Trigger Warning — Mouly Surya

If you watch Trigger Warning, Netflix’s latest big-budget action movie, with captions turned on, you may notice the phrase “terrorist, in Arabic” in the film’s opening scene. This commencement is set in the Middle East and utilizes violence against Arabic-speaking people as nothing more than an opportunity to catalog the combat skills of special agent Parker (Jessica Alba). The rest of the movie takes place in the small rural American town of Creation and is something of a cross between First Blood and an uninspiring murder mystery; Parker uses her superhuman fighting abilities to bring her father’s killer to justice and put an end to an illegal weapon trade operating out of the local military weapons depot. It has nothing to do with the live conflict of the opening or even the Middle East.

In some regards, the film’s willingness to use Arabic bodies as fodder for violent spectacle comes as a surprise from director Mouly Surya. Given her social context as an Indonesian director, it seems reasonable to wonder if someone from the world’s most populous Muslim country might approach the Middle East with a more generous eye, skeptical of the “reel bad Arab,” to borrow the title of Jack Shaheen’s book Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Indonesians aren’t Arab, of course, and nor are all Arabs Muslim, which are of course important facts to acknowledge. But it’s this very binary that someone from Surya’s cultural location might be most adept at interrupting. Instead, she doubles down on the image of the Arab as a terrorist and nothiAnthony Michael Hallng more: in a scene with such an ugly twist it might cause whiplash, Parker reprimands her fellow soldier for killing the captured Arab terrorists… except not because he’s violating the Geneva Conventions, but instead because it’s impossible to extract information out of dead bodies. If they were alive, they could still be tortured and thus knowledge could still be gained. This is how Trigger Warning introduces its designated “hero.”

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