Continuum

Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1030-4312 (Print) 1469-3666 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccon20

Between Homeland and Prisoners of War:

remaking terror
Anat Zanger
To cite this article: Anat Zanger (2015) Between Homeland and Prisoners of War: remaking
terror, Continuum, 29:5, 731-742, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2015.1068733
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1068733

Published online: 11 Sep 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 31

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccon20
Download by: [Tel Aviv University]

Date: 12 November 2015, At: 05:27

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2015

Vol. 29, No. 5, 731742, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1068733

Between Homeland and Prisoners of War: remaking terror

Anat Zanger*

Downloaded by [Tel Aviv University] at 05:27 12 November 2015

Film and Television Department, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
The Israeli series Prisoners of War (Hatufim, Keshet, Israel, Gideon Raff, 2009 2011)
and Homeland (Showtime, US 2011 2013; developed by Howard Gordon and Alex
Gansa based on the Israeli series with Gideon Raff as one of the producers) is a special
case of hypertextuality (Genette 1982). Both serial dramas revolve around prisoners of
war who have returned home and their families, intelligence agency operatives and
terror organizations operating behind the scenes. In these serializations of the thriller
genre, narratives of paranoia and conspiracy render invisible terror visible on the
screen. The focalization of the various plots and sub-plots as well as their reception
spaces are different however. Prisoners of War tells the story of three soldierswho are
kidnapped, held captive for 17 years and suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder on
their return home. The series was broadcast at a time when intensive negotiations were
underway for the release of three IDF soldiers who had been kidnapped. Homeland, on
the other hand, places centre stage a female CIA operative (Claire Danes) who suffers
from bipolar disorder. The first season was broadcast in post-9/11 America while
American soldiers were still fighting in Iraq. Both series therefore directly address their
audiences and relate to the public sphere outside the studio. The reception of these texts
incorporates their meaning as reconstructed by their publics. Thus, while both series
involve a ritual of scapegoating as a means of resolving conflict, each reflects and
produces its own repertoire of reality (realemes). Interestingly, a traumatic excess is
inscribed on both male and female bodies as each series rewrites its own societys
myth: the binding of Isaac in the Israeli Prisoners of War and Joan of Arc in the
American Homeland.

Any community that has fallen prey to violence or has been stricken by some overwhelming
catastrophe hurls itself blindly into the search of scapegoats. (Girard [1977] 2005, 84)

Introduction
The bleeding, scarred, beaten up, male body repeatedly appears alongside the scandalous
female body in both the Israeli drama Prisoners of War (Hatufim, Keshet, Israel (2009
2011), first broadcast 2010) and the American Homeland (Showtime, US 2011). The credits
on Homeland include a line informing us that the series is based on the Israeli Prisoners of
War (henceforth POW) and credit is given to Gideon Raff as co-creator on both. Gerard
Genette coined the term hypertextuality to describe the relations between a prior and a
derivative text: Hypertextuality refers to any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call
the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is
grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary (Genette 1997, 5). POW and Homeland
constitute a special case of the remake, however. From a formal, hypertextual point of view,
the original series provided the inspiration for the American remake, but it ran for only two
seasons, 24 episodes in all, while Homeland is, at the time of writing, coming to the end of
its fourth season. Moreover, only a small part of the original series, the hypotext, underwent

*Email: zanger@post.tau.ac.il
q 2015 Taylor & Francis

Downloaded by [Tel Aviv University] at 05:27 12 November 2015

2
732

A. Zanger

cultural adaptation for the American version, while most of the latter is actually a hybrid
development of the original. In Homeland, one plot line is developed at the expense of the
others, thus extrapolating from the diegetic world of the original series.1 At the same time,
through interpolations, it creates a new diegetic world not faithful to the original.
In this essay, I intend to focus on terror, trauma and scapegoats as a trope constructed
in both series. For the purposes of comparison, I will trace their serial structure: on the
narrative web spread over the characters and plot lines. As I hope to show, the most
significant difference occurs in each series focalization. POW follows the story of three
military kidnap victims and their families, their relations with the state and the army, the
security services and the Mossad. Following cultural adaptation, Homeland became an
American story revolving around a female CIA agent and her relationship with a returned
kidnap victim and with the organization for which she works. Nevertheless, both series
share a conspiracy motif, with anxiety provoked by the penetration of the national
homeland body by an unknown foreign one. The penetration takes place via a character put
under pressure: there is a prisoner of war or kidnap victim, but senior operatives in the CIA
or Mossad for their part are forced to make decisions in the name of service to their
country which result in the sacrifice of other people. Tension between loyalty and betrayal
is a central theme in both series in which, as I hope to show, an analogy is made between
what is depicted as defective femininity and treason. The central puzzle in both series is
the threat posed by the changing and unstable identity of the protagonists. The resulting
dialectic between victimhood and redemption serves to produce alternative narratives
which rewrite the past in an attempt to master it.
In order to explore the hypertextual process developing in the space between the two
series I will focus on three aspects: (1) cultural adaptation, (2) terror and violence, and (3)
masculinity in crisis as inscribed on the protagonists bodies. With regard to cultural
adaptation, I will examine the relationship between the inner diegetic world of the series
and the outside world. I use Even-Zohars notion of realemes (1980) and explore its
relevance to the transnational remake. I then examine the place of terror and posttraumatic stress disorder in the two series, with violence claiming human lives and
returning both societies to their mythical origins. Thirdly, I discuss the crisis of national
identity, as inscribed on the male and female body.
Cultural adaptation and realemes
The opening credits sequence of Homeland consists of a collage of photographs and black
and white footage together with a blend of voices with repetitive, melancholic music. There
is an image of a maze and a figure of a child wearing a mask, hands raised in a gesture of
surrender. This is followed by an extreme close up of an eyelid opening, a womans face and
a womans voice saying but I should have known, and Nicholas Brodys (Damian Lewis)
face. Shadowy human figures hurry down a street as ambulance sirens are heard. We see the
faces of Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, each backed by fragmented
sentences, taken from their responses to the 9/11 attacks. Obamas face appears in the top
half of the screen and also, but upside down, in the lower half. This opening sequence was
used throughout the first three seasons and leaves no doubt that terror and trauma in the
series are linked to the events of September 11 so that the media are marked as a conduit for
collective memory.2 The enunciation of the opening sequence is evocative of post-trauma.
In her study of trauma cinema, Janet Walker delineates the characteristics of post-traumatic
discourse as including non-linearity, fragmentation, nonsynchronous sound, repetition,
rapid editing and strange angles . . . an unusual admixture of emotional affect, metonymic

Downloaded by [Tel Aviv University] at 05:27 12 November 2015

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

3
733

symbolism and cinematic flashback (2005, 214). As Tobias Steiner points out, following
Walker, trauma television borrows a fragmented temporal frame and a mise en sce`ne
mimicking traumatic memories from cinema, together with Walkers account of rapid
editing and non-synchronic sound (2012, 34).3
The opening credits sequence in POW is quite different. Each episode opens with
fragments from earlier episodes (auto-memory) followed by the credits appearing on a
concrete block seen from various angles in monochrome shades of grey. At first, shafts of
light fall upon a concrete wall; a door opens allowing a little light into a dark space, to
reveal a table set on a concrete floor (perhaps an interrogation room), a glass door, a clock,
stairs softened with a colourful carpet and a concrete wall. The camera pans down the
stairs to reach a window through which birds fly. The sequence ends with the title of the
series in Hebrew: Hatufim (kidnapped) with the second letter beginning to crumble.
Following Kuntzel (1978), we may identify the sequence preceding the opening credits
of a film with the collage of pictures which appear before a dream and divulge what is to
come. Thus we are made aware from the outset of Homeland that the trauma of the Twin
Towers disaster is CIA agent Carrie Mathisons (Claire Danes) personal trauma.
September 11 is situated as the historical moment in which the rules changed and what had
seemed clear and certain was no longer so. The opening sequence of the Israeli series, on
the other hand, is umbilically linked with the kidnapping of soldiers and their post-trauma
following a period of captivity. The scene of that captivity and their subsequent
interrogation, represented by the concrete slabs and the rough architectural monolith, are
the focus of the frame. The concrete structure could be a shelter or an army outpost, or
alternatively a soldiers tombstone. The credits, accompanied by music, attempt to give
measure to the distance between spaces of military captivity, interrogation and graveyard.
The differences between the Israeli and American series are rooted in the particular
historical moments in which they were produced and their reception space.4 The Israeli
hypotext is set after the second Intifada and the Second Lebanese War. At the time of its
first broadcast, there was widespread public debate in Israel about the legitimacy of
prisoner exchanges in which a small number of Israeli prisoners are released in exchange
for an enormous number of terrorists. On several occasions in the 2000s Israeli soldiers
were abducted while on duty although not on active combat service by organizations
hostile to Israel. As the series broadcast, negotiations were indeed underway for the release
of military personnel who had been abducted. Eldad Regev and Aharon Goldwasser were
reservists abducted on the northern border with Lebanon and Gilad Shalit was abducted by
Hamas in the south while on compulsory service in the regular army. During the broadcast
of the series first season, Regev and Goldwassers bodies were returned, while intensive
negotiations for Gilad Shalits release were ongoing.5
The constant swing between hope and despair, between life and death, is strung out
throughout the series, together with guilt felt by the returnees because of comrades left
behind. The American hypertext, by contrast, depicts the US in the decade following 9/11,
so that the collective memory includes that traumatic event and attempts to understand
how such a disaster could have come about, as well as anxiety about the possibility of its
recurrence. A range of covert forces is exposed over several seasons: dormant cells and
activists opposed to the Administrations policies and to the CIA in America and abroad,
including from within the CIA and the Administration themselves. Thus everyone suspects
everyone and the process of exposing the true face of a character is the engine driving the
plot about conspiracy to commit a terror attack, or attacks which may be about to happen.
CIA director David Estes (David Harewood) suspects Carrie (season 1, episode 4); Carrie
suspects that Brody has been turned and is collaborating with arch terrorist Abu Nazir

4
734

A. Zanger

(David Negahban) (season 2, episode 1) and the CIA (correctly) suspects Carrie of
abetting Brodys flight (season 3). Then in season 4, Americas ambassador to Pakistan in
Islamabad (Laila Robins) suspects her husband is spying on behalf of the pro-Taliban
Pakistani secret service.6
The cultural differences apparent in this process of repetitions call attention to the
influence of the outside world on the diegetic, textual world. As Itamar Even-Zohar
remarks in his discussion of cultural translation, the degree of openness and diversity of
cultural repertoire in a text is influenced by elements in the real world:

Downloaded by [Tel Aviv University] at 05:27 12 November 2015

It is therefore apparent that while items of reality (such as persons and natural phenomena,
voices and furniture, gestures and faces) may be there in the outside world, in terms of
reference to them in a[n] . . . utterance they constitute items of cultural repertory, the
repertory of realia, or in short realemes. (1980, 67)7

In the following, I will highlight some of the extensive morphological and textual changes
made for the American series relative to the Israeli one. These changes may be attributed
to terror, trauma and post-trauma on one hand, and to a crisis of national identity and
patriarchy on the other. Different realemes create two kinds of trauma expressing
themselves as transformations, displacements and condensations.
Terror, trauma and post-trauma
Rabinovitch (2009) observes that while classical warfare was conducted between nation
states and peoples (whether soldiers or civilians), contemporary conflicts include a third
actor who is neither nation state nor civilian. The terror organization is made up of armed
groups, cartels, states-within-states and international apparatuses acting underground.
Narratives of terror thus tend to deal with the dynamic between visibility and invisibility
(Dayan in Chin 2010). In his discussion of terror and trauma, Thomas Elsaesser cites Jacques
Derrida who remarks, in Giovanna Borradoris Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003), that:
the terrorists act is a product of that which it rejects, a mirror image of its target. The heart of
trauma is not the past event but the fear for the future event whose catastrophic nature can only
be guessed. Imagination here is led by the media, without which there would have been no
world-historical event in the first place. The circle is almost unbreakable: terrorism and that
which it is against are locked in a reciprocal game of destruction where causes may no longer
be distinguished from consequences. (2014, 37, emphasis added)

Derridas distinction and the traits he attributes to terror are all inscribed in both POW and
Homeland. Not only the prisoners seem to have turned, but the security apparatus, as well
as terror organizations, employ indistinguishable methods of interrogation including
torture. The media (including the print press, television and surveillance cameras) indeed
plays a vital role in creating the events portrayed in both series. The traumas being
depicted, however, are different. As I will show, the differences between the two series
may be discerned in the textual and semiotic fields of terror and the body according to
three major categories: transformation (addition and omission), displacement and
condensation. This terminology is inspired by Sigmund Freuds discourse of dreamwork applied to this case of traumatic rewriting, in which the new writing aims to tell a
different version of the same story, or a different story in the same form.8
Transformations
Characters, action and themes developed in the original Israeli series undergo significant
transformation in Homeland. From the earliest episodes it becomes evident that the
American series accelerates events and combines the returnee characters into a single

Downloaded by [Tel Aviv University] at 05:27 12 November 2015

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

5
735

major one: Nicholas Brody. The surface structure of the two series (Greimas 1971) is
totally different. Brody returns home after having been held captive for eight years. Which
of the three released prisoners from the Israeli series is Brody? Is it Amiel Ben Horin
(Assie Cohen) who pretends to have been turned, Nimrod Klein (Yoram Toledano) who
tries and fails to return to normal life and to leave the past behind, or perhaps Uri Zach
(Shai Golan) who cowers in Nimrods shadow? And what about Nurit (Mili Avital) who
has married her fiance Uris brother? Or Talia (Yael Abukasis), who waits, Penelope-like,
for her missing-believed-dead husbands return? Where is Yael (Adi Azrani), Amiels
sister? Is Carrie Mathison equivalent to the seductive agent (Sandy Bar) in the Israeli
series? Who is the parallel character to Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin)?
Homeland also begins with the return of a long-term prisoner of war but its narrative
action derives mainly from the second season of the Israeli series, so that in a manner of
speaking Homeland begins where Prisoners of War leaves off. The first season of POW
deals with Nimrod and Uris difficulties acclimatizing on their return, following 17 years
in captivity. They have to face changes in their families, the lack of a profession and
ignorance regarding new technologies (Google and DVDs for example). They have
difficulties sleeping and suffer from anxiety and rage attacks. During the first season, they
are also preoccupied with making contact with the Israeli Arab family of Gemal, one of
their captors in Lebanon, in quest of clues regarding the mystery of what happened to
Amiel. The second season is in effect a reverse shot of the first, focusing on Amiel who has
gone over to the other side.9
Displacement
Homeland begins with Brodys return from captivity in Iraq. He has converted to Islam
and the CIA suspects that he has been recruited by the enemy, and particularly by Abu
Nazir, for their own ends: to wreak vengeance on the American Administration for a drone
attack on a Madras in which Abu Nazirs son was killed.10 When Brody comes home, he
discovers that his wife Jessica (Morena Baccarin) has been having an affair with his best
friend Mike. Like Nimrod and Uri, Brody has difficulty acclimatizing to normal life at
home. At first he prefers to sleep on the floor and finds intimacy with his wife difficult. His
reactions to those around him betray the pressure he is under, although unlike either
Nimrod or Uri his difficulties with everyday activities seem to come to an end when he is
enlisted as a candidate for Congress, or perhaps later when he escapes arrest (season 2,
episode 12) and is finally brought back from exile in Venezuela to be sent on various
missions by the CIA (season 3, episode 2).
Senior CIA agent Carrie Mathison is the main protagonist of the series. When stationed
in Baghdad, she received prior notice that one of the Americans held captive in Iraq had
been turned. She therefore suspects Brody and places him under surveillance without
authorization. She is a talented, fiercely loyal and creative operative who suffers from
bipolar disorder, a genetic disease which was diagnosed soon after September 11. Entire
episodes focus on her relationship with her superiors in the organization: Saul Berenson,
David Estes and from the third season on, Andrew Lockhart (Tracy Letts). She develops a
romantic attachment to Brody, and later to Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend), who has from
their earliest acquaintance been devoted to her. The Carrie character has no parallel in the
Israeli series.
Carrie puts eyes and ears on Brodys house in order to confirm her suspicion that he has
been turned but her interest in him gradually becomes more personal. As two subjects with
an unstable identity, Brody and Carrie have much in common (see Keeble [2001] 2014 ).11

6
736

A. Zanger

Downloaded by [Tel Aviv University] at 05:27 12 November 2015

Brody moves on an axis between East and West, between cooperating with the American
security services and acting against them, between the personas of victim and perpetrator.
Carrie for her part is cast out more than once from her status as senior investigator with
power and inside knowledge, to become a defenceless outsider. Unlike Brody, however, her
swings back and forth result from her bipolar disorder which leads those close to her to
question her decisions and which undermines her professional authority in the eyes of the
viewer as well. Her disease and the medication she takes to control it are kept hidden from
her superiors until they prove an Achilles heel enabling her colleagues to commit her
to hospital.12 At a later stage, her enemies also exploit her disease (season 4, episode 6),
substituting her medication for a dummy filled with a powerful hallucinogenic drug, in order
to disrupt her investigations. Most importantly, Carries bipolar disorder enables the series
creators to use clinical discourse (Doane 1985) in order to repeatedly neutralize her
authority and her moral and intellectual superiority.13

Condensation
Various features from the original Israeli series are condensed in the American one. I have
chosen to focus on the way in which the community is involved in the protagonists diegetic
world via support groups and caring professionals (POW, season 1, episode 4; season 2,
episodes 4 and 5). In the Israeli series, Nimrods wife Talia seeks professional help and
suggests joining a support group. Nimrod keeps insisting that everything is fine, despite the
frequent flashbacks of torture in captivity he suffers from. When Nimrod sees the large
number of people participating in the support group, he refuses to go in. No one has been
through what I went through, he shouts. How long were they held prisoner? Two weeks?
The exposure also puts him off: Its voyeurism, Im not prepared to lay myself open like
that. Talia re-joins the group while Nimrod escapes by the skin of his teeth. One of the
participants who divorced her husband after he returned from captivity tells Talia: I have
three children, I dont need another, adding the prisoners see their nuclear family as a kind
of imprisonment so they do everything they can to break it up. Like the Chorus in a Greek
tragedy, she provides Talia (and the viewers) with commentary on the action and predictions
about what is likely to happen. The psychologist treating Talias daughter, Dr Ostrovsky
(Dalik Volinitz), also tells Talia, depressed after Nimrod has left her, that the family is the
first thing that released prisoners of war disrupt (season 2, episode 5). Additional
information is provided in the second season of POW, when Mossad interrogator Haim
Cohen takes his partner Iris to a lecture on Stockholm syndrome. The lecture lays out the
ways a prisoner might identify with his captors and the conditions required for such a bond
of dependence to develop to a point where the prisoner willingly obeys his captors.
In Homeland, when Carrie is forced to suspend her surveillance of Brodys house, she
keeps track of him the old fashioned way: following his car and arriving together with him
at the door of a church hall where a support group for veterans is being held. Unlike
Nimrod, Brody comes to the meeting of his own accord, after an outburst witnessed by
family and friends. When he encounters Carrie, he follows her out. She tells him that she
attends meetings regularly but hardly ever goes to the same group twice because she
cannot risk exposing her professional identity:
Brody: Can I ask you a question?
Carrie: Sure.
Brody: How come it is so hard to talk with people who werent there about it?
Carrie: I have a better question. How come it is so hard to talk with anyone who wasnt there
about anything?

Downloaded by [Tel Aviv University] at 05:27 12 November 2015

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

7
737

Brody suggests they hold their own private support group meeting; then it starts to rain.
Carrie has managed to create an unmediated bond between them in this encounter. The
Israeli version of the support group meeting constitutes the start of Talias awakening
but also marks the end of her marriage. The support group meeting sets the clinical
psychological coordinates of the series establishing the violence of the flashbacks
experienced by the returnees.
These flashbacks are detached from any context of time or place, bursting the bounds
of the characters consciousness. As Amos Goldberg points out in his introduction to
Dominick LaCapras book Writing History, Writing Trauma, the presence of trauma is
merely a fundamental forgetting lacking positive content. Trauma therefore undermines
narrative structure and is often characterised by a repetition compulsion to fill an empty
space which cannot be filled ([2001] 2014, 15).14 Whether from Nimrod, Uri or Amiels
point of view, the flashbacks include fragments of scenes in which they are forced by their
captors to commit violent acts against one another. On one occasion, we learn that Nimrod
must choose between Uri and Amiel: he chooses Uri. For 12 years subsequently, Nimrod
and Uri are convinced that Amiel is no longer alive but they do not admit the cause to his
sister or to the Mossad: We said we wouldnt talk about it says Nimrod irritably to Uri
(season 1, episode 8).
In Homeland, by contrast, Brody does not actually participate in the support group
meeting in the church hall but his presence there facilitates the beginning of a tangled
alliance and romantic relationship with Carrie which continues until Brodys death at the
end of season 3. In its deep structure, the Israeli version has the returnees trauma and
their attempts to cope with it as a major theme, while the American version shifts its
focus from the returnee to the relation between the pre September 11 world and in its
aftermath, between here (Americans, the West) and there (Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan,
the East).
As Goldberg (2006) notes, the integral forgetting of the event creates a sense of an
empty space. The temporal (or rather a-temporal) structure recognizes only in retrospect
the original event as limited and defined in time and space (whether it be an accident,
incest, a battle, or the sudden death of a loved one). These are examples of the
a-temporality resulting from trauma which LaCapra calls historical trauma ([2001]
2014). The source of the traumas historical power is not only the fact that the experience
constantly recurs after it has been forgotten, but also that the trauma is only experienced
through the forgetting which is an integral part of it in the first place. Homeland focuses on
this traumatic experience from a similarly retroactive perspective. Thus we may explain
the rewriting of the Twin Towers disaster through the terror attack on Langley (season 2,
episode 12). Brody is held responsible for that attack, although the viewer has been
informed of other events which point to a foreign agent (Abu Nazirs group) as
responsible, and that Brody has been framed. The Langley attack constitutes fictive reenactment which projects retroactively on the earlier trauma and thereby provides an
illusion of mastering the pasts.
POW, on the other hand, deals with the ongoing trauma suffered by the returnees and
their families. The inherent forgetting of the traumatic event is pertinent as a perspective
which evades consciousness and perpetuates the nightmare. This is the structural
trauma which LaCapra defines ([2001] 2014, 80). The process begins from the time of
the traumatic event itself. The subsequent undermining of narrative structure by the
trauma, such as the unravelling of linear time, is expressed as flashbacks recurring
throughout the episodes. As I will show, excesses of collective trauma, be it structural or

8
738

A. Zanger

historical, are inscribed on male and female bodies and thereby converted into a
scapegoating ritual in both American and Israeli society.

Downloaded by [Tel Aviv University] at 05:27 12 November 2015

Male and female bodies: singling out scapegoats

LaCapra identifies an excess at the heart of the traumatic experience which defies
representation ([2001] 2014, 91). I wish to linger on this excess as expressed in recurrent
images of the female and male bodies as scapegoats in both series. Flashbacks of a male
body being injured constantly recur in among the various plot lines: terror attacks, family
scenes and security matters. There are sequences featuring torture, shots of a body bent
over, half naked, scarred and bloody, accompanied by cries of pain. Some are raw
memories of the returnees (especially in POW) whose significance later becomes clear and
some are part of the current action. At the same time much energy is devoted, most
particularly in Homeland but also in POW, to sequences in which the female characters
sexuality (whether wife, daughter or CIA agent) is subject to scrutiny. I would argue that
the narrative purpose of these excesses is to mark the social ritual of scapegoating woven
into both texts.
Rene Girard identifies the sacrificial victim with a time of crisis: The scapegoat
emerges . . . when the uniqueness and viability of the community is called into question
([1977] 2005, 298 299). Girard points to mimetic desire (179 180) as being at the root
of every societys attitude to its members as well as to prohibitions, taboos and crises.
Violence derives from the fact that one persons desire imitates someone elses and is
therefore inevitably generated in states of conflict or rivalry of desires. Girard suggests that
rival desires may be resolved, at least temporarily, by finding a potential surrogate victim
(98). He adds that the scapegoat must commit a crime which threatens the very hierarchies
of society. Such victims are chosen from among the underprivileged (children, women,
hostages, prisoners) but at the same time must have a degree of symbolic power in order to
shoulder the crisis adequately. His or her blood has, literally and metaphorically, a
restorative and reconciliatory effect on the community (113).15
Brody expresses his doubts about the American governments policies: how can we
achieve redemption, Brody asks Carrie, when we substitute killing of another person?
(season 3, episode 12). Nevertheless, scapegoats are clearly singled out in both POW
(season 1, episode 7; season 2, episodes 8 and 9) and in Homeland (season 3, episodes
10 12), and carry the mark of ancient scapegoat myths.
In POW, the death or capture of soldiers evokes the Biblical sacrifice of Isaac (the
akeda or binding myth) and its contemporary transformations. This pivotal sacrificial
myth serves as a powerful internal code by which Jewish Israeli society refers to itself.16
The Biblical dictate take your son, your only one, the one you love, Isaac, to Mount
Moriah and bring him as a burnt offering to me (Genesis 22:2) is understood in Israeli
society in two interconnected ways. First, there is the religious context, testing the father
by sacrificing his son and redemption of the son by substitution with an innocent ram.
Second, there is the secular Zionist context in which Zionism is God promising the Jewish
people a homeland in return for the sacrifice of their sons. But in the historical
extrapolation of the story there is no substitution: the modern Isaac is not replaced by a
ram. In POW also, no one replaces the sons as sacrifice. Like the Biblical Isaac, each finds
himself in a twilight zone between life and death, both in captivity and following release,
as he continues to suffer nightmares, mental scars and terminal illness.17 Moreover,
scapegoating characterizes the tasks set for the returned captives and those close to them.
Thus, when the need arises to rescue Amiel who is living undercover in Syria, the military

Downloaded by [Tel Aviv University] at 05:27 12 November 2015

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

9
739

psychologist turns to Nurit. She agrees to make amends for her betrayal of Uri by risking
her own life, travelling to Damascus undercover, rather than being considered a traitor to
the entire country as one of the newspapers describes her following her marriage to Uris
brother.
Similarly, in season 3 of Homeland, Brody undertakes a mission to Iran at the risk of
losing his own life, in order to cleanse his guilt as a traitor in the eyes of his family and of
the American people. Homeland marks Brody as a victim several times over. First, as a
prisoner held captive in Iraq for eight years, but also in the way he is exploited by the
Administration. He is sequentially the hero of the hour, the prime suspect of collaboration
with Abu Nazir and the scapegoat for the Langley attack. He is a pawn deployed by the
CIA, the Administration and their oppositions interests at home and abroad.
When Carrie realizes that Brody is about to be hanged in Iran (season 3, episode 12),
she approaches senior Iranian operative Magid Javadi (Shaun Toub) who is working as a
double agent on Americas behalf, in an attempt to avert the planned execution.
He explains to Carrie that Brody has suffered enough for one life and that his death will
bring redemption from his suffering, as well as helping to lay foundations for a dialogue
between Iran and the US. Thus we see Brody preparing himself for death, taking on the
sacrificial role the moment he undertakes the operation in Iran and sticking to his mission
despite the huge risk to himself. During these episodes and others, the Brody character
evokes a Christ figure. But despite the motifs of betrayal and crucifixion, this allusion is
merely a digression, since the real scapegoat is Carrie.
Male vulnerability in both series is juxtaposed with a weakening of Jacques Lacans
law of the Father (1966), manifesting as a rupture in the patriarchal order. Thus, while
traditionally, national discourse deploys the female figure as a symbol of stability for the
family and the nation, in both series, wives and daughters lacking a husband or father
figure and a single woman CIA agent provoke their communitys anxiety. Nimrods
daughter in POW and Brodys daughter Dana in Homeland seek male attention through
sex. Dana even attempts suicide.18
In both POW and Homeland, national instability and ambivalence is embodied in a
female body. Furthermore, there is implicit disapproval of women who do not wait for
their husbands to return from captivity. Israeli Nurit and American Jessica arrive to meet
their returning men in provocative red dresses; neither has been faithful. As Talia explains
to Nurit, a womans life should come to a standstill while her mans fate is unknown.
In Homeland, though, there is an additional female protagonist whose sexuality is
subject to scrutiny. Carrie is fiercely loyal and talented but her achievements in the CIA are
understood as penetration by her of a male, militaristic-security domain and as such they
provoke fierce hostility. Like Joan of Arc five centuries earlier, her status as a successful
warrior is supported by the establishment as long as she serves the interests of the reigning
authorities. As soon as she is no longer needed, she is cast off, whether to be burned at the
stake or committed to a closed psychiatric ward. Like Joan of Arc, Carrie is subject to an
improvised field trial (season 1) at which no answer she can give will extricate her from the
accusations against her. And like Joan of Arc, her sexuality is the target. Before her
military campaign was approved by the Church, Joan of Arc was examined by church
representatives at Poitiers to determine whether she was virgointacta. In the historical
myth, Joans virginity was crucial to her characterization as witch or saint. Moreover, the
fact that she wore mens clothes as well as the voices she claimed to hear was subjected to
cross-examination. In Homeland, Carrie is not required to submit to an examination of that
sort, but a connection is established between her manly professional skills and intuition
(her voices as it were) and her transgressive sexuality.19 Her colleagues, the grand jury

Downloaded by [Tel Aviv University] at 05:27 12 November 2015

10
740

A. Zanger

investigator, and the media are all curious about, and at times attempt to intervene in, her
sex life, especially her relationship with Nicholas Brody. Quinn even exposes her positive
pregnancy test (season 3, episode 10) without her permission while she is recovering in
hospital from a gunshot wound (he himself had inflicted). Carrie, like Joan of Arc, is
marked throughout the series as a scapegoat trapped between her characterization as a
witch or a saint.
As the case of POW and Homeland shows us, then, rewriting is a cultural act which
both reflects and produces a repertoire of realemes relevant to reality outside the texts.
Textual traces provide the realemes of the series with an excess of scarred, male bodies
and independent, sexual, female bodies. During the process of rewriting, however,
extrapolations and interpolations are deployed in order to say the same thing differently
or say different things in a similar way as Genette puts it.20 While terror and trauma
motivated the processes of writing and rewriting POW and Homeland, different historical
moments of production and different reception spaces generate two kinds of trauma.
Homeland is bound to a specific historical moment September 11 and attempts to
understand it by devising a new, fictive trauma, while POW traces the outcome of waging a
war over and over. Hence, despite the fact that the deep structure of both series revolves
around ritualizing a scapegoat, each designates a scapegoat of its own. The Israeli POW
rewrites the Biblical myth of the sacrifice of Isaac, while the American Homeland rewrites
the Joan of Arc myth. Thus we may say that each series produces a different kind of trauma
but both employ a similar formulation of ritual.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.

See Constantine Verevis on the textual category of film remaking (2006, 10f).
The collage is changed for the fourth season. Carries I should have known, Brody and
Obama have gone; we have Hilary Clinton, John Kerry and the Afghan landscape instead.
See also discussion in Edgerton and Edgerton (2012).
As noted by Verevis, the reception of a series is by two kinds of audience, those who have seen
the original and those who have not (2006, 46 47).
Bloggers responded to events both in the series and in the real world. For a discussion on
bloggers see Dayan (2001).
See also Edgerton and Edgerton (2012).
Even-Zohar refers to expressions of otherness. I argue that this distinction is similarly
applicable to textual representations, whether visual or vocal.
See Freuds dream work mechanism (2004) and also Christian Metzs (1978) discussion of
psychoanalysis and cinema.
Towards the end of the second season, we learn that both Amiel and his handler Gemal are in
fact double agents.
This is information that emerges only at the end of the second series.
See for example, the cross editing in season 3, episode 2, between shots of Carrie as an
inpatient in a mental hospital requiring medication and Brody imprisoned in Venezuela where
he injects himself with the heroin.
Her breakdown and hospitalization are actually part of an operation run by Saul, under the
radar of the CIA directorate, a fact the viewer only becomes party to at a later stage.
Unlike Steiner (2012), I find that monstrous otherness is attached to Carrie as well as to some
of the Moslem characters in the series.
On trauma in Israeli and Palestinian cinema see Gertz and George (2008) and Yosef (2011).
See also Silverman (1992).

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

16.
17.
18.
19.
20.

11
741

See Ofrat (1988), Kerton-Bloom (1989), Weiss (1991) on Binding myth and Zanger (2011) on
Binding myth in Israeli cinema.
One should note that the names of all three Israeli kidnap victims, Uri, Nimrod and Amiel are
linguistically linked to the Binding myth (Akeda) in Israeli culture.
Each of the mothers seeks the help of a male psychologist who stresses the link between the
fathers absence and their daughters behaviour.
On the historiography of Joan of Arc and her portrayal in cinema see Zanger (2006).
Dire la meme chose autrement and dire autre chose semblablement (Genette 1982, 13).

Downloaded by [Tel Aviv University] at 05:27 12 November 2015

Notes on contributor
Anat Zanger is an associate professor at the Department of Film and Television and Chair of the MA
in Film Studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel. Her research areas include: mythology and women,
history and collective memory, repetitions and intertextuality, space and landscape. She is author of
Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise (Amsterdam University Press, 2006) and Place, Memory and
Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), and co-editor of Just Images:
Ethics and the Cinematic (Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2012). Her current project on Israeli
space and cinema is supported by grants from the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF, 2008 2012 and
2013 2017).

References
Borradori, Giovanna, ed. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas
and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chin, Esther. 2010. Bearing Witness Between the Professional and the Personal: An Interview
with Daniel Dayan. Platform: Journal of Media and Communication 2 (1): 34 45.
Dayan, Daniel. 2001. The Peculiar Public of Television. Media, Culture & Society 23 (6):
743 765. doi:10.1177/016344301023006004.
Doane, Mary Ann. 1985. The Clinical Eye: Medical Discourses in the Womens Film of the
1940s. Poetics Today 6 (1 2): 205 227.
Edgerton, Gary R., and Katherine C. Edgerton. 2012. Pathologizing Post-9/11 America in
Homeland: Private Paranoia, Public Psychosis. Critical Studies in Television: The International
Journal of Television Studies 7 (1). In Debate: Remembering 9/11: Terror, Trauma and
Television 10 Years On: 89 92.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 2014. German Cinema Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945.
New York: Routledge.
Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1980. Constraints of Realeme Insertability in Narrative. Poetics Today 1
Special Issue: Narratology I: Poetics of Fiction. doi:10.2307/1772411 (3): 65 74.
Freud, Sigmund. 2004. The Interpretation of Dreams. Sioux Falls SD: NuVision Publications.
Genette, Gerard. 1997 (1982). Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Gertz, Nurith, and Khleifi George. 2008. Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, Memory.
Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
Girard, Rene. [1977] 2005. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Goldberg, Amos. 2006. Introduction. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, edited by
LaCapra Dominick, 7 27. Tel Aviv: Resling.
Greimas, Algirdas J. 1971. Narrative Grammar: Units and Levels. Modern Language Notes 86 (6):
793 806.
Homeland. 2011 2013. Created by Gideon Raff. USA: Showtime.
Keeble, Arin. [2001] 2014. Introduction: A Conflicted Homeland. In The 9/11 Novel: Trauma,
Politics and Identity, 3 16. North Carolina: McFarland.
Kerton-Bloom, Ruth. 1989. How Did I Get Hold of the Wood? The Binding as Case Study in
New Hebrew Poetry (Hebrew). Moznaim 62 (9 10): 9 14.
Kuntzel, Thierry. 1978. The Film Work. Enclitic 2 (1): 38 61.
LaCapra, Dominick. [2001] 2014. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press.
Metz, Christian. 1978. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.

Downloaded by [Tel Aviv University] at 05:27 12 November 2015

12
742

A. Zanger

Ofrat, Gideon. 1988. The Binding of Isaac in Israeli Art. (Hebrew). Ramat Gan: The Museum of
Israeli Art.
Prisoners of War (Hatufim). 2009 2011. Created by Gideon Raff. Israel: Keshet Media Group.
Rabinovitch, Gerard. 2009. Terrorismeet Resistance, la lec ondAlbert Camus. In Un monde en
trans:Transfert de transfertsoudunehypocondrie du contemporain, edited by Gad
Wolkowicz Michel, 56 73. Paris: EDK.
Silverman, Kaja. 1992. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge.
Steiner, Tobias. 2012. A Nations Trauma: Allegories on 9/11 in Contemporary U.S. Television
Drama Narratives and the Case of Homeland. MA diss. University of London.
Verevis, Constantine. 2006. Film Remakes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Walker, Janet. 2005. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Weiss, Hillel. 1991. Remarks for Examination of the Binding of Isaac in Contemporary Hebrew
Literature as Topos, Theme and Motif (Hebrew). In Fathers and Sons: Myth, Theme and
Literary Topos, edited by Zvi H. Levy, 31 52. Jerusalem: Magnes Press and The Hebrew
University.
Yosef, Raz. 2011. The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema. New York:
Routledge.
Zanger, Anat. 2006. Second Variation: Joan. In Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise: From
Carmen to Ripley, 69 118. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Zanger, Anat. 2011. Beaufort and My Father My Lord: Traces of the Binding Myth and the
Mothers Voice. In Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion, edited by Miri Talmon and
Yaron Peleg, 225 238. Austin: University of Texas Press.