Army veteran Timothy McVeigh hatches a deadly plan after the Waco siege. A psychological thriller depicting the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.
From beginning to end
One of my little pleasures in life is to surprise myself, like going to see a movie without knowing anything other than the title and half of the trailer so as not to spoil the experience. So I enter naively and with great ease into sometimes horrible or inhospitable universes, a bit like a child born on an Earth where misery and mercy coexist; Good and Evil. Would existing amount in some way to being an aberrant fact that seeks to assert itself as a constant, or at least a variable capable of influencing the immutable; of being an integral part of it?
I afflicted my mind with these thoughts, as my viewing of McVeigh, whom I had never heard of before, ended. I, who thought I was watching a fiction about deviant Rednecks, realized once again that reality too often surpasses fiction. Mike Ott presents a film about this terrible event that occurred on April 19, 1995, when a man detonated a bomb in the city of Oklahoma City killing 167 people, including 19 children, thus becoming the most devastating domestic terrorist act in the history of the United States. I was stunned, gobsmacked, overwhelmed. I mean when you don’t expect it, it has a bit of the effect of a bomb; don’t you think?
Not everything is chaos. However, this should not necessarily mean the omnipresence of a total and absolute order. Life — and even the whole of existence — is probably more than a paradox, but a real oxymoron. Beyond the billions of galaxies that extend beyond what we can observe, there probably exists everything and its opposite; some variables must be constants; for every plus, there must be a minus. Nevertheless, this destabilizing feature film confirms that this kind of malice can be felt. The entire cinematographic work is tinged with this impression — this bad feeling — in a crescendo that achieves no catharsis. A brilliant choice, since there is no happiness or liberation attached to this tragic moment; even though a weight remains, weighing deep in the chest, as if one wanted to annihilate all the Evil in the world while realizing that it is this Evil which nourishes these thoughts.
Point of origin
Matter and antimatter… both born at the same time in the universe. That one supplants the other, a simple question of chance, perhaps, and of time, surely. Who started it, who deserves to be punished, who should get compensation, etc. Justice has no end, since time cannot be caught up. The time that we want to perceive as a variable — one more dimension — is in fact only the observation of what was and is no longer, a human observation; an idea of what we still believe we can one day control. Feelings of oppression or tyrannical imposition of one’s truth? It is difficult to understand what breaks inside us when thought turns into dangerous and hateful words or actions.
Alfie Allen embodies the character of Tim (for Timothy McVeigh) with remarkable intensity. I felt precisely this darkness in the depths of his gaze; this thing that parasitizes and corrupts the minds of its hosts and — they say — deprives them of their humanity. It reminded me of that scene in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto where the protagonist’s father warns him of the dangers of letting fear creep into oneself, that it is like a disease, something that therefore precedes the human. It also reminds me of that line in Christopher Nolan’s Batman: Dark Knight when Alfred explains to Bruce Wayne that Evil sometimes has no origin, it simply is.
The justification of such acts is not new. This idea, symbolically represented by the past of a man sentenced to death, played by Tracy Letts, and a friend of Tim, runs through the film from start to finish. We advance fearfully and against our will in a catabasis where the only option seems to be death. Even if we show that the man played by Alfie Allen is capable of loving and compassion, we do not feel this character as being neither what dominates his mind nor what guides his ideas and thoughts. We thus evoke the drop of white that exists in the black part of the Taijitu, the symbol of Taoist zenitude.
Where to start
However, we must not condemn, because as I have tried to illustrate above (and several other times), violence and hatred only engender violence and hatred. It seems to me that it is more than normal to feel anger, sadness and fear in the face of all this, but we must not give in to it because this slope is more slippery and treacherous than a sidewalk during an ice storm. Deep down, I imagine that all this began when the rings were forged… A way of saying that there is no real beginning.
I did enjoy it, though, because even if it doesn’t necessarily convey a positive message, it at least allows us to observe a moment in history with a powerful realism that struck me. I kept saying to myself, “I hope he doesn’t succeed. No matter what his plan is, I hope it doesn’t work.”, but in vain. Fortunately, we don’t fall into the entertainment of horror and bloody murders either, we even try to avoid it, even at the very heart of the diegesis. This gives the impression that the film presents itself as a cry that tries to be heard through time. A message that wants to turn back by highlighting all the violence that doesn’t occur before the end credits are announced on the screen.
Tim had more than one opportunity to do introspective work, to take an objective look at himself in addition to giving himself the possibility of being and doing something else with his life. However, he does nothing about it and continues to blame the system, others, but never himself. I have the strange feeling that this is not just an interpretation of reality, but a representation of a truth that we refuse to believe. I think that if this was just nonsense, there would be no excellent series on the subject of violence and awareness like À cœur battu or Mea culpa. This is what I want to do this week, the same thing as all the others. I hope to contribute something good to the world around me and to be inspired by the times when we believe that everything can be fixed; others not, but especially the wisdom of knowing the difference.
I leave you with a song with lyrics that everyone can understand when life tells us that nothing is worth it, we must know how to remember that that’s life and that even roses have thorns, that we manage to appreciate their scent despite everything.
