Non-Stop – The Muslim Passenger
Over the last decade or so, the list of movies about the terrorist threat has been steadily growing. There was the inevitable World Trade Centre and the somewhat grittier United 93, Michael Moore’s controversial documentary Farenheit 9/11 and the cultural comment Babel; Four Lions even managed to wrangle the topic into a suicide-bomber comedy (hopefully during his studio pitch Chris Morris took advantage of the single most appropriate moment ever known to mankind for using the phrase “What, too soon?”).
Set almost entirely during a commercial flight, and following the efforts of air marshall William Marks (Liam Neeson) to identify a mystery text-sender who is threatening to kill people on board, Non-Stop is generally based on broad elements of terrorism. More significantly, however, there is a Muslim gentleman on the scene. From the moment in which the second air marshall eyes him as he boards the plane (carrying a bag of all things, I ask you!) Dr. Fahin Nasir is subtly yet continually presented as suspicious, the most noticeable moment coming with an NYPD passenger exclaiming to Marks as he takes Nasir to tend to a stricken pilot, “You’re letting that guy in the cockpit?!”
All of this seems pretty typical. Until, that is, we acknowledge that the threat in Non-Stop is not from the Middle-Eastern contingent. The threat in this instance is actually….well, pretty poorly thought out by the filmmakers as it happens – the luggage could have made a more believable case for hijacking the plane – but that’s beside the point. What is important is that the policeman’s surprise at Marks letting Nasir into the cockpit is delivered almost as a throw-away remark, as if this is simply a standard question that it would have been unrealistic for someone not to ask.
Basically, there is a very clear impression here that regardless of the main storyline or the behaviour of the character in question, it is now completely ordinary for movies set in certain contexts to include a person of Middle-Eastern descent as a prime suspect – simply because they are Middle-Eastern. For a world that spends a lot of its time fending off various prejudices (racism, sexism, ageism, ableism….gingerism?), it is surprisingly prepared to allow the stereotyping of Muslims.
But let’s not get too serious about it. It is only an observation, and in any case we’ve already noted that it is cinema’s right and even its job to reflect the currents of real life, whatever they may be. If we were to quibble over all content like this, cinema may as well just give up now and hand itself over to the likes of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the infliction of whose movies on humanity is in itself pretty unethical behaviour.