"You Don't Mess with the Zohan" stars Adam Sandler as Zohan Dvir, an Israeli counter-terrorism army commando who, after growing tired of the Israel/Palestine conflict, fakes his own death in order to pursue his dream; he wants to become a hairstylist in America.
Like Steven Spielberg's tedious "Munich", "Zohan" is preoccupied with a simple question. Why can't Israelis and Palestinians just make love, make money, and eat hummus in peace? But where "Munich" engages in dishonest equivalencies - blaming resistance to colonialism for colonialism - "Zohan" does something far more original and far more bizarre.
Zohan is a Jewish superhero. He's Israel's national perception of itself: invincible, strong and adept at kicking Palestinian butt. But Zohan has another side which his country won't let him nurture. He's loving and kind and simply wants to be a hairdresser. "I want to make things silky smooth," he says, desperate to cast off his hyper-masculine national identity.
Fittingly, "Zohan" increasingly indulges in sex and hummus (love and sperm) gags. But this juvenile humour masks a larger point: Zohan now dedicates his life to bringing love and joy to others. He wants to escape his superhero counter-terrorist persona. He wants to go to America and make hair "silky smooth"! Unsurprisingly, other Jews mock Zohan's newfound beliefs. They call him a "feigele" or "homo", mocking his perceived weaknesses. Here, empathy is aligned with both castration anxieties and femininity. Only at the end of the film, when Zohan acquires financial and personal success, do his parents accept the gentler Zohan. You can be what you want, they say, so long as you're bringing in the cash.
Zohan's initial dreams serve to reverse the Zionist transformation of the effeminate European scholar into the macho soldier of God. When he arrives in America, though, Sandler takes the Jewish inferiority complex and plays it against American superiority. Thus, your Jewish superhero is only ever good enough to be a lowly American hairdresser. America, a melting pot of all cultures, assimilates all creeds and races, removes their historical and tribal baggage, and transforms their faith into a belief in consumer culture.
As such, "Zohan's" second half takes place on a New York street in which one half is owned by Jewish shop-owners and the other half is owned by Palestinian shop-owners. Both sides live in harmony, selling to their customers and raking in cash. There are no conflicts here, no wars, only peaceful trading. The film buys into its "we're all the same" philosophy so clearly that Zohan's arch nemesis, a Palestinian superhero called The Phantom (John Turturro), ultimately has the same aspirations as Zohan: he wants to open a shoe store. Both superheroes, one Palestinian, one Jewish, are thus ultimately colonised by similar capitalist aspirations.
During its final act, Sandler's Zohan replaces the Third World's perceived childishness with the "sanity" of the United States (US sanity = the diversity of capitalism's homogeneity) and then replaces his adolescent promiscuity with monogamous marriage. Zohan ceases to be a pro-nationalist superman, and becomes the bourgeois, monogamous, hetero businessman; the bland hero of every American success story. He has a house, a car, a wife and he's happy. America placates needs, removes ethnic tension, and keeps you sufficiently happy until you die of old age or overwork.
By the end of Sandler's film, it turns out that the real enemy is a businessman called Walbridge (Wall Street?), who wants to take all land from the Jews and the Palestinians in order to construct a huge shopping mall. Wallbridge thus gathers a group of uneducated rednecks, appeals to their patriotism, bigotry and racism, and gets them to start a war between Arabs. At its best, the film goes further than fare like "Munich", in that it says that ethnic tensions are really a manifestation of class/power tensions, and that Middle Eastern conflicts largely stem from conniving white dudes and rampant greed. At its worst, however, the film unconsciously espouses more capitalism as an ideal (and ignores the linkages between capitalism and neo-colonialism/Zionism/war/terrorism), even if it also satirises such a stance. The implication is that a Middle Eastern capitalist "utopia" is the end result and end goal of twenty first century US Imperialism (via the proxy of Israel).
Regardless, the conflict in "Zohan" is ultimately not between Palestinians and Israelis, but between Walbridge (who wants to pit the racial minorities against one another and claim the real estate as his own) and the working class coalition of hummus-eaters. To combat this, the film's Jews and Palestinians form an alliance, defeat Walbridge and his bigot army, and unite to build a mall of their own.
The film then ends with Jews and Palestinians holding hands and creating their own American dream, their own Eden, without the West. They thus build their own mall, in which each can live out their own flavour of the bland American dream. Sandler's tongue-in-cheek point: malls are good, business unites, religious and racial differences are illusory or superficial, blanket bigotry is the province of greedy white men, heterosexuality and monogamous marriage is a natural part of growing up and there is no real victory once Jews and Palestianians shake hands, only Western-style, cement-grey banality.
"Don't Mess with the Zohan" isn't as funny as Sandler's best movies ("Wedding Singer", "Happy Gilmore", "50 First Dates" etc), but it at least tries to delve into issues which most films are scared stiff of tackling. Incidentally, aside from John Turturro, all the film's major Palestinians are played by Jewish actors. This, along with the film's reliance on crude stereotypes, has led to the film being labelled "racist". In reality, Sandler's an equal opportunity offender, and his film hinges on a love story between Palestinians and Jews, be they male or female.
7.9/10 - Worth two viewings. For more interesting films about the Palestine/Israeli conflict, see "Paradise Now", "Checkpoint" and "The Time that Remains".
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