On Foxtrot

“Did you know the foxtrot is actually a dance? The foxtrot steps are really easy. Watch this. Step forward, forward, to the side and stop. Back, back, to the side and stop.”

Just after delivering this line the Foxtrot outpost guard dances one of the most hauntingly beautiful improvisations of the film’s many homages to the genre. The vast desert surrounds a rickety ice cream truck nearby. Its faded paint still displays the gleaming smile of a sixties era advertisement. The guard’s gun whirls the part of his partner as the camel plods into the distance. The film is worth watching just for this scene at around minute thirty-seven. Towards the end, the father of another guard reiterates the theme: “There’s a dance that goes like this… No matter where you go you always end up at the same point…” He begins to shuffle around a square of his kitchen before Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror) plays over the film’s denouement. Foxtrot provides witty meditations on the pointlessness of suffering and violence. Although not cited, it echoes the Hebrew bible’s Job. That book also dances through a series of discourses to end where it began, more or less. There’s a metaphor toward the end where “terror dances” before Leviathan (the Hebrew word for dance here is דּוּץ/duwts 41.22). It’s hard not to risk an anachronism and picture Job shuffling through the foxtrot. For a recent bestselling philosophical account of Israeli politics today there is Micah Goodman’s Catch-57. It was recently reviewed at the Tablet here.