Theeb

Theeb is a coming of age film with two key differences from our familiar genre.

The Bedouin boy’s maturing into an adult involves different criteria than those in the West. Essentially, the adulthood this boy assumes is tribal loyalty not our overriding value — personal fulfilment. As well, our culture’s “manhood” often centres upon learning to relate to women. There are no women in this film. Manhood is strictly between, among and for men. 

Theeb has no mother, but also no father, just two authoritative older brothers. When he mischievously follows his brother Hussein into a desert mission he for the first time abandons his childhood security. His adventure is premature because he has not yet learned to shoot, just to try to aim. In the crunch, then, he cannot help Hussein, just hinder his self-defence against the thieves. 

Theeb shows his growing ingenuity when he escapes the bandits, hides in and escapes from the well, and manages to deal with the wounded thief. First Theeb serves his dead brother, protecting him from the vultures by burying him in sand and marking him with stones. This tribal gesture proves his sense of duty and service.

Then he and the outlaw negotiate a relationship, gradually outgrowing distrust. The boy learns stoicism by helping the bandit remove his bullet and cauterize the wound. They share bread. Theeb accepts the outlaw’s story when they pass Arab soldiers. He may even admire the man, as when he learns from him how to navigate by the stars. He may be slipping into a filial relationship. That stops when the bandit tells the Turkish officer Theeb is his son. The pretended connection reminds Theeb of their difference.

The Bedouin boy has no experience with money. He discards the bag of coins he finds on a corpse. Most dramatically, he rejects the Turk’s offer of a coin, even after his “father” has ordered him to accept it. Instead Theeb goes back out to the camel, finds the bandit’s pistol and when he emerges from the army outpost kills him. “He killed my brother,” Theeb explains, at which the Turkish officer lets him go free.  

In the last shot Theeb rides off on the bandit’s camel with the authority and posture of an adult. When he earlier rode behind his brother Theeb looked like a bundle, a babe, just hanging on. When he first tries to ride off the camel refused his control. At the end the camel obeys him, as if sensitive to Theeb’s adult authority — or aware he killed and replaced the camel’s master.

In the West a boy becomes a man by learning self-control, responsibility, forgiveness and an honour based on established moral principles. The honour Theeb recovers in the Turkish office is the overriding value of family honour, which here means tribal vengeance. Tempted to survive as the bandit’s protege he instead acts upon his tribe’s implicit command to avenge his brother. Theeb assumes the risks of returning home across a vast, impersonal and dangerous desert. 

As ‘Theeb’ means ‘wolf,’ our hero is caught in the tension between the lone wolf, which is our modern hero, and the pack, which here would be the tribe. Lines like “the strong eat the weak” emphasize the tribe’s pack and primitive mentality.

The second difference is that this coming of age applies not just to the hero Theeb but to the Bedouins as a people. Their society is presented on the turning point between their traditional life and the modern. As the film is set during WW I, the nomadic Bedouins are themselves a rootless, borderless society ill-adjusted to the modern (aka Adult) world. Their simple lives and ancient ways connote a childlike, undeveloped society. They don’t use money. Their last jobs are guiding pilgrims but the new phenomenon of the railroad is ending that. 

  Trapped between two more developed cultures, the British and the Turkish imperialists, the Bedouin seem even more childlike in their unfamiliarity with those societies’ ambitions and conflicts and with their equipment (like cigarettes, a lighter, a sentimental locket — and the detonator the Brit drives Theeb away from). 

The imperialists shrink the Bedouins. Theeb’s bandit friend seems heroic in his survival, self-healing and swagger. But he shrinks to a junk-dealing beggar when he enters the Turk’s office. The Brit was planning to blow up the Turkish railroad, the Turk pays a few coins for the stolen detonator, and the adept Bedouin is a helpless unaware innocent caught between them. 

When Theeb rides homeward to emblematically crosses the intersection of the camel prints and the railroad tracks, the old natural and the looming technological.

How would the Bedouins come of age, as Theeb does? How is maturing into a higher level of maturity and knowledge different for a class than for a boy?
     The society has no models, no trustworthy family seniors, from whom to learn how to negotiate among the alien and destructive cultures. Unless the unworldly tribes find a way to mature into the modern world they doom their children to the archaic values they’ve inherited — and wasted lives. In this light, the film about the Bedouins hovering on the edge of modernity the way a boy hovers on manhood is as pertinent to the contemporary Middle East as to the early 20th Century. Their world, after all, has since then not changed as much as ours has.
     And yet, as our wars continue to rage there -- and we continue to abet the suppression of the powerless in the Arab world, indeed everywhere but in Israel -- we haven’t matured much either.