“Arlington Road,” the 1999 thriller starring Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins, defies easy definitions of good cinema. It effectively escalates the suspense throughout its two hour running time, creating an inescapable mood of paranoia and panic. The performances from its two lead actors are brilliant, and much of its dialogue is unforgettable. Despite its attributes, it has a storyline with craters of illogic. While audiences should suspend disbelief whenever watching a film, “Arlington Road” turns on so many one-in-a-million coincidences that it almost becomes an exercise in absurdity—characters bump into each other in shopping mall parking garages at the exact moment that one is doing something suspicious, other characters overhear conversations in public places, because they happen to be shopping at the same store at the same time, villains turn their heads at precisely the right moment to catch people in compromising positions across the street from their headquarters. The flaws are significant, but “Arlington Road” is entertaining. It was also prophetic.
During the 1990s, many social critics and a few officials in the Democratic Party became increasingly concerned about terrorist attacks from white supremacists, anti-government extremists, and militias. The presidency of Bill Clinton, particularly his passage of two significant gun control measures, acted as a hallucinogenic on the collective mind of the white right. Militias grew by the thousands, violent rhetoric began to enter mainstream circles of Republican commentary, and Timothy McVeigh, a white supremacist and Second Amendment absolutist, committed the deadliest homegrown act of terrorism in US history—the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring 680. The reasons that McVeigh provided to explain his act of mass murder closely resemble contemporary talking points on Fox News: a “new world order” was set to impose “socialism” on the United States, gun control was a Trojan Horse to sneak tyranny into American life, and the growing racial diversity of the population was the result of a conspiracy to disenfranchise white patriots.
“Arlington Road” was an attempt from screenwriter Ehren Kruger and director Mark Pellington to give audiences action and suspense, but also contribute to the developing conversation about domestic terrorism and the insurgent, reactionary right wing of US politics. The conversation came to an abrupt end on September 11th, 2001. Foreign nationals, most from Saudi Arabia, who were Islamic extremists, orchestrated and executed the worst terrorist attack in US history—an unspeakable catastrophe—and the political and cultural focus on terrorism shifted to the Middle East. Political debate escalated in ways both reasonable (striking Al-Qaeda—the group responsible, reducing barriers between FBI and CIA communication) and horrific (pre-emptive war in Iraq, use of torture to interrogate suspects). Fears of white rage and domestic terrorism faded far into the background.
Twenty-one years after the 9/11 attacks, the United States is, again, confronting the violent radicals within its own majority population. White supremacist hate crimes increase on an annual basis, ranging from targeted assaults to mass shootings against Jews, Latinos, LGBTQ citizens, and Blacks, and far right hate groups, such as the Proud Boys, threaten elected officials, school board meetings, and even librarians. The insurrection of January 6th, 2021 demonstrated exactly how much the reactionary right despises democracy, and is prepared to use violence to achieve its political objectives. It is a dangerous moment in American history, and also an opportunity, albeit an unfortunate one, to reevaluate “Arlington Road.”
The film tells the story of widower and single dad, Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges), a history professor at George Washington University in Washington, DC. His late wife, an FBI agent, died in a routine visit turned fatal raid against a family with a white separatist patriarch who was suspected of domestic terrorism. The “Arlington Road” raid bears strong resemblance to the FBI’s action against Randy Weaver, a racist living in rural Idaho who illegally modified firearms for neo-Nazi leaders. When the FBI attempted to arrest Weaver, the mission transformed into a nightmare. Weaver’s wife and son were killed, and “Remember Ruby Ridge” (Ruby Ridge was the name of Weaver’s compound) became a rallying cry for the far right. The likeliest cause of the Ruby Ridge crossfire was Weaver family paranoia and FBI incompetence, but to the militia movement and many right wing pundits, it was evidence of a “New World Order” plot involving the American government’s war against civil liberties, Christianity, and white identity.
When “Arlington Road” introduces viewers to Faraday, he is struggling to overcome his grief, doing the best he can to raise his 9-year-old son in the Virginia suburbs, and becoming increasingly obsessed with terrorism. He teaches a class on domestic terrorist movements, and lectures about how the media has a tendency to myopically concentrate on a “single name” lone wolf perpetrator of an attack, rather than consider the possibility of an organization behind the “lone wolf,” or examine the anti-government ideology that inspired him.
Early in the film, Faraday meets his neighbor for the first time, Oliver Lang (Tim Robbins), an architect and family man from Kansas. Faraday and Lang develop a friendship, but Faraday soon becomes suspicious. He catches Lang in a few small lies, and finds his right wing rhetoric, which borders on justification of anti-government violence, deeply disturbing. Despite excoriations from his girlfriend, who believes his obsession with terrorism is unhealthy and that he has no right to violate his new friend’s privacy, Faraday begins to investigate Lang. He discovers that Lang changed his name to conceal that when he was 16-years-old, he attempted to blow up a post office in his hometown, believing the federal government was responsible for the suicide of his father—a farmer who couldn’t earn a living after a governmental agency claimed some of his most fertile land. Lang claims that he regrets his attempt at terrorism, and that he reformed after spending time in a juvenile prison.
Faraday begrudgingly accepts his explanation, but then his girlfriend witnesses Lang exchanging metal boxes in a parking lot. She tries to inform Faraday, but is discovered in one of the multiple highly unlikely coincidences. The terrorists murder her, and Faraday’s suspicions eventually return. His worst fears are realized when Lang and his co-conspirators kidnap Faraday’s son. They tell him that they will murder his son if he informs the police or the FBI about their intentions—the details of which he doesn’t even know.
In a series of high energy, genuinely exciting, but often convoluted plot twists, Faraday learns that Lang is going to bomb the FBI headquarters in DC. Powered by characteristically effective and charismatic acting from Bridges, the movie races to its conclusion. (Spoiler alert) Afraid to alert the police, because of the danger to his son’s life, Faraday takes matters into his own hands, but drives the bomb, which Lang’s crew has planted in the trunk of his rental car without his knowledge, into the FBI parking garage. Lang detonates the bomb from a rooftop across town, watches the smoke rise and building crater, and walks away with a smirk on his face.
A DC news station perpetuates exactly the false reporting that Faraday had warned against—naming him the lone wolf killer whose motivation was to avenge the death of his wife. Lang and his family put a “For Sale” sign in their front yard, ready to move to another town and seemingly onto their next plan of attack.
“Arlington Road” suffers under the weight of storytelling errors, but Bridges and Robbins make the characters believable and powerful. The ideas of the film transcend its flawed execution. Over twenty years after its release, Kruger and Pellington appear prescient.
Since 9/11, right wing organizations are responsible for the greatest amount American deaths from terrorism and targeted violence. Members of its various offshoots have faced criminal convictions for attempting to abduct and assassinate the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, they have assaulted high numbers of gay, trans, Jewish, and Latino Americans, and they recently attempted to destroy the power grid of Baltimore. It is no longer only civil rights organizations, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League that warn against the severity of the white supremacist/far right threat, but the FBI, the United States House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack, and high ranking officials in the Pentagon.
Even a few of “Arlington Road’s” histrionic moments have aged well. At one point, Lang taunts Faraday, telling him, “There are millions of us ready to take up arms.” Robert Pape, an academic specialist on terrorism at the University of Chicago, has found that 21 million Americans believe violence is necessary to achieve their political aspirations.
In the opening lecture of his course on terrorism, Michael Faraday—something of a fictional Robert Pape—presents the following questions to his students:
“Terrorist acts, violent political theater, these have been part of this country since its inception, but why? What has led so many men to bloodshed in the name of their political beliefs? Why in this era of national prosperity has the anti-government movement been at its peak? And what is that going to mean when the prosperity fades? Fewer and fewer of us are voting. More and more of us are joining the ranks of a resistance. How long are we going to call these numbers insignificant? What do they have to teach us?”
Aside from his observation about voter participation—turnout has increased since the release of “Arlington Road”—Faraday’s questions are more relevant and salient now than ever. The classroom scene is, unintentionally or not, also an accurate forecast of America’s future. Most of the students are women, and whites appear in the minority. Asian, Latino, and Black students watch as Faraday cautions against the menace of white hate. As the American public becomes more diverse, with Black mayors of the country’s four largest cities, a Black and Asian woman as vice president, and Latinos becoming an increasingly influential voting bloc, many whites, from the suburban fathers who tune into Tucker Carlson to the militia extremists running Army drills in the wilderness, are adopting beliefs that were once the sole province of neo-Nazis, namely the “great replacement theory” that posits the existence of a globalist/Jewish conspiracy to “replace” the white populace with people of color who are, secretly or unknowingly, agents of destruction against “traditional” American values.
Faraday’s inquiry slices through the armor over American discourse, exposing that at the heart of the American experience, for all its beauty, liberty, and laudable progress, there is violence, bigotry, and paranoia that often manifests in disaster. His ending—death followed by reputational ruin—is a clear warning. If we settle for easy answers, the body count will rise and the division will grow more cavernous.
“Arlington Road” is currently in development for a television series to air on Paramount. Without Bridges and Robbins, it is unlikely to have the same emotional force, but in a political climate where it is no longer verboten or even controversial to discuss the dangers of white rage, it will land with greater resonance.
Perhaps, the most courageous and commendable act of “Arlington Road” was its challenge to the notion that political violence is un-American, and that those who perpetrate it, are, in the words of Faraday, “nothing like us.” Before the election of Donald Trump and before the insurrection of January 6th, “Arlington Road” calculated the costs of such a narrow and dangerous myth.
