Alan Ball's Americana

‘Towelhead’ is perhaps a bit of a misconceiving title for the film. It not only explores the racial tensions in America in the wake of the Iraq war but also goes to the centre of what it is to be displaced. The protagonist, Jasira, is in an almost constant state of dispossession in a country which claims its kitsch values of individual rights and loving your neighbour as yourself. This seems to be an underlying theme in Alan Ball’s work. The film is an expression of political frustration with an intense focus on a 13 year old’s sexual awakening. This culminates with the influences of the fantasy space of her neighbour’s closet full of Playboy magazines.

Jasira Bishil first experiences rejection from her faux-feminist and puerile mother. She is exiled to live with her Lebanese father in a cardboard box suburban house. It is here that Jasira has to confront her father’s warped form of nationalism and his phobia for her own abject fluids. Her racial difference is eroticized by her dysfunctional and predatory neighbour who uses sex as a catharsis from his depressive world. Ball doesn’t hesitate to take a lens to the inhumane eroticization of Jasira’s body. It is portrayed directly in episodes of insidious abuse. Jasira does find a boyfriend at school who shares another side of her sexuality. Here the commodification of her body and her abuse is symbolically broken. She meets another set of liberal neighbours who come to give her the space to regain her identity.

Alan Ball does not hold back with this film’s intensity. This is its strength regardless of the fact that it may be its downfall in a wider audience’s eye.