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The Return: Life After ISIS
Oct. 14th, 2021 08:13 amThe Return: Life after ISIS is a documentary about a number of women who ran away from various western countries to join the Islamic State. Living in a refugee camp in the aftermath of the Islamic State's defeat, they have formed (or are forced to form, the mechanics are not quite clear) a support group to deradicalize themselves and ponder what led to their radicalization in the first place.
From a dramatic standpoint, this documentary is gold. It's such an inherently dramatic situation! You have all these women who get swept up in a Movement, and think they are doing something great and glorious (and incidentally giving themselves purpose and direction) by joining up, and then they actually get to the war zone and realize, "Oh no. I have made a horrible mistake." But by then, they're trapped.
Or at least, this is how they present their stories to the filmmaker. At the end of the day any documentary has an agenda and any documentary subject does too, but it's particularly clear here: these women want to go home, and the documentary is presenting that case in the best possible light, which means playing up the "brainwashed by Twitter!" angle and not "Is it really brainwashing if you kept choosing of your own free will to go back to the ISIS propaganda videos? There are so many cat videos you could have watched instead!"
So on the one hand it does succeed in presenting these women as sympathetic. Haven't we all had times when we thrashed around for purpose and direction in our lives? Who among us has not, at some point, made a horrible mistake? Isn't it just luck really that our horrible mistakes were things like "grad school" or "dating that chump" instead of "joining ISIS"?
On the other hand, it's pushing the sympathetic angle hard enough that it begins to undermine itself: clearly we're not getting the whole story here. You don't just trip and fall into an ISIS propaganda clickhole if you're not already kind of into the idea of beheading your opponents.
From a dramatic standpoint, this documentary is gold. It's such an inherently dramatic situation! You have all these women who get swept up in a Movement, and think they are doing something great and glorious (and incidentally giving themselves purpose and direction) by joining up, and then they actually get to the war zone and realize, "Oh no. I have made a horrible mistake." But by then, they're trapped.
Or at least, this is how they present their stories to the filmmaker. At the end of the day any documentary has an agenda and any documentary subject does too, but it's particularly clear here: these women want to go home, and the documentary is presenting that case in the best possible light, which means playing up the "brainwashed by Twitter!" angle and not "Is it really brainwashing if you kept choosing of your own free will to go back to the ISIS propaganda videos? There are so many cat videos you could have watched instead!"
So on the one hand it does succeed in presenting these women as sympathetic. Haven't we all had times when we thrashed around for purpose and direction in our lives? Who among us has not, at some point, made a horrible mistake? Isn't it just luck really that our horrible mistakes were things like "grad school" or "dating that chump" instead of "joining ISIS"?
On the other hand, it's pushing the sympathetic angle hard enough that it begins to undermine itself: clearly we're not getting the whole story here. You don't just trip and fall into an ISIS propaganda clickhole if you're not already kind of into the idea of beheading your opponents.
