Civic Duty (2006)
DVD (region 4)
d. Jeff Renfroe; pr. Andrew Lanter, Tine Pehme, Jeff Renfroe, Andrew Joiner, Kim Roberts; scr. Andrew Joiner; ph. Dylan MacLeod; m. Terry Huud, Eli Krantzberg; ed. Erik Hammarberg, Jeff Renfroe; cast. Peter Krause, Kari Matchett, Richard Schiff, Khaled Abol Naga
Following 9-11, the US government urged its citizens to do their patriotic duty in the war on terror and report anything suspicious. News media such as Fox News covered the numerous alert-status level variations to such an extent that in the immediate years following 9-11 Americans were hyper-conscious of being in a new state of war, with an enemy that may already be on US soil. Such was “justice” in the early years of the GW Bush era and such is the period evoked in Civic Duty. The plot, in which a man loses his job and becomes overly vigilant of his new Muslim neighbours, has a faint echo of Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down. In that film, a defense worker loses his job and unable to adapt, snaps. The protagonist in Civic Duty doesn’t snap, but segue into paranoia. Falling Down was considered an indictment of the political conservatism and economic rationalism of the Reagan-Bush years and it is appropriate to consider Civic Duty in similar terms – as an indictment of the fear-based, culturally paranoid “war on terror” spin spread by the Bush government.
The unemployed accountant protagonist (Peter Krause) here wanders through a post office, the famous terrorist most wanted list pinned to a noticeboard. Extracts from Bush’s most fear-mongering us and them axis of evil rhetoric filter in and out of the soundtrack, adding a hallucinatory quality to this film’s sense of cumulative paranoia. When Krause notices his new neighbour is Middle Eastern, he follows him, becoming suspicious enough at least in Krause’s paranoid mind to report him to the FBI. Following the CNN news scrutiny given Islamic events like Ramadan, Krause is driven ever deeper in his suspicions. The FBI warn him not to pursue the matter. He subsequently confronts the oblivious neighbour at gunpoint, demanding to know who he works for. Soon it descends into a siege standoff.
The neighbourly suspicion in this film dates back of course to Hitchcock and Rear Window and had been played for black comedy in the 1980s in The ‘Burbs, then a metaphor for the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. It is appropriate that Civic Duty, although by no means a comedy, address similar terrain of cultural difference breeding suspicion and resentment. However, Civic Duty, like The Siege a decade before it, posits the double-edged sword that is cultural profiling in a world in which the prime terrorists acting against US interests are Muslim. Hence: the protagonist’s suspicions of his neighbour ring as perhaps not entirely unfounded; a premise which also infiltrated the terrorist-as-neighbour film of Arlington Road.
Interestingly enough, when Krause says he doesn’t care about his country’s foreign policy, his captive counters that it is about time he did. Indeed, this is the film’s point: lack of awareness of American foreign policy enables the racial profiling that can only end in a kind of middle American paranoid psychosis. It’s the parallel between the Bush rhetoric of civil vigilance and paranoid psychosis that motivates Civic Duty’s study of a man on the edge, driven to irrational acts of violence.
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