Unreal city: madness, dark humour and the vicissitudes of Beirut

Abstract

This article examines how madness, disorder and clinical challenges are encountered when interacting with post-civil war Beirut. It looks at how, through the rapid rebuilding of the city, itself engendering as much destruction as the civil wars themselves, a form of psychic disarray infuses Lebanese collective memory as chronic and acute timestreams intertwine. In Ahmad Ghossein’s short film White Noise (2017), a hapless rookie security guard, Said, spends his first shift under the Ring bridge, and each encounter with the motley crew of Beirut’s nightlife and improvised securitisation sends him further into confusion, dissociation and eventually psychosis. By focusing on the character of Abu Rabih, an elderly man who jumps from the Ring and repeatedly fails in his suicide attempt, much to his consternation, the article shows how this seemingly incidental figure is in fact highly illustrative of the film’s core message, as he rails against Beirut and Lebanon as being so broken that they do not even permit him to take his own life. This article explores how protagonist and city fuse: the dysfunctional mechanisms of both, as well as the violence that traverses them, produce a form of disturbing unreality resolved only in the imaginary, exorbitant – and funny – destruction of the bridge, thus mapping out a new epistemic field.