Taylor Sheridan Has A Very Clear Opinion On The War on Terror in Lioness -And It’s Not What You Might Think
How Two Speeches In ‘Wish The Fight Away’ Make This Clear
Warning: Spoilers for much of Season 1 of Lioness — and much of Episode 7 ‘Wish the Fight Away — below.
I never expected that the most blatant rejection of how we’ve been fighting the War On Terror for nearly a quarter of a century would come not from Michael Moore or even a filmmaker like Steven Spielberg but Taylor Sheridan. I especially didn’t think I would see it Lioness a show which is, at least ostensibly, about a special ops unit that has been designed to take out Muslim terrorists on foreign soil by using women to get where males can’t.
But Lioness is, in many ways, a completely repudiation of not only how we’ve been fighting the war but how the CIA operates and how the entire U.S. government has been taking the wrong approach to everything in the Middle East before the war even officially started. While the series makes this clear many times in its first season I think the clearest contrast can be seen in the penultimate episode of the series Wish the Fight Away.
The series has been following Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira) in her mission to try and reach a terrorist who we have been told multiple times is the biggest fundraiser in Saudi Araba ‘since Bin Laden’. To do so Cruz has been getting close to his daughter Aaliyah (Stephanie Nur) who is about to be married off. Cruz, as we learned in the pilot, was the victim of domestic abuse both from her parents and her boyfriend and gave herself to the Marines when they saved her life. Cruz is the moral conscience of Lioness because she’s the only person whose soul has not been worn away by the mission the way everyone around her has. Joe (Zoe Saldana) has made it very clear almost since the start of the series that she views the people who are operators solely as the means to an end. Consequently she has no interest in not only coming close to them but even considering them human beings. In the second episode she ‘puts Cruz through the ringer’ and has no remorse about doing so either to Cruz or the soldiers who did. Cruz is basically alone in this and Jo and her team give her no real support, not psychological.
As Aaliyah gets closer to her wedding say she and Cruz become closer. We learn over time that Aaliyah has no real friends and sees her impending marriage as the end of her independence as a woman. On the night of a sleepover where both women are vulnerable the two women kiss and start having sex. The relationship deepens when they go to Manhattan and it is here Cruz genuinely feels vulnerable.
After her handler hears her the two of them having sex for three hours — something he nonchalantly reports to Jo later — Cruz freezes at Aaliyah’s pledges of commitment and walks out of the room into a nearby hotel. Cruz is clearly falling apart and she makes it very clear she doesn’t know if she can go through with this. Joe is called in from the mission prep about this and honestly doesn’t seem that thrilled that her recruit is a human being.
When she ends up in Manhattan Joe looks at Cruz as she falls apart and offers the opposite of sympathy or even humanity. “You have no family, no friends, you’ve never known love,” she said matter-of-factly. She tells Cruz that this isn’t real and she’s believing the lie. When Cruz tells her that Aaliyah genuinely seems empathetic Joe’s words are dismissive, saying that is her last bit of freedom “an adventure before she becomes a breeder.”
There is a hypocrisy to Joe’s words that is staggering. During the last few episodes Joe’s 14 year old daughter was in a car accident and was discovered to be pregnant. Joe has been a mostly absentee mother and has been infuriated that her husband has been letting her getting away with a boyfriend. When she goes to see her daughter in the hospital she apologizes for her absence saying that her daughter “has been one of the sacrifice she makes for the good of her country.’
Yet it’s clear in her discussion with Cruz that she sees this woman’s soul as another necessary sacrifice. Worse considering that Jo is a woman of color and that she knows more than anyone how repressive the Saudi regime is even to women of stature her dismissal of Aaliyah shows that at the end of the day she essentially views her in the same breath as her father, even though to this point we’ve seen no evidence of that and Sheridan has gone out of his way to make Aaliyah infinitely more sympathetic than almost every other character on the show, save for Cruz. It makes it very clear that for Joe she truly does view that American exceptionalism must prevail and that the ends will always justify the means.
She drives this point home later by saying that Aaliyah’s father is the worst terrorist we’ve seen since Bin Laden who ‘was also a father’. That Cruz feels remorse about what she might have to do is considered a weakness to her. When she says this will break Aaliyah Joe says simply: “It’ll break her anyway.” Nothing could make it clearer about Joe and in effect the entire War on Terror is argued by saying that American lives will always be more important than the lives of anyone else or that no one in the Middle East is an innocent bystander.
It’s worth noting this speech does nothing to convince Cruz of the righteousness of her mission: for the rest of the episode it’s an open question whether she’ll go through with it. Even when Kaitlyn (Nicole Kidman) makes it clear that their best bet is probably a missile strike Joe says she doesn’t agree. She intends to waken the marine. And her methods later on are even crueler: she shows Cruz footage of all the confirmed attacks they know Aaliyah’s father is responsible for. “It’s an eight hour flight” she tells her. “You won’t get close to finishing it but I want you to try.” In other words Joe wants to turn her into a cold killing machine and if that means destroying whatever residual humanity she might have, well, that’s just a case of the ends justifying the means.
This is a harsh enough statement from Sheridan. What makes all the more damning is a speech that’s takes place just before the plane flying to the location of the wedding takes off. Throughout the series we’ve watched the puzzling marriage between Kaitlyn and her husband Errol (Martin Donovan). Errol is a financial expert who seems indifferent to what his wife is doing and who Kaitlyn is more than willing to trade information to learn what she needs to help her giving away little in return. Before she leaves, however, Errol drops the dance he’s been doing and tells her why he’s been warning about the mission he’s on. In it he reveals that even without the intelligence briefings Kaitlyn has been getting he has a better understanding of the Middle East then she does — and maybe anyone in the CIA.
He tells her, in no uncertain terms, about the situation in Saudi Arabia. He gives us the statistics that less than one percent of the population controlled a vast majority of the nation’s wealth while more than 40 percent are well below the poverty line. He makes it clear that the Saudi royals need to make sure that if the populace ever stops to think about this for long they might decide to revolt and that in a sense the War on Terror has been basically a distraction by the wealthy for the religious elite. He also implies very bluntly that America and the West is willing to indulge this — and he mentions 9–11 in all but name — in recognition of the vast oil reserves in Saudi Arabia and their fear that if there is a religious war, Saudi Arabia will end up becoming Iran.
Errol is blunt that until the world comes up with an alternative to fossil fuels the entire Middle East must be handle with delicacy and that any disruption — like the assassination of Aaliyah’s father — will lead to consequences that will reverberate throughout the entire world and possibly World War III. “Everyone’s wondering why the world won’t do anything about climate change,” he finishes his speech. “Honestly, I don’t think the world will survive long enough to die from climate change.”
Errol’s speech, delivered with almost no emotion by Donovan, is arguably the darkest thing in the entire series. It argues that the War on Terror is a lost cause not because we’ve been fighting it wrong or that we don’t know what winning looks like (though Sheridan makes it clear that those are very much part of the reason) but because the entire thing is essentially is a staged event by both parties to maintain status quo. I’ve heard many arguments as to the American reasoning for the war being built entirely on oil; Sheridan argues just as strongly that the Saudis are doing it for exactly the same reason. And part of the reason I find it believable is because as long as America is dependent on oil as a natural resource we’re going to be spending a lot of money that will end up in Saudi Arabia. And that in turn will eventually end up in the pockets of men like Aaliyah’s father. We’re funding both sides of the war to a great extent and we’ll never win that way.
Kaitlyn’s reaction is, like almost everything else we’ve seen in Kidman’s performance, perfectly neutral. “Thank you for taking away any doubts about the moral high ground of this.” But by this point we know Kaitlyn well enough to know that, because she’s closer to the ground than Jo is, that she is shaken by this. She knows better than Jo the costs this job has on a person — in the previous episode she offered Joe a station position because she know how high the cost is to both her and her family. She spends the entire season basically as a buffer to Joe (I’m reminded of the relationship between Saul and Carrie in Homeland) emotionally supportive when she needs to be, chewing her out when its necessary. But she knows very well the moral high ground is all she has.
Errol has essentially told her — and the viewer — that the entire arc we’ve seen and perhaps the mission statement for the series is in the grand scheme of things, inconsequential. It doesn’t make Joe or the Lioness teams less heroic — they go into that episode knowing all too well that they may all end up dead or in a foreign prison, and yet they go anyway. What Sheridan makes very clear in Lioness is that this is pointless because the CIA’s victories are all essentially short term and do nothing for the long-term. Their job, as we see over and over, is to make America safe right now. They don’t care if the consequences of their actions lead to America facing a different threat a year or even a month or later. I can’t help but be reminded of Munich. After Eric Bana asks Geoffrey Rush the immortal line: “Did we really accomplish anything?” Rush responds: “My toenails keep growing back. Does that mean I stop cutting them?” In a sense that could just as easily apply to America’s entire strategy (I use the term very broadly) when it comes to the Middle East.
And 9/11 will always be people like Joe’s justification. I don’t know if Kaitlyn ever tells her husband’s blunt opinion of it but I seriously doubt she ever will. The attacks on the Twin Towers have been for 23 years, our government’s de facto blanket justification for every single thing that has been done in our name since. Joe uses it as a trump card, indirectly, to convince Cruz to move forward. Errol says not only that it’s an excuse but that it was practically inevitable given the economy of both regions. Lioness argues not that we lost our moral high ground when we started the War on Terror but that we never really had it in the first place.
The second season of Lioness will begin airing on Showtime on Monday and I look forward to it for many reasons. In addition to be exceptionally written, directed and acted it acts, indirectly as both a mirror image and a repudiation of 24 which began its run at the start of both Peak TV and the post 9/11 world. For nearly a decade we cheered for Jack Bauer as he saved the world every day and blatantly refused to play by the rules under the doctrine of ‘the end justifying the means’. Now 20 years later we watch Joe and the rest of her team break many of the same rules for the mission but Sheridan is always making it clear that we’re breaking our laws in the name of some larger purpose, that there is no oversight or consequences for the people who do so, and that the ends that everyone’s fighting for are so vague that not even the people doing so really know what they are any more. For what shall it profit our nation if we win the world and lose our soul, Sheridan keeps asking the viewer with every episode? Lioness argues that not only have lost the collective soul of our nation we don’t even know what winning looks like or if we’re just cutting our collective toenails no matter how much bigger and uglier they grow back each time.