Homicide Review

It's impossible for me to see this film as outside the context of Mamet's intense Zionism. You can certainly do a reading of the text in and of itself as at least ambivalent to it—a depiction of Gold as essentially a person without a self who is blown in whichever direction the prevailing culture around him points. You could see the diner scene with the Israeli woman as essentially cult recruitment, picking at the vulnerabilities of a depersonalized man to replace them with a rancid ideology.

But that's so clearly not what Mamet is trying to point to. Even if he's lightly critiquing the paramilitary underbelly of Zionism, he's manifestly invested in the need for a "Jewish homeland" defended by force that makes such an underbelly necessary. Similarly, despite vague gestures at the parallels between Black and Jewish experiences, the film can't bring itself to connect that to a need for solidarity. Gold says he doesn't have a home, that this city isn't his, but that's just not true. It's his, and Randolph's, and the Kleins' and the two Black kids'. And it's his choice to participate exclusively in structures—both the police force and the Zionist paramilitary—that enforce the oppression of that city.


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