Messing With The Zohan In the Wake of Charlottesville
Let the good-natured stupidity of “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” take you back to a crueler and more innocent time.
2008 Bejing was incredible. The entire city had worked tirelessly to welcome the world to the Olympic games, and the summer of 08' was the successful culmination of 10 years of hard work and modernization. Despite the various complaints about human rights abuses and mistreatment of migrant labor, the success of the Games was undeniably good for China as a whole and kicked off a decade in which the lifestyle of every Chinese demographic steadily improved. Young professionals learned a sense of irony by mocking the Olympic preparations, and poorer Chinese from the countryside suck into the cities to engage in of the books labor. For many migrants building Olympic facilities became a basis of wealth that propelled their families into the middle class. I’ve got the social media images of friends on vacation in Vietnam to prove it. It was the most positive atmosphere I’ve lived in. As an American in China, it seemed things couldn’t get any better. But things got better, at least on Peking University Campus the day Obama was elected.
November 5th 2008 was characterized by international students dancing in the streets and Chinese strangers giving me high fives, saying things like “I knew you Americans didn’t mean all that Iraq stuff!” Most of the world had spent over a year convincing itself that Obama’s election was the soul precondition of world peace. I remember saying that all the problems we associated with the Bush administration were about to be solved, and being met with such enthusiastic agreement that I said it again even louder. In retrospect, it turned out our expectations were unreasonable. Nobody was really to blame, the whole world was caught up in the mass hysteria.
The classic example of 2008 style “irrational exuberance” was the decision to award Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize during his first term in office. The reasons for the award were vague but I was there and I can tell you it was generally understood that “reaching out to the Arab world” and “new climate” referred to the assumption that The President would solve the Arab-Israeli conflict and bring peace tot he middle east. If you want to know how difficult we anticipated this would be or what “peace” meant to us at the time, look no further than Adam Sandler’s “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” (The Zohan).
The Zohan came out in 2008, during the height of the Obama campaign. It didn’t get rave reviews but nobody was offended by it because it fit into the narrative of “hope and change”. Personally, I enjoyed it because it fit into other narratives I supported at the time, particularly those related to Polyamory and Martial Arts violence.
The Zohan tells the story of a Hamas Super Terrorist and a celebrity Mossad who agent team up to stop a gang of Charlottesville style white supremacist who are secretly working for Donald Trump. There’s also a subplot about Zohan having sex with hundreds of elderly women, and another about the Zohan wanting to cut hair. Each of these story elements is given about equal weight, but all three are tied together by the central theme “Palestinians and Israeli’s are more alike than different”, and the comedic premise “gays and foreigners are weird”. I think it’s safe to say that Sandler really believed in the project. He got in excellent shape for it and engaged in numerous scenes of physical comedy which would have been quite taxing compared to his more recent performances.
In the film, Hamas is portrayed as a comical, largely harmless secular organization, and Mossad does everything it it’s power to reduce civilian casualties. Zohan even win’s over a crowd of Palestinian children by catching the rocks they throw at him and twisting them into balloon animals. Zohan’s nemesis “The Shadow” has the ability to walk on walls, is a huge Mariah Carrie fan, doesn’t show any signs of Islamic belief besides practicing polygamy, and casually accepts Zohan as his brother in law after Zohan supports his ambition to open a fancy shoe store. (This is clearly supposed to be extra funny because in “real life” only gay men like shoes).
Zohan is an entirely secular superhuman who can do the butterfly stroke at 45 miles an hour. His dream is to “cut and style hair” which is supposed to be comical because Zohan is not gay. Zohan happily put’s his grievances with Hamas aside in order to stop a fire started by white supremacists. The climax of the film involves him saving a burning Palestinian-owned business by spraying it with Hummus. The climax also contains a scene in which Zohan and Shadow ululate in unison to create a sonic weapon which defeats the white supremacists and diffuses their bombs, a symbolic suggestion the Arabs and Israelis are #strongertogether.
If this movie were made today it would be viciously attacked from all sides, as homophobic, Islamophobic, antisemitic, ignorant, naive, sexist, and callously indifferent to human rights abuses. In fact, the movie is more an example of how learning more about another culture or a problem can often make it harder to solve. No one heavily involved in these issues, fully aware of the atrocities, the history, the water conservation issues, and the international politics, could avoid taking a side. The idea of everybody simply, waking up to the futility of their hatred and getting along together, seems so absurd in light of the details that many would find the suggestion insulting. Although silly at the time of it’s release, today The Zohan is invaluable as a demonstration of how wildly our collective perspective can change in the space of a decade.
There’s speculation online about a potential “Zohan 2”. Let’s think about what that would entail. Ten years after Zohan and The Shadow became comrades in arms and brothers in law:
- Progress in the Israel-Palestinian conflict consists of the increasing hopelessness of the Palestinian cause and the rapid erosion and militarization of Israeli democracy.
- The evil real-estate developer villain of the previous film has become the President of the United States and moved America’s embassy to Jerusalem.
- The white supremacist thugs who burned down Zohan’s neighborhood, have risen from a law enforcement problem, to national figures who’s social media posts form the basis of a [public debate on race.
The 2018 sequel to my 2008 adventure in China, takes place in a world where:
- China’s economic dynamism and national optimism have been replaced with territorial aggression, and self doubt.
- None of the major issues I hoped Obama would magically fix have been resolved, although in 2012 he did become the first President to support Gay Marriage.
- Merely admitting that I watched an enjoyed “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” could cause me serious financial harm for a range reasons many of which will be unknowable for years.
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on ’t, ah fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
-Hamlet
