From its opening moments, director Alex Gibney’s “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie” goes straight for the jugular, plunging viewers into the throes of the brutal attack its titular subject experienced in 2022.
As the film recalls, 24-year-old assailant, Hadi Matar, rushed the stage where author Salman Rushdie was giving a talk and stabbed him 15 times. What follows is a film about the road to spiritual, physical and mental healing after such a devastating attack, and what it looks like not to be defined by the most traumatic thing that’s happened to you. It’s a film that stands as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and our ability to rebuild even after experiencing the worst.
Through Rushdie’s path, we see a way to put our pain in its proper place, acknowledging that it does not have to be the sole way in which we’re defined by the world.
For those unaware of Rushdie’s story and work, Gibney delivers the information efficiently and thoroughly, understanding that telling people the events of what transpires is dramatic in and of itself and doesn’t need any editorial curation.
Rushdie’s first clear thought post-attack was the need to record his road to healing. His wife, artist and writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths, is quick to support, picking up a handheld camera and letting it bear witness to his body and its wounds. As Rushdie processes what happens in real time, never losing an ounce of his inquisitive or defiant spirit, we learn the history of how he became such an intellectual provocateur.
Gibney tells a sprawling story of Rushdie’s life, tracing how he used stories to escape the abuse his father inflicted upon him and his sisters, to when he wrote the incendiary 1988 novel, “Satanic Verses.” The book, deemed to be blasphemous to Allah by Muslims worldwide, turned Rushdie into a walking target once the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered that he be killed for his transgression. As a result, Rushdie had a security detail and, over the years, effectively became a walking hostage.
Witnessing the global animosity is chilling, as we’re treated to footage of religious fundamentalists of every age casually sharing how they’d murder Rushdie if they could. There’s a phrase that goes “The hardest people will wake up are those who pretend to be asleep,” and Rushdie’s work is always trying to evoke people to wake up from their self-induced slumber, whether that means questioning religious fundamentalism or advocating for free speech. This naturally puts him in contention with extremists and those who would want to see him silenced.
This is not the first time artists and writers like Rushdie have had to reinvent themselves, and Gibney edits these trials and tribulations as if to show that for Rushdie, what happened to him, while uniquely devastating, is not something that he is ill-equipped to bounce back from.
Of interesting note is the way Gibney and Rushdie interweave the films that sustained Rushdie while he was in recovery from his wounds, showing how, in our darkest moments, we can be sustained by art that reflects our experiences to us. There’s an obvious parallel to “The Seventh Seal,” with Rushdie reflecting on how long he can avoid death, but there’s also an interesting montage of films that Rushdie talks about that prominently feature knives, from “Psycho” to “West Side Story,” and how his altercation has shifted his view of those scenes.
In another sequence, Gibney reimagines the interrogation scene from “High and Low,” this time envisioning what he might say in a conversation with Matar. It’s one of the few moments that struck a false note for me; cinema is powerful as an act of prototyping and imagination, but Matar’s own voice and words are silenced, with Rushdie speculating and speaking for him.
“You know what freedom is? No fear.” Benicio del Toro’s Sensei utters these iconic words in “One Battle After Another,” but they serve as a thesis statement of this documentary as well. While there’s the loss of physical capacities that Rushdie mourns (the camera, to its credit, bravely documents the ways Rushdie has become a stranger in his own body by not being afraid to linger on the staples in his abdomen or the ways his eye has had to be sewn shut).
For Rushdie, the fear is two-fold: that he will never be able to escape the shadow of his pain and that he’ll be wounded into silence, giving his attacker(s) a victory by refusing to speak. Yet as we see, Rushdie begins to step out in public again and speak out against the regimes and forces that seek to silence free speech.
Even at the film’s post Q&A at Sundance, Rushdie shared, “For the authoritarian, culture is the enemy.” The great trick of empire, the ones that will murder the likes of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in broad daylight, is to choke the imagination, to make people think they’re helpless to change the machinations of subjugation.
For Rushdie, there’s a line between the destabilizing power of grief and the clarifying power of lament. We need art like this documentary that reminds us that resistance is not just possible, but necessary. It’s a gift that Rushdie was willing to so nakedly share his pain and his journey of resurrection with us, and Gibney’s film offers a way forward in these times when it feels like all we can do is crumble.
