The Kite Runner

Guilt is one of the few things that truly unites us. Well before we came to acknowledge or deny the existence of any universal moral standard, supreme being, or day of reckoning, each of us can well remember experiencing that unsteady feeling of fear and shame engulfing us as a child when we realized: “I have done something wrong”. Guilt is such a universal feeling that society brands those who no longer feel it as something less than human – sociopaths in psychological parlance. The Kite Runner is a record of how extinguishing guilt can lead humans down the darkest roads, while embracing it can point the path to freedom.

Based on the best-selling novel by Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner charts the turbulent history of a Amir and Hassan, a pair of Afghani boys growing up in the Kabul of the ‘70s. Kite flying is less of a docile past-time and more an aerial battle for the city’s denizens. The best two-boy teams artfully manouvre their craft to cut the lines of their opponents and achieve the acclaim of peer and parent alike. But in other respects, these boys are outcasts. Amir is the son of a wealthy, westernized businessman; Hassan, the child of the family’s devoted servant and a member of a despised minority, the Hazara. Amir steadily becomes ashamed of his devoted friend because of the trouble his ethnicity brings, and even more so as discovers his own cowardice. He begins to fear that he will fulfil his father’s grim prophecy: “A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who won’t stand up for anything.”

Amir’s growing shame leads him to falsely implicate Hassan in a theft that sees his family removed from his home. The scene is as sad as it is familiar. Confronted with our own failings, we are more likely to seek to remove the evidence than address the problem. But denying that we have failed, according to the Apostle John, is the root of all deception – “If we say we have no sin, then we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us…” (1 John 1:8). The moral force and the plot of The Kite Runner hinges on Amir’s preparedness to both confess his betrayal and find forgiveness.

Director Marc Forster will be congratulated for the textured and evocative Kabul – the ‘pearl of central Asia’ – that he has brought to the screen. But scarcely less powerful are the emotions with which he has enthused this tale. One of the truly hateful villains of the piece, however, delivers the film’s most fundamental truth. In preparing to punish his victim he informs him that he is prepared to forgive him, but ‘forgiveness isn’t free’. As an adult, many years later, Amir will have to sacrifice much and risk a terrible price amongst the ashes of his beloved Afghanistan if he is to deal with the guilt he carries for abandoning Hassan. And The Kite Runner is no fairy tale. Even though a payment of sorts is made, it is clear that his offering is incapable of erasing the suffering his betrayal has caused others. As the kits soar, so do the hopes of a better future, but the shadow of the sins of the fathers is likely to cover Amir’s family and country for years to come.

The tag-line of the film would fit well into the mouth of any Christian: “There is a way to be good again.” The encouragement is offered by Amir’s elderly ‘uncle’ in the full knowledge that the way is neither cheap nor easy, but it is a goal that a young man who has come to recognize the full extent of his failings can well appreciate. In the end, Amir is attempting to account for a single act of betrayal. In dieing for our life-long rejection of God, though, Jesus offers a payment that will cover all, providing a ‘goodness’ we could never have dreamed possible. Those who have learned from their guilt will have no trouble acknowledging its value.

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