The Film That Taught Me About “Blowback” As a Kid

On the 1998 thriller (starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, Annette Benning, Tony Shalhoub, Assif Mandvi, and many more) that was also an early education for me.

Apr 22, 2025

The first time I ever saw a depiction of Palestinians was also the first time I got introduced to the concept of “blowback”—a term of CIA origin that describes the unintended harm resulting from actions of the national security state.

As a Central Florida teen, I walked into the Regal Cinema at the Oviedo Mall at least 50 times in 1998. One of those times, just before Thanksgiving that year, I stumbled into a surprise favorite—a political-military thriller depicting martial law descending on New York City after a series of terrorist attacks. The Siege blew away.

I had never met a Palestinian before, and the film introduced Palestinians to me as history’s geopolitical pawns. Not wrong. According to a CIA officer played by Annette Benning in the movie, they also “seduce you with their suffering.” The film portrayed Palestinians as not just victims but terrorists resorting to political violence out of desperation—militant opponents of US support for an Israeli state that policed, imprisoned, and tortured them. Terrorism was the only weapon with a chance of making the Americans stop their government’s support for death-dealing in Palestine and the wider Middle East.

Heavy stuff, especially for a ‘90s teen. Comedies like There’s Something About Mary and Rush Hour—both of which I watched repeatedly in theaters that year—dominated my imagination. But there was something about The Siege that grabbed me enough to return to Regal Cinema at least half a dozen times to rewatch this film showing the intersection of ‘90s Brooklyn, political violence, and the terror potential of the US national security state. All of those things, funny enough, have proven to be life-long obsessions.

The Siege has confused politics. Its allusions to Israel’s conduct as a root cause of Palestinian violence are present but subdued.1 The film portrays the FBI as a more saintly organization than the CIA—LOL. And it presents the military as a machine of horrors so bad that it must be quarantined abroad, yet it never questions, for example, the merits of having a massive murder machine in the first place, or whether a spatial fix to US militarism is even possible. The movie is a partial liberal critique of racism and militarism…but only a partial one. And while The Siege ends up predicting America’s fascist response to 9/11 pretty well, it fails to anticipate that bin Laden’s attacks were themselves blowback in response to US bases in Saudi Arabia.

But as a teen, this was all intellectually overwhelming, in the best way. In a way that made me want to pump this shit into my veins. I didn’t know how to think about America’s role in the world, because nothing I’d read or watched up to that point had asked me to. The Siege ended up being my introduction to foreign policy. Wild that I now make a living as a foreign policy expert, and even teach a course that includes a lecture on blowback.

Shortly after watching The Siege, I decided that I was going to join the military. In many ways it was a poverty-draft decision. But I was also very taken with an intense standoff at the end of the film between Denzel Washington (as the Constitution-protecting FBI agent) and Bruce Willis (as a General drunk with too much power). In that moment, everything was at stake. Lots of guns pointed in all directions. I remember asking myself how, if a confrontation like that went down, I might be able to matter within it. And it seemed like there was no way, unless I was one of the pimple-faced teens in the scene shitting himself, holding an M-16. So I told myself I should probably start down that road.

Did The Siege plant a seed of critical consciousness in me, even though the film itself offers only the thinnest of critiques? I don’t know. But did I go down the path I went down because of this movie? Maybe a little bit, crazy as that sounds.

Re-watching this film for the Bang-Bang Podcast was heavy with meaning, reconnecting me with my own past. But if you just want to have a good time watching a politically minded ‘90s action thriller, this is a fun one.