#michael wilson

The casting of Alec Guinness as Faisal sucks because, on paper, Faisal embodies the goal of representation: to have minority characters who are humans. Characters who are allowed to have imperfections and flaws without that making them the symbol of everything evil; nor characters who are flat saints that symbolize everything good—the reductive, “simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong,” as Orwell said. Faisal is a dignified, eloquent, proud person fighting a noble cause, yet is also fighting for his own interest: he wants to be king. In a movie obsessed with shadows and illusions he too wears a mask, being much more observant and cutting than the unassuming affectation he often dons. He is in love with—and slightly clouded by—visions of past glories that a part of him knows can’t rise again if he gets the English involved. He goes against his instincts, though, because he needs the English’s weapons, but also because believes he can outwit them. Despite this sense of idealism, he is a realist: a symbol of the cold, bureaucratic cruelty of politicians, the “vices of old men.” As we see during his interview with Bentley, he is guided by his own strong set of ethics that doesn’t bend to Western ideas of morality. Yet, whenever the problematic aspects of this movie are discussed, the first thing anybody mentions—and rightfully so—is Alec Guinness in brownface. It undermines the whole character. It sucks.