Lost in Translation

(allmoviephoto.com)

As Battle in Seattle‘s protestors faced a police assault onscreen, another progressive journalist leaned over to me and asked if I had ever been tear gassed. No, I said, surprised at my chagrin. "It sucks," he replied.

Being a demonstrator often does suck, as the film makes clear. But Battle also goes out of its way to show that being a cop also can suck, that being a politician isn’t great, and that it’s not always awesome being a humanitarian activist, either. The film makes an effort to humanize the various groups involved, but it can only go so far—the film never gets around to explaining why these people felt they had to protest the World Trade Organization, or why the WTO does what it does.

Battle in Seattle premiered at film festivals this spring. It is a dramatization of the protests and subsequent riots surrounding the WTO’s 1999 ministerial meeting in Seattle, Washington, the first meeting that organization ever held in the United States. The enormous protests caused millions of dollars in damages and attracted media attention from around the world; for many, it was the first time they had heard of the anti-WTO movement. The protestors, who came from many different organizations and had widely varying motivations, were even able to shut down the meeting’s opening ceremonies.

The film begins with activists Jay (Martin Henderson), Lou (Michelle Rodriguez), and Django (scene-stealer Andre 3000) planning to disrupt the conference even as Seattle’s liberal establishment, represented by Mayor Jim Tobin (Ray Liota), prepares to allow their protests. We see Tobin welcoming the WTO delegates in an auditorium before proceeding to welcome the protestors at a rally, promising them the chance to express their views and adding plaintively that he once protested the Vietnam War.

Director Stuart Townshend’s filmmaking is deft, interspersed with actual footage of the events, and it makes an effort to empathize with everyone but the WTO officials. Although the movie mainly follows the protestors, there are police officers played by Woody Harrelson and Tatum Channing, a Bernard Kouchner-esque Doctors Without Borders official, a stereotypical news reporter, and the representative of an African country who leads a bloc of developing nations in the WTO negotiations. (Note: Giving Woody Harrelson a central dramatic role is a mistake.) The film even depicts labor unions diverting a scheduled march in exchange for a seat at the table. Unlike a more "Hollywood" adaptation, the film spends time sussing out the motivations of the minor characters, but still manages to come in at a crisp 100 minutes long.

Unfortunately, much of the dialogue in the film is poorly written—nearly every scene that could have been poignant falls flat with a near-audible thud. Luckily, the one important scene that doesn’t seem forced is the confrontation between Jay and the leader of the small group of anarchists who helped escalate what were ultimately peaceful demonstrations into a battle. As the characters confront each other in front of a shattered window, the film draws a bright line between the goal of protestors—getting their message out—and the senseless violence of the anarchists. It’s a moment meant to deconstruct the stereotypical view of the protestors as a single bloc.

But the movie fails, thanks in part to the poor scripting, to explain why the protestors are in Seattle beyond vague environmental generalities or to make a real case against the WTO. The opening shots of the film could have been lifted from a negative political ad. The WTO does, in fact, offer some benefits to the world. Instead of including a character who could have tried to explain them, Townsend gave the organization a simple role in the film: to be as evil as possible. The deliberate effort to portray the various institutions through people in the film creates an unsettling contrast when you realize that none of these people is given a good reason for doing what they are doing.

In some ways, Battle is an exercise in masochism, reminiscent of The Passion of the Christ, depicting ultimately senseless violence that at points will have audience members squirming in their seats. Tobin becomes something of a Pontius Pilate figure whose commitment to letting demonstrators have their voice heard is the reason that the conflict spins out of control. Today, demonstrators at meetings of the WTO and similar organizations are kept miles from the actual negotiations. Tobin’s flawed virtue is ultimately what makes the protest possible.

The movie ends on a bright note as the imprisoned protestors are released, and finally closes with a chronicle of the following years, as future WTO meetings see more and more protests, as developing nations become more and more uncomfortable with the organization and eventually pull out of discussions on trade. The effects of domestic agricultural subsidies that punish developing nations ended the most recent talks in a deadlock, but on Tuesday officials hinted at another try.

But the representatives of developing nations didn’t need to see protestors to know that their countries were catching the short end of the stick. The Doctors Without Borders representative didn’t need them to show the delegates the failure to send basic medicines to sub-Saharan Africa—a message that ultimately went unheard. Almost as if anticipating this critique of the film, Django says, "A week ago, nobody knew what the WTO was. Now they don’t know what it is, but they know it’s bad."

It is also possible that worldwide audience could think that people who protest against the WTO are all bad or violent. This film might convince them otherwise, even if it won’t convince them that the protestors are right. Ultimately, Battle in Seattle challenges how people can hope to change large and powerful multi-national institutions like the WTO. There are different ways—from the inside, with confrontation, with conversation, and, as the film shows, with violence. It’s not clear, at least to me, that the protests in Seattle were any more effective than any other method, but the costs might have outweighed the benefits.

A viewer not familiar with the debates around international trade could certainly leave the theater without understanding why anyone was even in Seattle. But progressives should know more—they are responsible for understanding the solidarity of the people on both sides of the barriers are people, and finding solutions from the inside as well as out. As Jay observes to a cop who has beaten him, neither of them are benefiting from the machinations of the WTO, "It seems kind of fucked that you and I had to fight each other."

Tim Fernholz is a writing fellow at The American Prospect and graduated from Georgetown University this year.

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