Of the many chills that gave me as I watched The dissident (Filmin), the more subtle ones keep teasing me, those that have to do with the biographical profile of Jamal Khashoggi. It does not fit the idea of the dissident suggested by the title, which perhaps explains the naivety with which he went to the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey where he was killed. Other dissidents appear in the documentary, such as Omar Abdulaziz, who take the precautions of being in hiding and do not come within a kilometer of a Saudi legation.
Bryan Fogel’s film, which is ascribed better to the horror genre than to the political one and makes good the cliché that reality surpasses any fiction, presents Khashoggi as a figure who discovers very late the totalitarian cruelty of the regime. Until his exile in 2017, at age 59, he tempered far more bagpipes than any decent Democrat would ever temper. Even as a persona non grata settled in the United States, his prose did not cease to convey a coarse reformism. The real dissidents don’t trust him at first, they think of him as a mole, and they don’t take him seriously until he puts in five thousand dollars to finance clandestine activities.
No matter how much he signed tribunes in The Washington Post (lukewarm and complacent in the eyes of any Westerner accustomed to brawling), it is difficult to understand that the Saudi regime saw him as such a dangerous enemy as to assassinate and dismember him. Even putting oneself in the shoes of the satrap does not justify an ill will that only admits psychiatric explanations. Mohamed bin Salam (MBS, in the documentary) plays Snow White’s stepmother in this story: when she looked at herself in the mirror of the Washington Post and asked who was the most handsome prince, he could not bear for a certain Kashoggi to answer that it was not him.
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