Notes On The Provision Of An Essay

“These weapons are rusty” Mokhtar says, holding an ancient Elamite sword: “They are just expensive”.

I’m starting near the end because the end is where this ideological mess comes together in a compressed decrescendo. 2004’s The Goddess of the Ziggurat ends with a single scene that I revisit once a year to make sure its not a hallucination. I’ve spent half my life reading analyses of auteur-driven cinema, having personally concluded that the most ideologically interesting films are the more confused ones. Ideology is a lot more interesting when banal, when it has become so normalized it stops to self-identify.

When looking back at Iran’s national and international film scene in the 2000s, there’s no shortage of films to discuss, but not a single one ends like The Goddess of the Ziggurat: with a thirteen year-old girl’s voice-over about self-immolation, playing over real life footage of the world trade center crumbling into dust, the dust itself slowly fading into the ruins of an Elamite Chogha Zanbil Ziggurat in south-western Iran.

The Goddess of the Ziggurat or الهه زیگورات is 2004’s way of unearthing the post 9/11 groupthink of contemporary Iran. It’s a b-movie that has been stripped of all subtext for the sake of, well, text itself. If there is an aim, an aspiration or complication, it is said very explicitly in dialogue. But that’s not why its interesting. We are not inspecting a document after all.

The Goddess of the Ziggurat is a one-of-a-kind amalgam of Iran’s fragmented histories told in stilted narrative over a series of disconnected images: aspirations bleed into people into pride-and-prejudicial love triangles between proposed homelands, pre-existing homelands and hallucinated ones. What the film brings to me isn’t so much the story, but how nostalgia is oftentimes a misguided attempt to rebuild what never was.

before I steer too far off into the distance let’s start with the basics: the film begins in blue-tinted New York city: We see royalty free clips of the streets, over-imposed by a green-screen taxi cab driven by Shahab Hosseini, the unnamed coroner that leads this film. Mind you, Its his second or third acting credit (due to conflicting Iranian databases I’m having trouble being completely sure), and its about a decade before he rose to worldwide fame with his powerful performances in Asghar Farhadi’s films. Here Shahab Hosseini is still the pretty boy plucked from the theatre scene, perfect for the Hero archetype of this story. He drives his cab against the blue-tinted streets of New York, with a voiceover of his young daughter vaguely making us aware that both she and her mother are out and about in town when we are treated to a real montage of footage from the September 11th attacks. It is implied that the coroner’s wife and child both perish in the attacks. What I propose here may be pre-emptive, but it is perhaps an attempt to create a space where the Iranian populace under constant threat by the Bush administration can perhaps find some space to empathize with the national grief of the American public. This is the opening of the film.

This is a sentiment that strikes close to home for me personally. I remember walking into the living room in the dim blue-gray air of dusk, watching a silhouette of my mother staring at the small CRT tv: the famous imagery of the divers was something that struck a nerve, one that inspired profound grief in 6 year old me, only a few days away from turning 7; but one that was very quickly replaced with a constant daily barrage of accusations from the Bush administration. Imagery that had initially sparked a profound sadness and empathy within me was something that was quickly paired with threat of war until I spent nights with eyes open, thinking of war. On my first few days in grade school a schoolmate claimed he had learned magic in a cave on his trip to Mecca, and I paid him 500 toman (10 days stipend) for him to write me a talisman that could help topple George Bush. He wrote me a talisman with a single line:

کرسی رو کرسی

I had to place the talisman where no sound, not even the footsteps of an ant, could pierce, and read the line 10 times. I did that in every silent corner of every space I inhabited for months. It helped tranquilize anxieties of an Iran under threat of invasion.

We put the opening behind and the blue tint of disappears to show the coroner arriving on the busy streets of Tehran. at this point we are less than 6 minutes into the film, having watched an opening credits section on top of the blue-tinted 9/11 scene. considering how this film bookends itself with footage of 9/11, the attacks are mentioned in a brief sentence once and only once.

the story is simple: the coroner can’t stand busy streets or tall buildings, so he asks to be stationed in a small town in South-West Iran. As the coroner his office will now be overlooking the Chogha Zanbil Ziggurat. He soon meets Mokhtar, a smuggler who digs up Elamite artefacts and sells them to the highest bidders abroad. the Coroner’s uncle comes to town to meet the coroner’s new workplace and falls into a complicated tug of war between Mokhtar’s apparent betrayal to the homeland that the coroner’s so keen to protect. Other than these two men, who are quite complex in their needs and obsessions, we are also introduced the fourth character: the 13 year old girl, Iqlima, working as a helper at the mortuary.

The film pulls a clever trick on its audience. There’s a joke I once heard about a horse that calls a job center. the job centre clerk asks the horse a list of questions about skills and qualifications: “can you do A?” “no”, “B, C, D and E?” “No, no, no and no”. “well what can you do?” which makes the horse scream “WELL I’M A HORSE THAT’S BEEN SPEAKING TO YOU FOR TWENTY MINUTES”. The Goddess of the Ziggurat pulls many similar stunts on its audience: presenting oddly problematic scenarios that are slowly normalized through narrative only to be spat back at the viewer for their absurdity. When the coroner arrives in town he asks for a helping hand and that’s where the groundskeeper dismisses the idea of bureaucratic hiring and recommends the 13 year old Iqlima. We see her work as a child labourer for the majority of the film, slowly accepting the very idea until one day she doesn’t show up for work. The coroner is angry, aggressively asking where she is and the groundskeeper simply breaks through the narrative (as the horse does): “She was a 13 year old girl! She was never a legal hire to begin with!”

The film works mainly around tensions of the ancient with modernity and even many times tries to challenge the many antithetical tensions between tradition and progression. Mokhtar and the Coroner’s uncle are both people torn between the ancient and the colonial: Mokhtar’s father worked under the French archeological team that dug up the Ziggurat, and the uncle studied French literature and Ancient history. Mokhtar’s intention to sell Elamite artefacts abroad is further revealed not to be of the lack of respect that the Coroner accuses him of, it is instead of a confessed inflation of value since he says “The foreigners will value them more than us”.

Mokhtar has spent many decades observing how Ancient Persia neglected on a national level, while many scholars and archeologists are highly valuing it abroad. Its important to mention here that this tension is an important thing to discuss, but one that has also been used by many colonizers and orientalists to feel obligated to save such artefacts from their respective governments.

The uncle however is torn. He once had a great love for ancient Persia (in its most nebulous form possible, the same way that many contemporary Iranians do in the diaspora), though he considers the great progressions of humanity to lie abroad. When the Uncle visits the coroner in his office, he looks over at the ziggurat and says “you’ve left the New York of Today, and have come to the New York of 4000 years ago” very strongly alluding that the ziggurat was the Elamites’ world trade center. The Coroner mentions that the ziggurat was a place of holy worship to which the uncle replies “how do you think the priests gathered the capital to build such a ziggurat? it was trade. people trade stocks today, they traded the divine back then”.

The Coroner is the voice of reason, trying to safekeep many things. He projects his impotence to save his family during 9/11 as an impotence to save his culture from ruin, and he tries to redeem himself by trying hard to connect with Iqlima, the working girl. He tries to create a “safe” workspace for her considering she is an adolescent. The Coroner therefore contains many paradoxes within, just like many immigrants do in the diaspora, but when faced with the tangible issues of the “homeland”, proposed utopias slowly begin to fall apart.

The coroner is righteous but that doesn’t work in his favor in the audience’s eyes, at least not in the way I perceive the filmmakers intended. The coroner is constantly undermined for knowing very little about how Iran “Actually works”, about its actualities and implicit societal laws, so he tries so hard to preserve certain aspects of tradition which are anachronistic to contemporary Iranian living.

The issue becomes amplified when the coroner is confronted with aspects of contemporary Iranian “traditions” which are toxic based on his experience abroad. In a short exchange the coroner’s uncle lustfully calls Iqlima the thirteen year-old a “Parichehr” or “Fair one”, and that there are many fair ones to come, implying sexual or romantic interest between the coroner and her. The coroner responds aggressively that such talk can get you imprisoned abroad, but the issue is that his righteousness is so archetypal, and his character so one dimensional and so consistently undermined, that even at such heightened points of tension where his arguments are valid, his words sound naïve. Therefore even at his most logical, his words are ensnared in radical relativities that would’ve easily been avoided if every other one of his observations had not been proven naïve and one dimensional. The Coroner is trapped, both as a character and as an archetype in this radical relativity that is endemic of the diaspora. It also doesn’t help that what the film frames as the two “Good” characters are its most predictable ones.

The strangest aspect of the film is its structure. there are 30 minute spans where the filmmaking is the most simplistic and straightforward, and then suddenly the format of the film is pierced by such experimental approaches to filmmaking rarely seen in such B-movies. The most intriguing fragments are recurring scenes of Iqlima with a variety of effects used to change their sense of time and space. The scene that ends being the most pivotal is reversed footage of Iqlima throwing stones at stray dogs, meaning they now seem to appear out of thin air and right into her hand. You have to consider that at first, this is shown while dialogue of the scenes before and after spill into the imagery of the scene. This specific scene appears to always brim at the very edge of tangible imagery: that at first it is almost a dream and like many other hypothesized and imagined aspects of the film, it slowly materializes into the actuality of the film, which in the language of the film itself is where sound and image connect: the disconnect that is concurrent to the Coroner’s disconnect of his actuality and his idealism. As the film progresses, these dreamscapes begin to bleed into reality, the idealized imagery begin being perceived, at least in part, in diegesis: the coroner witnessing an ancient Elamite religious ceremony and then waking to see lights in the ziggurat for example, or the stones flying in the air, making noises that eventually wake the coroner up. The ideal is slowly being actualized.

As I said in the beginning, I began writing of this film specifically because of its ending. For a film whose idealized outer shell (call it transcendental, call it non-diegetic, call it noumena) hinges around 9/11 and its intermarriage with ancient Elamite ritual, the actual diegetic world has very little to do with 9/11 or ancient Elam. I won’t get into the nitty gritty of the story, but the film ends with a fight between the coroner and Mokhtar. “These weapons are rusty” Mokhtar says, holding an ancient Elamite sword: “They are just expensive”; but these very weapons end up wounding the coroner until he exits an ancient dungeon and with eyes on the Chogha Zanbil Ziggurat the true change takes place:

the ruins of the Ziggurat stands stark against the bright blue sky: they fade into the twin towers, aggressively reflecting the sun: we are treated to real life footage of the towers crumbling, becoming ruins, becoming dust and : out of that dust emerges the Chogha Zanbil Ziggurat. The film ends with another dreamscape: the coroner walking hand in hand with Iqlima, inching towards the sun: the final transcendence: the achievement of the ideal.

I’ve never dared call myself an introspective individual, all I do is point toward what challenges my thinking and dig into what it rouses within my knowledge. On the surface it may often seem like I’m opposing the coroner’s views, or that I’m perhaps falling into the film’s own traps, oscillating between orientalism and occidentalism. I enjoy the film simply because how perfectly it encapsulates the paradoxical thinking of the diasporic mind in all its beauty and all its ugliness. Many times the path forward is a simple bypassing of the colonial, but other times, the path forward is through paving the hurtful societal narratives that hurt us from inside, whether historically defined or not. It is endemic of the diasporic mind to want to situate oneself within the terraformed homeland, paradoxically called “Tradition” right now. What is now tradition was once the greatest plight to move forward, and what is now progress is too often a hearkening to what has been left behind. If the Coroner struggles to remain in its reality it is because the societal borders are ones that when crossed, are impossible to revert to their original states, and when reverted to their “original states” they are nothing but manufactured homelands based on second-hand, third-hand or fourth-hand nostalgia.

The Goddess of the Ziggurat fascinates me because it simultaneously considers the diasporic object as a self-alienating subject, while situating it against self-alienated subjects of its opposite poles: the orientalist and the occidentalist aren’t complementing poles that will create a whole: they are two sides of the same colonial sword that rips and tears wherever it may strike.