A Hologram for the King

This might have been titled Rebirth of a Salesman. The new Willy Low-man is Alan Clay, i.e. the quintessential man. Tom Hanks as the current representative American doesn’t just have feet of clay; he is entirely vulnerable and crumbling. 

Alan was reduced back to sales after his management ruined his old bike-making company. When he shifted his manufacturing to cheaper China they stole his models and began making their own bikes — but better and cheaper — and stole the industry. 

He still flashes back to having to announce his US factory’s closure, for which his father has still not forgiven him. A camping story recalls the father’s lesson in self-reliance. By outsourcing its manufacturing Alan/America lost that essential value. No longer independent the once-powerful Alan/America suffers indignities and frustrations by having to go cap in hand to try to salvage a future by submission to an alien and antipathetic culture, i.e. Saudi Arabia.

The failed businessman also failed domestically, of course. His wife divorced him (for “not seeing the big picture”). He still has a tenuous relationship with his 20ish daughter — but he feels guilty for not being able to support her, to pay for her college, to provide for her future.

As befits a psychological analysis of America, the opening scene is Alan’s dream. While he glibly offers a hearty pitch (product indeterminate so irrelevant), the key elements of his life explode in puffs of pink smoke behind him: his house, his wife, etc. He’s flying to the Saudis where his new company depends on his selling the king on their new IT program for their plan to urbanize a desert. 

The ensuing comedy derives from the fumblings of a stranger in a strange land. He can’t adjust to the culture any more than to the time-lag. So he sleeps through his appointment times, only to find it doesn’t matter. He was stood up anyway. He stumbles into meeting his elusive contact only to be dumped by him again. The guy lets him drive his flashy Audi but only because the American is no longer in the global driver’s seat. The privilege is a taunt.

Obviously the key metaphor is the hologram of the title. Alan finally manages to show the king his company’s impressive holography, where a “real” character interacts with a virtual figure. He creates the continuum between reality and illusion, substance and image, power and pretence. Despite the perfect presentation the Chinese beat Alan out again.

Though holography is the new, ultimate force of image-making, America has always defined itself by fabricated images. That’s how Arthur Miller characterized his Loman, who taught his son the false importance of being “well-liked” and soared into failure with his suitcase and a smile. Falling for the image is the real failure to see the big picture.

Here the past image, the lost glory, is the Schwann bike, Alan’s old company. The bike evokes America’s lost station in the world, its mythic past of innocence, optimism, when it was a world power with clean hands and an unlimited future. Of course that was as illusory as the hologram. 

The Danish Embassy party is an orgiastic release from the Saudi restrictions. Yet Alan is as out of his element there as in the Saudi culture. Its noise, fever and license seem like another dream. He declines the woman’s offer of sex out of an uncertain mix of his purity and impotence. Similarly, when he declines to shoot the wolf the scene evokes the hunting scene in an earlier classic of American Innocent Abroad, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter.  

Alan tries to negotiate the mysteries of the foreign culture. He’s thrown by his driver’s command of US pop music. He misses the banned booze — and suffers even more when he gets some. He’s especially at sea with the differences in gender issues. In a climactic paradox the woman doctor swims topless with him — in order to divert suspicion! From behind, a topless woman and a man look the same, you see. The underwater frolic seems another dream, the positive replacement of the first. 

In a side episode Alan has to deal with a growth on his back. It’s an image of a burden, a threat that proves benign. In a drunken initiative he tries to cut it out himself, another failed self-reliance. He finally has it removed by his woman doctor, who returns to lance his malignant love-life as well. 

If the romantic happy ending seems a bit forced and implausible — that’s because it is. This cross-cultural relationship is our anodyne, our relief from reality, another version of the false image of domestic bliss Alan will be offering his clients when he sells them the new apartments yet to be built on the Saudi sands.  

In that respect the entire film is a carefully selected image of Saudi Arabia. It’s defined by its massive population, its alien dress and manners, its fervid and ubiquitous religiosity, and its striking power. When someone decides to help Alan all his problems are immediately addressed. The huge and opulent buildings flash the new Muslim power, which dwarfs the American and leaves him helplessly dependent. 

The film frames out any suggestion of the Saudis’ support of terrorism, especially 9/11, and its current political play as a counterforce to the even more disruptive Iran. But that’s fine. The connotations remain, especially as we see how the Saudi businessman plays his American partner. Spelling out that political reality would probably have been too big a boil for the back of this satiric and pointed comedy to bear. 
     In any case, the world the Saudis are developing there is as false an image as the idealized America fabricated for Alan's opening dream commercial. Like any illusion, reality will eventually blow it up too.