic risk taker. “The triumphs are huge,” he once said, “and the failures are enormous.” Reading the obits, I remembered one of those grand failures: “The Horsemen,” made in and about Afghanistan.

That setting alone made “The Horsemen” a Hollywood first. At the time (1969) “Afghanistan” was code for “far away and unimportant,” somewhere beyond Timbuktu. John Frankenheimer’s gamble followed that of French writer Joseph Kessel whose novel of the same name had appeared two years earlier. Key experiment for both storytellers: a tale spun for Western audiences but without a single Western character. All figures in “The Horsemen” – both novel and film – are Afghans. Even more outlandishly, the plot’s point of departure and ongoing context is buzkashi.

Small world! This normally obscure equestrian game of Central Asia is by now familiar to some Bangor readers. It drove my field research as a fledgling anthropologist in the mid-1970s. It now serves as yardstick for this column’s quarterly reports on Operation Enduring Freedom.

Blame it on Kessel and, particularly, Frankenheimer. I remember, as a diplomatic corps trainee in Washington bound for Afghanistan, seeing “The Horsemen” for the first time in 1971. And thinking: “Here’s the real stuff. I’m going as a diplomat, but it’s the culture – and most of all this game – that really grabs me.” So thank you, Joseph Kessel (died 1974) and John Frankenheimer. Today’s scribble concerns your story and what it can tell us at the troubled start of a new century. Three basic lessons:

Lesson no. 1: Cultural differences are real, important, and frequently hard to reconcile. “The Horsemen” “failed” as a film not for conventional artistic reasons but because its key characters – Afghan buzkashi players – seemed so utterly alien to U.S. audiences. Great ethnographic sensibility led to bad box-office receipts. Put differently, we American movie-goers didn’t want to go that far from home.

Kessel and Frankenheimer each tried to make the product Western user-friendly. Kessel’s original plot is largely psychological – which we are, but Afghans are not. (Note how psychology in America has become a secular religion, complete with prophets, priesthood, and confessional. We rich moderns pay shrinks to keep our devils away. Not subsistence economy Afghans. They pray to God … and just keep on keeping on.) Frankenheimer’s film cast Hollywood’s finest in lead roles: Jack Palance, Omar Sharif and Leigh Taylor-Young – whom the Los Angeles Times, bewildered by all this on-screen exotica, dubbed “the most beautiful nomad ever born.”

But both novelist and movie director were clearly captivated by Afghanistan. Neither wanted to dilute it for the sake of increased sales. Glad memories of their attitude lingered among the Afghans. My field-research, beginning barely half a decade after the film was made, included contact with several of “The Horsemen’s” featured buzkashi riders. One, Habib, became my mentor. Habib chuckled at some cinematic techniques – including use of tomato juice to fake blood – but recalled Frankenheimer fondly: “Mister John was always with us, always asking questions, always wanting to know details of the game. I think, despite his money and comfort, he sometimes wanted to be like us.”

Result: A fine film, but too culturally different for its own money-making good. Worrisome implication: that cultural differences, even when innocent, can preclude appreciation. Samuel Huntington is famous (and controversial) for his recent thesis titled “Clash of Civilizations.” Much of that “clash” is not ill-intentioned but simply a by-product of deep difference in values, purposes, even perceptions. Example: Note that They, not We, are actively ready to die for a cause. And that We, not knowing what to make of martyrdom, are prone to call suicide bombers “cowardly.” (Quick question: Political loyalties and “ethics” aside, which bomber must master greater fear: one of our B-52 pilots, or a Palestinian with explosives packed around his waist?)

Lesson no. 2: Afghans are fiercely contentious, even in idle play. Like its predecessor, this “Horsemen” lesson is best illustrated by off-camera events. When relations ruptured between Columbia Pictures and the Afghan government cinema agency, the film had to be finished in Spain. Habib was among the Afghans flown, as he put it, to the “Country of Madrid.” (Cities and their surrounding regions – not nation-states – were until recently the power units of Central Asian politics.) With him came the attitudes and assumptions of his own combative culture.

Habib disdained bull-fighting for being one-sided and “cowardly,” but admired, at least initially, the custom of clinking glasses together to start a meal. It reminded him, he said, of what Afghans like to do with hard-boiled eggs: Knock them together until one breaks. He whose egg is still intact wins. “Only later,” he said, “did I realize two things. First, that the glasses were full of drink forbidden in Islam. Second, that they never broke. Such was not the purpose after all. I felt disappointed.”

“Egg fighting,” as the Afghans call it, itself provoked a fight several years ago when the Taliban forbade the custom as sinful frivolity. Rural Pashtuns, otherwise amenable to Taliban direction, rebelled rather than submit to the ban. Shots were fired over the use of hard-boiled eggs!

Lesson no. 3: Certain matters are “different and somewhat larger” than others. We – and especially our policy makers – should already know this truism, but an excerpt from “The Horsemen’s” script helps keep it in mind. Situation: Jack Palance (father) and Omar Sharif (son) are both buzkashi riders. Son, an underachiever, wants to outdo father, now in resentful retirement. At issue is a great horse, Jalil, which will belong to son if he wins the first national tournament. [That event, in fact, took place first in 1953, and has served ever since as a measure of Kabul’s central control. Will it be resumed this fall after years of abeyance?] Father taunts son: “If you cannot win on Jalil, you cannot win on any horse.” Put-down.

Son responds: “You were the greatest chapandaz [buzkashi rider] in the three provinces. The royal buzkashi in Kabul with teams from all the provinces in Afghanistan is a different and somewhat larger matter.” Double put-down.

Palance and Sharif are not meant here as analogs of Bush 41 and 43. For one thing, Poppy and W seem to get along. For another, Bush 41 retired gracefully and maintains a dignified distance. For a third, it’s the not the father but the son, Bush 43, who needs to be told about “different and somewhat larger.” At issue is the difference between going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Daily news on Iraq and Bush policy towards it is cluttered by detail. Claims, leaks, and counter-leaks distract us from the basics. Bush is clear on two of them: A) Saddam is a meglomaniac murderer, and B) Saddam may well have weapons of mass destruction. More complicated is what we should do and how. Threats of forcible “regime change” recall Afghanistan and our rout of the Taliban. We used the same phrase there and got it done.

Routing Saddam Hussein, however, is a “different and somewhat larger matter.” First, his armed forces dwarf those of Mullah Omar. Second, if not quite “all alone” (Thomas Friedman’s take in The New York Times), the United States has far fewer allies in this Iraq adventure than in Afghanistan. Third, filling the post-Saddam vacuum with a regime acceptable to most Iraqis would prove much harder than what we’ve attempted – but not yet consolidated – with new Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Summary: What has worked (sort of) in Afghanistan may not work elsewhere.

Frankenheimer’s “The Horsemen” ends on a sad, almost nihilistic note. Son leaves home and father to wander “from nowhere to nowhere.” Let’s hope – as citizens and voters, let’s make sure – that son Bush doesn’t do the same.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract.