The Seed of the Sacred Fig is peppered with actual footage of Iranians taking to the streets in 2022 and 2023, protesting the regime and the hijab following the death of Mahsa Amini. For that reason, it is a difficult film to watch. We see real people getting abducted by police, real people getting beaten and shot at, and I am sure that at least one clip shows a dead man. It occurs to me now, 24 hours later, that the footage showing him was not blurred to obscure his identity, unlike so much of the other footage. Whether I realized it or not at the time, that might be why I knew he was dead.
During one of those montages, I found myself thinking about power, and what it means to believe in a world that consists of nothing but power, or rather nothing but power and its absence. That is, after all, the worldview of the Iranian regime: either my control is total, or it may as well not exist.
That is very much what The Seed of the Sacred Fig is about, power and absolutism and the ways they undermine our humanity. The title refers to the sacred fig, ficus religiosa, which propagates by landing on other trees and eventually choking them out. In the real world, the sacred fig was a metaphor in Iran for the revolution and the regime. As for the movie, the regime may be the sacred fig, but if it is, it’s smothering the people of Iran rather than the US-backed Pahlavi Dynasty. More likely, director Mohammad Rasoulof sees the sacred fig in this story as the inevitability of cultural change and progress. I keep thinking about a single shot in the film, showing a tattooed young woman wearing a baseball cap and driving car, which suggests that the world has already moved on more than even the people in this film care to acknowledge.
The day before Seed, I saw I’m Still Here, which tells the true story of Rubens Paiva, a former Brazilian congressman who was disappeared by the military dictatorship. During a harrowing sequence set in a military prison, I found myself thinking, “Why do you feel so compelled to hold onto power that you would behave this way?” I’ve had the thought before. I do not find meaning in power, and I never have. The only power that means anything to me, the only power I understand people fighting tooth and nail to retain or reclaim, is autonomy, but autonomy doesn’t extend beyond one’s own immediate borders.
I understand power’s appeal intellectually. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are entirely foreign to me, but I get where they’re coming from. Our own little home-brewed fascists share the same outlook as the Ayatollah, the AfD in Germany, Putin, the Communist Party in China, and Bibi. Each and every one of them exists in a world that consists of those who do and those who are done upon. The idea of a world in which we are all equal and we all have dignity doesn’t exist for them, because they do not believe that is possible. They believe power is a zero-sum resource. If they don’t have it, someone else must.
When you see the world that way, as so many Americans do nowadays, you open yourself up to all manner of horrors. I was reminded of Adam Serwer’s now-immortal line, “the cruelty is the point.” When he wrote that during the first Trump presidency, Serwer was putting the lie to the idea that Trump supporters liked his policies and were willing to ignore his racism. The cruelty of his words was central to why people flocked to him, why they still do. The cruelty isn’t a side affect, it’s the whole point. Poor white people supported the institution of chattel slavery because it meant there was someone beneath them. There are those who do and those who are done upon.
Both The Seed of the Sacred Fig and I’m Still Here were part of a two-day mini-marathon to catch up on new releases. Whether it’s because I started with I’m Still Here or because I’ve been reading Say Nothing, about Ireland during the Troubles, or because of what it’s like to live through this moment in time with even a hint of awareness, all four movies that I saw seemed to be about power, in one way or another. Even Companion, a fun B-movie about a sex robot, can be framed as a story about one man’s inability to accept his own impotence. If he’d managed to find meaning in any other aspects of life, none of [gestures vaguely towards a pile of dead people] would have happened.
The last movie in my two-day marathon was Nickel Boys, which also has quite a bit to say about power, about who has it and who doesn’t, and how those who don’t survive. Nickel Boys is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys, which was in turn based on a real and highly-abusive reform school in Florida. The administrator of the school, a white man named Spencer, enters the film congenially enough. He talks to the boys about the school, its system, how they can earn early release with good behavior. He then tells them that misbehavior will not be tolerated. “I’ll see to that personally,” he says while patting a ring of keys on his belt loop.
One of the places he takes the boys for punishment is a shed where he belts them. We only see the shed once, though that’s certainly enough. The whole scene plays out like a horror film, enhanced by director RaMell Ross’s decision to shoot the entire movie in POV. Because of that choice, you spend a lot more time observing the details of the world, rather than focusing on the protagonists. When Elwood enters the room, which is dim and splattered with blood, we see Spencer looking haggard, exhausted, spittle or possibly some blood dripping from his lower lip. He looks, in the moment, far weaker than any of the boys. You can gain power if you want. It isn’t necessarily hard. But what you have to give up in the process is almost certainly not worth it, and, if all four of these films are to be believed, it will destroy you.