Sci Fi Wire: What even Roland Emmerich won't destroy
In Roland Emmerich’s upcoming global demolition derby movie 2012, the director gets to indulge his passion for destroying landmarks on a world scale. In 2012, he takes on landmarks in Rome, Rio de Janeiro and, yes, Washington, but there is one place even he couldn’t bring himself to obliterate. We caught up with Emmerich in Jackson Hole, Wyo., where he told us why he chose various landmarks to lay waste in 2012, and about the one that got away. [...] Emmerich said that he got approached by people who wanted their landmarks destroyed, such as the 101 Tower in Taipei, the world’s tallest building. But Emmerich was thinking of something even more explosive: the Kaaba, the cube-shaped building at the heart of Mecca, the focus of prayers and the Islamic pilgrimage called the Hajj; it is one of Islam’s holiest sites. Really? “Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit,” Emmerich says. “But my co-writer Harald said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie. And he was right. … We have to all … in the Western world … think about this. You can actually … let … Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have … a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. So it’s just something which I kind of didn’t [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out.”
Article continues. The Kaaba is a Muslim site, not (necessarily) an Arab site. Some people will use any word except “Muslim” in describing Muslims out of fear of being killed offending. Do people really get killed for making films perceived as sacreligious by Muslims? Ask Theo Van Gogh. Ask Maurice Williams and ask Officer Mack Cantrell. It’s prudent to avoid doing things that might get you killed. But what is prudent and what is right are not always the same thing. In this case, a few moments of computer animation did not occur out of fear that the filmmakers might be killed by moral and intellectual runts who can’t tell the difference between pretend time and the real world. What must be done to let filmmakers feel free to offend, inform or inspire? Or is dhimmitude what the future holds for us all?
