Disappearing Act: Traumatic Formalism in Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot (2017)

The film’s most problematic allegorical turn, however, is its subsequent and wholesale appropriation of Palestinian trauma. Despite the slaughter of four innocent Palestinians – by accident or not – Maoz only lingers on the reality of their deaths in a brief but highly stylized scene showing an army bulldozer unceremoniously dumping the wrecked car into an unmarked sandpit. This is the “cover-up” Culture Minister Miri Regev so vehemently criticized for being unpatriotic. But what’s remarkable about this scene is its depersonalization of death: we are shown no bodies, no personal artifacts that might stand-in for the identities of those who have died. Instead the camera is fixed on the smoldering car, its carcass doubling as a collective corpse or coffin.

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The furor surrounding Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot (2017) began a few days after the film’s domestic release last September, when Israeli Culture Minster Miri Regev denounced its depiction of an IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) cover-up as “self-flagellation and co-operation with the anti-Israel narrative.”1 In a following statement Regev suggested it’s “outrageous that Israeli artists contribute to the incitement of the young generation against the most moral army in the world by spreading lies in the form of art.”2

Despite Regev’s objections, Foxtrot has garnered unbridled praise from film critics within Israel – winning eight Ophir awards, including Best Film – and abroad, culminating in a Silver Lion grand jury prize at the Venice Film Festival and a spot in the Oscar shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film category. The Village Voice lauded Foxtrot as a “searing” exploration of Israel’s national trauma by means of a “rigorous and inventive formalism”;3
The Washington Post praised Maoz’s “elegant allegory of self-examination” for its “alternately amusing and sobering flights of absurdism”;4 Rolling Stone declared it one of the best films of the year.5 Foxtrot’s seductive combination of allegory, trauma, and the Absurd proved to be a compelling formula for critical success and awards recognition. But at what cost?

Let’s begin in the film’s second act, set in a remote military roadblock where we find Jonathan Feldman (played by Yonatan Shiray) – who is mistakenly reported killed “in the line of duty” to his devastated parents in the opening sequence – and three other young recruits. This outpost is nothing more than a bombed-out sentry tower guarding a single rusty red and white lifting gate – more of an allegorical joke than a barrier against the enemy. Occasionally, a car will approach carrying nervous Palestinians who must hand over their IDs for the young soldiers to input into a whirring desktop computer that looks like it might be an original Macintosh (long before the company rebranded itself as “Apple”), its screen saturated by the greenish hue we’ve come to identify with a bygone technological age. Apart from these encounters, which generally pass without incident, the military checkpoint is a barren wasteland of mud and dust enlivened only by the boys’ existential ennui and the odd camel seeking passage. Here is the life of waiting; we are in Beckett territory. In the film’s more overtly Absurdist moments, the young recruits obsessively measure the list of their sinking barracks, a rusty cargo container, by timing the roll of a can from one end to the other.

Manning a checkpoint to nowhere, with primitive equipment filtered through a romantic nostalgia for the slow technology of the ’80s, the boys pass their time fooling around, sketching in their notepads, telling stories, and playing video games. The outpost’s anachronism is rather incongruous considering the film is set in a present where Jonathan’s parents possess the latest iPhone. It also politicizes the film’s aesthetic in a way that critics have willfully overlooked. For the boys’ innocence is directly correlated to the primitivism of their technology, which in turn imputes the military machines with the innocence of the boys. In one memorable scene, a young recruit caresses his gun in a fanciful lovers’ dance. It’s just play, or a charade at most. And if the outpost is “a microcosm of Israeli society,” as the director claims, then the film’s allegorical structure generates a conclusion that is hard to avoid: the Israeli army-state is as innocent as these boys and their toys. This elides the fact that the IDF is one of the most technologically advanced armies in the world, and is routinely criticized for its use of excessive force.6

Foxtrot’s state of “sovereign innocence” (the etymology of innocence, Roland Barthes reminds us, is “I do no harm”) also overdetermines the central scene of violence as an instance of the “pure” accident in the philosophical vein. In this devastating scene, four innocent Palestinian youths are gunned-down when a beer can accidentally rolls out of their car and is mistaken for a grenade. Jonathan’s gut reaction viscerally overtakes the slow technology at his disposal – it is as if he is having an out-of-body experience; he opens fire, moved by a will greater than his own. The film telegraphs Jonathan’s innocence in an extended scene of recognition immediately preceding the fatal misunderstanding. We are shown the young recruit and the Palestinian girl in the passenger seat exchanging furtive glances, even a smile, as he checks her ID. The sanguine portrayal of their attraction means we’d be hard-pressed to name this desire, which would at least add a degree of ambivalence to the unfortunate affair. How could there be animus when Jonathan and the Palestinian girl clearly see eye-to-eye? The sentimental colonialism of this shot-reverse-shot conjures a shared ethical space that demands another reason for her death, one capable of squaring their respective (geopolitical) positions, to satisfy its inflated vision.

Justifying civilian deaths on the grounds of “collateral damage” always rings hollow; in the context of this film’s aspiration for generality, such an excuse comes across as a regrettable lack of imagination. When the sergeant (called in to clear up this sorry affair) gruffly reassures Jonathan, “in war, shit happens,” it is clear to all that his pronouncement misses the mark entirely. Notice, also, the way The Guardian’s Xan Brooks extrapolates the film’s allegorical tenor into a metaphysical dictum that doubles as a kind of Absurdist’s code of ethics: “The world, it tells us, is random and inept – as likely to kill you by mistake as on purpose.”7

The world. Whether or not Maoz intended Foxtrot to be a critique of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, Brooks’ reading highlights the disavowal that inevitably arises when politicized violence is framed as an allegory for a metaphysical condition.

The film’s most problematic allegorical turn, however, is its subsequent and wholesale appropriation of Palestinian trauma. Despite the slaughter of four innocent Palestinians – by accident or not – Maoz only lingers on the reality of their deaths in a brief but highly stylized scene showing an army bulldozer unceremoniously dumping the wrecked car into an unmarked sandpit. This is the “cover-up” Culture Minister Miri Regev so vehemently criticized for being unpatriotic. But what’s remarkable about this scene is its depersonalization of death: we are shown no bodies, no personal artifacts that might stand-in for the identities of those who have died. Instead the camera is fixed on the smoldering car, its carcass doubling as a collective corpse or coffin.

The formal logic of this vehicular trope only becomes apparent when we reach the final act, set in Jonathan’s parents’ home in Tel Aviv, where it transpires their son has died for real this time. Jonathan’s death has clearly exposed underlying tensions between the now separated husband and wife. The mother (Sarah Adler) blames the father (Lior Ashkenazi) for the son’s death, suggesting it might be a cosmic “revenge” or “punishment” for something in the father’s past, but for the time being this secret – along with the facts surrounding Jonathan’s death – are withheld from the audience. The only clue is a sketch the mother finds in Jonathan’s notebook. The picture is of a bulldozer bearing the wreckage of a car, which we assume is a reference to the earlier cover-up scene. Is this Jonathan’s admission of guilt? Did he take his own life because he couldn’t live with the blood of the innocent Palestinians on his hands? Is this how the reality of Palestinian deaths will break into the Feldmans’ domestic space or, maybe, their political consciousness?

Unfortunately no. As the final act unfolds we learn that Jonathan was killed in yet another vehicular accident, when the truck transporting him back to the checkpoint swerves off the road to avoid a wandering camel. We learn the father is nominally to blame, because he demanded Jonathan’s return to Tel Aviv after the army’s initial kerfuffle. Jonathan’s sketch is placed on the dining table, positioned between the parents like an accusation. Might the bulldozer actually symbolize the father, who sends his son to an early grave? But, as the scene progresses, Jonathan’s sketch is repurposed again when the parents turn to the image to allegorize their wrecked marriage, each vying over who is the bulldozer and who the car. What’s more, the couple’s fight over the symbolic meaning of this picture is embedded in a larger narrative about Israel’s national trauma, when the father finally confesses the “secret” preventing him from emotionally engaging with his wife. He reveals how he is haunted by an event from his time in the army, by a quixotic decision he made during a mission that caused his friend’s vehicle to hit a landmine. The final act, it turns out, was building toward this wreckage. In this tropological movement the only image of Palestinian death in the movie’s final sequence is entirely refigured as a metaphor for the inter- and intragenerational violence Israel inflicts on its own subjects. This symbolic appropriation of Palestinian trauma – by mobilizing the scene of Palestinian death to first allegorize Jonathan’s death, then the Feldman’s failed marriage, and, finally, to figure the father’s dead IDF comrade – is the film’s real cover-up.

The movie ends with the father, Michael, performing a solitary foxtrot in a heavy-handed explication of the titular metaphor. “Foxtrot,” the filmmaker explains, “deals with the open wound or bleeding soul of Israeli society. We dance the foxtrot; each generation tries to dance it differently but we all end up at the same starting point.”8 This recursive structure means it is impossible to determine where we are in its movement or to break its reassuring holding pattern. Hence, in Maoz’s film, father and son are indistinguishable from the start: both figurally die in the opening scene, when the erroneous report of Jonathan’s death causes the father to black out; both have Xs placed over their eyes in the film’s extended animated sequence. And who is the other Jonathan Feldman, the one that is killed at the beginning of the film, the disembodied figure who could be anyone? If all the Feldman men are already dead, then who really killed the Palestinians?

In academic discourse, “trauma culture” is routinely criticized for fueling the “wounded attachments” of identity and national politics. “[A] traumatic subject is a paradox,” Roger Luckhurst reminds us, “in that trauma is held to be that which disaggregates or shatters subjectivity” and thus to “organize an identity around trauma [. . . ] is to premise it on exactly that which escapes the subject, on an absence or a gap.”9 Maoz’s film does indeed interrogate the way trauma is proffered as a key to unlocking the nation’s repressed core while also locking in trauma as national identity. But Foxtrot also produces its own traumatic form by plugging the lacuna at the heart of trauma with yet another: the Absurd. While trauma fundamentally disorganizes form – whether temporal, historical, psychical, or aesthetic – Maoz’s film organizes trauma around disorganization. The film is packed with references to its ingenious formal structure, from the foxtrot’s empty shuffle to the telescoping squares in the painting that graces the Feldman’s home. This formal mapping of trauma onto the Absurd manages to square both circles. And although trauma can be encountered as the Absurd, Foxtrot absurdly equates the two. The result is an autopoetic traumatic formalism at best, political denial at worst. These two modalities are not as distinct as one might think because Foxtrot’s traumatic formalism constitutes what Lauren Berlant would call “a proliferative abstraction” (which is another way of describing the work of allegory), which must authenticate its truth claim by finding correspondence in the world and thus surpass its own content.10 At the same time, every traumatic event in the world can now be recruited to validate the film’s metaphysical claims. In other words, Foxtrot derives its traumatic formalism from a constitutive dependency that is sustained by a structural relation of denial.

In an interview with Haaretz, Maoz states, “the film’s conclusion is that fate is unchangeable not because it’s decreed by the heavens, but due to the nature of the human being who shapes the nature of the collective that is stuck in the situation of the occupation.”11 This begs the question why anyone would contest fate when Maoz has made denial so conceptually seductive, so profoundly universal, and so absurdly natural. Foxtrot’s traumatic formalism does indeed make it a controversial film, but certainly not for the reasons Miri Regev has led us to believe.

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All images are screenshots from the film’s trailer.