Rewatching The Relic (1997) over the years has made me realize how unusually, wonderfully subversive it is and started me thinking about how popular movies can slotted into a taxonomy of the possibilities what can happen when an anthropologist leaves a homespace to enter a world of foreign “local” people.

Although I am not an aid-worker in 1995 in the war-ravaged Balkans, A Perfect Day (2016) is the best cinematic portrayal of my life in the Middle East. I live middle-class comfortable, teaching at a university but the feeling of the characters is very similar: the getting up and spending the day trying to do the right thing in a foreign environment, with no sense if one is ever actually helping anything but doing it anyway. I can relate to that. Tying ropes on the body of a dead, white man so that the local people can later use the ropes to haul the body away and have clean water. That’s an eerily helpful metaphor for teaching Shakespeare, Milton, Wilde and Shaw on the Arabian Peninsula.

 And most people who have lived expat for years, even those not in the military, can relate to the scene in Hurt Locker (2008) in which James (Jeremy Renner) stands stupefied in the cereal aisle and the continual displacement/ disorientation of Billy-Lynn in Billy-Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk (2016) and Krebs in Soldier’s Home (1977), based on a Hemingway short story.