Sleepless in Los Angeles: Showtime's "Sleeper Cell"

By Laura Fokkena

Sleeper Cell will air again on Showtime beginning January 10, 2006.

They’re your friends! Your neighbors! Your husbands! Yes, the terrorists are living among you: teaching science to your children, handing you ugly shoes at the bowling alley, and reverse-engineering your home security systems.

Now where have we heard this plotline before? Oh that’s right, everywhere. So you can’t be faulted if Showtime’s latest ten-part miniseries, Sleeper Cell, escaped your attention. Sometimes it’s hard to keep all those TV terrorists straight.

I went into this drama with low expectations, and in many ways I wasn’t disappointed. (Gratuitous honor killing? Check. Jew-bashing? Yep. Obligatory mistreatment of women? Got it.) At first glance, Sleeper Cell appears to play straight into all the fear! fear! fear! rhetoric we’ve been force-fed for the past four years. The word “sleeper,” after all, is far scarier than the word “cell.” Are the Muslims poisoning me at Burger King? Planting explosives in my new Ikea coffee table? Reading my e-mail? Hiding in my basement?

In spite of all its melodramatic hype, however, the more I watched, the more I was surprised to discover that this is one series that’s more intriguing for the things it gets right than it is for the things it gets wrong.

Whether it was a bow to political correctness or a tool to heighten the sense that terrorists are indeed the boys next door, Sleeper Cell eschewed the normal trope of all Arabs, all the time and peppered its cast with a band of Muslims so multicultural they were worthy of placement on a United Nations WMD inspections team. In a Victor/Victoria move with a Middle Eastern touch, we find an Israeli actor (Oded Fehr) playing a Saudi Arabian extremist (“Faris al-Farik”) posing as an Israeli security analyst (“Yossi Amran”). Farik works with Ilija (Henri Lubatti), a Bosnian who saw his family killed and joined the mujahadeen to avenge their deaths; Bobby (Grant Heslov), the Americanized Egyptian-born son of one of Sadat’s assassins; Christian (Alex Nesic), a French thug and former skinhead who converted to Islam after marrying a Moroccan woman; and Tommy (Blake Shields), a blonder-than-blonde teenager from Berkeley -- a character clearly modeled after the media presentation of the John Walker Lindh case -- who decides to get back at his self-involved, ’60s-throwback mother by taking up terrorism. (That’ll show her!)

The cast is completed with the addition of Darwyn Al-Hakim (Michael Ealy), a blue-eyed African-American once nicknamed “Nakir.” Darwin, a devout Muslim, is an undercover FBI agent who spent time in prison infiltrating an Islamic network, and it’s through these contacts that he meets up with Farik in the series’ first episode, cynically titled “Al-Fatiha.”

On the surface, Sleeper Cell’s plot looks every bit as formulaic as its title suggests: the bad guys are once again Muslim terrorists; the good guys once again American law enforcement. But unlike much more crude attempts at telling this particular story, Sleeper Cell doesn’t pit the secular white hero against a crazy, inept, and inexplicably violent band of dark-skinned foreigners. By keeping the cell members at the forefront of the story, and relegating Darwyn’s non-Muslim colleagues at the FBI to a supporting role where they are depicted as out-of-touch and largely clueless, the show avoids the trap of erasing the histories of those who constitute what social scientists politely refer to as “the periphery.” The main narrative, then, becomes a conversation by Muslims, for Muslims. (Contrast this with movies like Good Morning Vietnam, Schindler’s List, Glory, Cry Freedom, Three Kings, or any number of other films where we are given a white Christian male to latch onto, our entry point into the world of The Other.)

Of course Darwyn, as an American, does fill this role to some extent. But as a black man and a practicing Muslim, he exists on the margins of both the cell he infiltrates and the government he works for: a stranger in both lands. It is only in this climate that his personal convictions can overshadow the simplistic identity we’re used to pinning on our protagonists, an identity where race, religion, and nationality take precedence over politics and belief. In a discussion with Ray, his boss at the FBI, about a Yemeni sheikh known for his success at converting former jihadis to a more moderate version of Islam, Ray makes a sarcastic comment about “true Islam, whatever that is.” Darwyn reminds him that “that’s my faith you’re talking about.”

“Look, I don’t profess to understand your faith,” Ray says, “or anybody else’s faith for that matter, but I don’t see how reciting a few lines of the Qur’an is going to convert a murderer into a solid citizen.”

Darwyn hesitates. “You’re right, Ray,” he says. “You’re right… You don’t understand my faith.”

But it’s not just that we have a couple-three “good” Muslims to offset the “bad” ones. That’s been tried before (The Siege, 24) and it never works as well as the scriptwriters seem to hope. What’s different here is that, although the cell members are definitely an unlovable bunch of seriously bad dudes, they’ve also been written with some complexity, true to the recent trend of giving the enemy just as much motivation and back story as the good guys get. In this case, that back story involves the draw to martyrdom in the name of Islam.

This is where Sleeper Cell is at its best, because, although there is the odd mention of the life the cell members can expect in paradise (though thankfully no tiresome reference to seventy-two virgins) once they carry through with “the operation,” their main complaints are political. There is talk of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the American invasion of Somalia, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia, and, of course, the war in Iraq. Notably, these concerns aren’t laughed off or treated as fanatical in and of themselves. Darwyn’s opposition to the cell is wrapped up in the question of tactics, not purpose; he doesn’t want to see the killing of civilians in any country, and he worries for the future of Islam as it takes an increasingly violent tenor. But he is genuinely sympathetic to the plight of Muslims worldwide, and to that end he distances himself from both the cell and the government he works for, appearing most at home in the mosque and at prayer.

The series is also interspersed with far more Islamic references than other shows in its genre. While the terrorists in movies such as Executive Decision and True Lies are caricatures of themselves, motivated by blind fanaticism and cold, hard rage, Sleeper Cell’s protagonists quote surahs and hadith, recount the flight to Medina and the Battle of the Ditch, debate fatwas and the meaning of jihad, reference the 15th of Shaban and the lunar calendar, order kosher food because it’s closest to being halal, argue about the proper treatment of non-Muslim prisoners and the motives of American soldiers in Iraq from a Qur’anic standpoint, and tell the story of Ali pardoning the unbeliever who spat on him lest he kill out of anger and become a murderer rather than a soldier in the eyes of God.

Years from now, as Islam continues to fold itself into the fabric of everyday American society, these conversations may seem trite and obvious even to non-Muslim viewers. In the current political climate, however, the very idea of an internal dialogue within Islam is a departure from what we’ve come to expect from pop culture’s treatment of Muslims, who are normally portrayed as something closer to Star Trek’s Borg -- all thinking in unison with their one, shared brain.

But the show is not without its problems. Most glaringly, the script plays to Middle American fears and assumptions regarding the cell’s selection of targets. Farik and his cohorts look at malls, sports stadiums, universities, airports, Disneyland -- anywhere they can find the largest number of people crowded into a small space. This ignores the highly symbolic nature of most Islamist activity. The Pentagon, after all, would have been a sloppy target if Al-Qaeda’s goal was to kill tens of thousands of people at once, but as a symbol of American military supremacy it was a spectacularly powerful one. In Sleeper Cell, however, Farik and his gang prepare to dump anthrax into the ventilation system of a shopping mall full of mothers and children... for, what? It’s an act that seems at odds with their earlier, thornier conversations regarding “appropriate” targets they believe to be sanctioned by God in the name of global jihad.

Of course, the viewer may argue that there is no such thing as an “appropriate” target. But here even the good guys would disagree. With the possible exception of the aforementioned Yemeni sheikh, there are no pacifists in this series. Darwyn himself received military training, fought in Iraq, and by the end of the first episode has already engaged in the mercy killing of a fellow cell member and the single-handed beating of four skinheads who harass a man with a turban on the subway, kicking them in the head while giving them a lecture on cross-cultural understanding (“he’s not Arab, he’s not Muslim, he’s a Sikh! Sikhs and Muslims are like the Crips and the Bloods!”).

Darwyn’s colleagues at the FBI are equally committed to the selective use of violence. His supervisor, Ray, shoots an Afghani teenager three times in the back; Ray’s supervisor, whose brother is stationed in Iraq, says if he were killed she would resign her position with the FBI and take a job in private security in Baghdad, so she could take out as many Iraqis as possible.

There is no attempt to paint moral equivalency between one death and another, but we are to understand that the discussion is one worth having. Ultimately both the sleeper cell and the FBI share the same goal: to kill some in the name of saving many. The question is only which “some” should sacrifice for which “many.” It’s a disturbing view of the world, but it’s a view more accurate than the notion that terrorists are about to start bombing Wal-Marts in Cleveland and elementary schools in Topeka, and it would have been an admirable change of pace to see the question explored in more depth.

But the show’s most troubling element occurs in the last episode. Throughout the series, Darwyn and his colleagues have been arguing over whether the FBI should take the cell down immediately, or wait until they’ve collected more evidence against its members. Usually they decide to wait, hoping to build their case. By the time the FBI moves in, however, Darwyn has so compromised the situation by participating in -- or, at least, looking askance to -- the murders of individual innocents that the government claims it can no longer take the risk of having Farik stand trial. Darwyn’s controversial actions might cause the case to be thrown out of court, and Farik would once again be back on the loose. The Department of Homeland Security, acting at the request of the president, decides to declare Farik an enemy combatant and hold him secretly in custody, incommunicado and without recourse to legal counsel. There will be no trial.

The message? Civil liberties get in the way of justice. Following the letter of the law inhibits effective intelligence work. We are left with only two conclusions in this scenario: either we forgive the gaffes of American law enforcement, even when they involve participation in torture and murder, or we agree that the illegal detention of potential terrorists constitutes a special case, one beholden neither to American law nor the Geneva Conventions. In the precise hypothetical offered by the plot in Sleeper Cell, there are, no doubt, those who would be willing to entertain either of those two options. Farik is hardly a sympathetic character, and it’s satisfying to think he might spend the rest of his life in a windowless room wearing an orange jumpsuit.

In reality, however, things are rarely this tidy. “Extraordinary renditions” have produced more bad intelligence than good. The torture at Abu Ghraib served no purpose other than to entertain the soldiers who took part in it. Darwyn faced wrenching moral decisions in the course of his work, and I supported him all the way. But Lynndie England? Not so much. Closing the door on due process and the prohibition of torture has done much more harm than good to American interests, not only because it is immoral, not only because it “harms our image abroad” and we’re vain enough to care, but because, at the end of the day, it simply doesn’t work. It adds fuel to the fire among populations already predisposed to see Americans as the enemy, and it does so without offering anything in return.

But all its faults notwithstanding, I found myself wanting more by the end of the last episode. Not because Sleeper Cell is an accurate or exclusively positive portrayal of Islam -- it was never trying to be anything of the kind -- but because it’s one of the more nuanced portrayals of war, terror, and The War On Terror we’ve seen in mainstream American media. And that’s a start.

Laura Fokkena lives in Boston. Her essay, Are you a terrorist, or do you play one on TV? was reprinted in The Contemporary Reader [Longman, 2004], Dialogues [Longman, 2005], and is forthcoming in What Matters in America: Reading and Writing About Contemporary Culture [Longman, 2006].