CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND THE MOVIES
Reviewed by David A. Thomas, Assoc. Prof. of Rhetoric, Emeritus, University of Richmond[i]
Reconciliation: The Kite Runner (2007)
The Kite Runner is a beautiful modern fable of a man who had two sons. However, this familial relationship is not revealed until the end. This secret is not too hard to guess. It is a coming of age story about an Afghani boy, Amir, who strove futilely to please his father, Baba. The title refers to the children’s game of dueling with brilliantly colored kites over Kabul’s rooftops. The symbolic violence of fighting kites mirrors the emotional violence between the boys, and the stark war violence within Afghanistan.
Only when Amir wins the annual kite flying tournament with a higher score than his father’s old record does Amir begin to feel a little confidence. Amir is an artistic child who likes to read and make up stories, but his father is disappointed with him mainly because he is so weak.
The movie is based on a debut novel by Khaled Housseni, himself an Afghani immigrant in California who is now a doctor. It is said to be the first Afghan novel written in English. There are some strong autobiographical elements in the novel. The general outline of events corresponds to the author’s own life, including the asymmetrical relationship between the two boys. The Kite Runner is set in the contemporary miseries of transitional Afghanistan (part of the movie is sub-titled). The two boys, Amir and Hassan, grew up in pre-war Kabul almost like brothers, if you account for the rigid caste distinctions between them. Amir is the only son of Baba, a wealthy man. Hassan is the only son of Ali, Baba’s lifelong loyal family servant. Their extreme class differences is seen in the two boys’ relationship, but the story’s predominant motif is their close bond as friends.
Neither boy has a mother who is present in this story. Amir’s mother is said to have died in childbirth. The first important female character to appear is the young woman Amir marries in America. The Kite Runner is a male quest story, all the way.
The plot is divided into three main acts: (1) Amir’s childhood period up to the point when the Russian invasion of the country forces Baba and Amir to seek political asylum in America, and (2) Amir’s subsequent young manhood in San Jose, his marriage to an Afghani woman who was also a part of the diaspora, and his father Baba’s death, and (3) Amir’s return to Afghanistan on a climactic mercy mission to save the only son of his boyhood friend Hassan.
In the first act, Amir’s story begins when he is twelve, and it unfolds through his close relationship with Hassan, the son of Ali, Baba’s longtime family servant. Because of the strict class difference that divided the two boys, their friendship was always constrained by Amir’s dominance and Hassan’s subservience. Things change when Amir wins the annual kite flying tournament.
Hassan, the “kite runner” of the title, is off retrieving a fallen kite in an alleyway, but he runs into trouble. Some older bullies get little Hassan off alone and sexually assault him. Amir secretly witnesses the attack, but is too terrified to intervene. He never discloses to anyone that he was there, not even to Hassan. In the Middle Eastern moral universe, Hassan is not only tantamount to being Amir’s slave, he is now impure, defiled (and defined) by his misfortune of having been raped. [ii] So the confused Amir bears the twin burdens of dealing with Hassan’s secret shame, and also his own guilt over his cowardice in not trying to protect Hassan, never telling anyone.
Thereafter, Amir becomes a cruel playmate bent on humiliating Hassan. Amir continues to act out by contriving a plot to get rid of poor Hassan. He accuses Hassan of stealing his watch. Out of his fierce, unswerving loyalty to his friend, little Hassan admits to Amir’s dastardly lie, so as not to get his best friend into trouble with his father, Baba, for such treachery. Ali, the loyal family servant, feels he has no choice but to leave the beloved family and take his disgraced son Hassan with him. Baba forgives Hassan; but Ali apparently assumes Hassan’s admitted guilt, and does not accept the offer of grace.
Then the Russians invade Kabul. Amir’s father is forced to flee with Amir for their lives. In the second act of the movie, they wind up in California, leaving Afghanistan—and Hassan—behind forever. Amir grows into a good man, living within an Afghani diaspora enclave in America. Even in their new humbled status, working in a gas station and in the flea markets, the older elitist generation still maintains their illusions of being superior to the Pashtun servant class they condescended to back home in Afghanistan.
Amir remains haunted by the sin of his childhood betrayal of his best friend Hassan.
In the last act, set in 2000, a close family friend, (Shaun Toub, previously seen in Crash) calls Amir from Pakistan to inform him that Hassan has died. Hassan has left a young son, Sohrab, as an orphan back in Afghanistan, now under Taliban control. Would Amir come to get Sohrab and take him to safety? This, he says, would be a good thing. Act III shows Amir’s dangerous rescue mission to find Sohrab and return him into the safety of Amir’s family. The phone call revealed the dark secret that Hassan was not really the son of Ali, Amir’s family servant. Baba was also Hassan’s natural father. Amir and Hassan were half-brothers by blood. Doubtless, this new knowledge reinforced Amir’s obsession to rescue Sohrab as a belated action of atonement for himself.
Social and Ethical Issues. There is more than a passing connection to the archetypal stories of Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and Esau. The Kite Runner isthe story of the favored son and the rejected brother (or half-brother), embedded within family betrayals, enmities, inherent guilts, and perpetual demands for reconciliation and redemption. The fiction that is The Kite Runner allows the older brother to come to terms with his guilt by taking his nephew Sohrab into his own home to raise as his own child.
Modern day tensions and conflicts in the Middle East, alas, still await resolution.
One thing to note about The Kite Runner is the contrast between Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s, a veritable paradise (at least for the wealthy), and the hellish devastation of the present day shown by the tragic images of a generation of wars, including the succession of wars with the Russians, the ongoing internal tribal struggles involving Al Queda and the Taliban, and, presumably also, the Americans. Kite flying is one of the many things the Taliban banned when it came into power. The kite flying scenes represent the possibility of freedom and joy for Afghanistan again someday in the future.
On a moral note, the story is one of sin and redemption. As a child, Amir carves their names into a pomegranate tree with a legend, “Kings of Kabul.” The tree dies in the next act. As an upwardly mobile young adult, Amir manages to find success as a novelist, in English, yet still seeks his dying father’s blessing, who continues to deny it. In the climax, Amir is able to construct a modicum of the reconciliation he so desperately craves by adopting Sohrab, and particularly, by the way he insists that his wife’s father must also accept the boy as an equal family member, and not just as “a Pashtun boy.”
