The pictures that brought together, at the beginning of the month of Ramadan, the head of the Syrian regime, Bashar al-Assad, with some Syrian actors, suggest that they are from one family, who met at a social event. The distance between him and them is narrow, so that he appears as if he is one of the actors, and if we look at the picture from another angle, the actors can be seen as members of a government team. There is a great intersection that reaches the point of identification, especially with the roles, which is exposed by the state of acting meekness by everyone, and gives it an unlimited amount of deception and hypocrisy.
Everyone sits at a meeting point in the middle of the road, at the same distance, which seems very prominent in the effort of Assad and the artists to represent the moment, until the picture appears ordinary. It seems that they trained for this, and conducted more than one rehearsal, to the point that the picture does not reveal anyone’s superiority. The marks are almost equal, everyone gets the same grade, as if director Najdat Anzour was the one who put the final touches. He made a great effort to make his friend Assad appear inside and outside the scene at the same time.
Al-Assad went to the meeting with the actors because he was no longer in a role. He played all the roles that were assigned to him, and he failed in all of them, and when he no longer found a camera following him, or a stage to stand on, he began searching for pictures of himself that would keep them in circulation, and he chose the Ramadan drama season, because it is the right time. . But it was not the hunger for the image alone that prompted him to request a meeting with the actors, but rather his feeling that the Syrian drama had begun to imitate reality, and had reached a moment in which violence had become an artistic material for spectacle and enjoyment, in sympathy with the events of recent years, in which the violence of the regime appeared. From the basements to above ground, he turned the land of Syria into an open crime scene. What Al-Assad fears is that the drama will go towards minefields and present what reveals the cards of the Al-Assad family’s rule, and before him is the example of the series “Smile, General”, written by screenwriter Samer Radwan, produced by the “Metaphora” Foundation, and shown on the Arab TV channel during the last Ramadan season. The high rate of interaction with the work was an indication of the demand for the other novel. This series could constitute the beginning of dramatic writing, relying on the large reservoir of the Syrian regime’s archives, since the Baath Party came to power. The distinguished screenwriter Radwan can continue working in the same direction, in order to expand the path of this form of dramatic work, which breaks with the prevailing pattern based on the commercialization of violence.
The picture of Assad with the drama actors indicates that he wants to continue promoting the series, which Syrians lived through before the revolution, because his absence from the screen heralds that Assad and the actors will enter a period of unemployment, and this paves the way in the simplest case for new screenwriters, writing different scenarios, and crews of actors other than those who They burned out, and are no longer able to attract the attention of the public from outside the regime’s circle. Drama cannot promote a political solution in Syria, while it is far from reach. It cannot talk about peace, while the fighting continues on the axes of contact between the spheres of influence.
The drama, which is being produced according to the regime’s line, says that the tragedy that the Syrians experienced in two stages has not ended. The first was before the revolution that took place in March 2011, and the second began on that date and is still continuing. The television series do not suggest that the regime has emptied all of its violence, as there is an inexhaustible reservoir, and this feeling would not have been reflected in the series, if the regime’s behavior had changed slightly, such as if it had taken the initiative to allow the return of the displaced, or revealed the fate of tens of thousands of forcibly disappeared people. The bottom line is direct actual steps to break with the bloody period. Therefore, drama seems faithful to reality, drawing from it and drawing inspiration from it even in tools and mechanisms, and thus relieved of the trouble of searching for an imagined reality, or digging into the Ottoman and French history for topics.
Some actors could not leave the system, as if they were clinging to their roles there. They fear that he will strip them of their ranks. Although they do not work for him, but rather practice acting, and receive wages from production companies in the private sector, they fear that they will be without roles, because the producers take into account the sensitivities and calculations of the regime, bringing those close to it closer to it, and keeping those far away from it. In this way, they guarantee themselves to work without headaches, and within this equation they do not produce series that approach areas prohibited by the regime. Moreover, they do not have a critical spirit when they deal with social issues. Rather, they approach even history from a narrow perspective, and do not read it with a wide eye. It goes according to the lines drawn by the system, and therefore the actor finds himself playing a role according to the production company’s specifications.
