Right at Your Door
When Daily, through Thu 8/30
STRANGE CULTURE sss
Two new independent features–one dramatic, the other documentary–show how badly fear eats away at the national psyche and how easily the government can become as threatening as any terrorist. Right at Your Door, the debut feature from writer-director Chris Gorak, imagines what might happen if terrorists detonated a series of dirty bombs across Los Angeles, releasing a lethal virus and forcing people to duct-tape themselves into their homes. It’s pretty scary stuff, but not nearly as unnerving as Lynn Hershman-Leeson’s Strange Culture, the true story of a mild-mannered conceptual artist whose purchase of harmless bacteria got him fingered by the FBI as a bioterrorist. Watching them side by side, you realize how unprepared we are for a genuine bioterror attack, partly because the feds are so willing to squander time and money prosecuting an innocuous left-wing artist.
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At the classroom level, it certainly seems to have had an effect. Because Kurtz has been advised not to speak publicly about the case, some of the events have been dramatized, with Thomas Jay Ryan playing him, Tilda Swinton as Hope Kurtz, and Peter Coyote as Robert Ferrell. One early scene shows Kurtz in class, where he appears to be liked and admired by his students. But after he’s busted, a colleague asks the same students to sign a petition in Kurtz’s defense. Nearly all of them balk, afraid their names will wind up on an FBI watch list. The colleague tells the class, “The thing that frightens me the most is that I’m not totally shocked that most of you won’t sign this petition.” As anyone in Al Qaeda could tell you, a little terror goes a long way.
