One need not be an avid reader of Cahiers du Cinema, an influential highbrow magazine founded in 1951 that effectively re-invented the basic tenets of film criticism, for one to know that filmic art is a barometer of popular culture, a subliminal projection of the preoccupations of the national mood, a mood that a movie reflects as much as it is reflected by.

Consider the recently released film, Argo, the odyssey of six American diplomats who managed to seek refuge at the Canadian embassy after their own was stormed by Iranian militants in November, 1979, and 52 of their colleagues were captured and held hostage for 444 days.

The ordeal of the hostages wounded America’s spirit for months after that. But CIA operatives at the time, resorting to a ruse, were able to spirit the other six out of the Canadian embassy, all the way to Tehran airport and, miraculously, out of the country — and do it all in the midst of revolutionary street fervor. Argo, released not quite two weeks ago, is a dramatization of that improbable feat.

So why bring a movie into a political column? Simply this: The fact that viewers watching it in the US, including younger Americans to whom the Iran hostage crisis is clearly not a part of their repertoire of memories, left their theaters moved and shaken. Americans’ embrace of the movie is a measure of their yearning to get one up on terrorists — if only viscerally — who dare assault their embassies abroad. An embassy under siege is a traumatic experience for a nation, all the more so because it is a compound that is seen as part of one’s national territory and its resident diplomats as one’s own fellow citizens. You burn down an embassy and kill the ambassador, you hit at the core of a nation’s pride.

All of which brings us to why the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last month, has ignited such overly heated exchanges in the presidential debate and an ongoing search for answers in media discourse. The dispute boiled over again in the televised debate last Tuesday between President Obama and Mitt Romney, with Romney accusing the president of failing to provide greater security for the diplomatic mission, an accusation that some commentators claim the presidential aspirant is exploiting for his own invidious reasons, namely to appeal for votes.

Invidious or not, it now appears that the Benghazi attack, which Libyan authorities now definitively blame on a Benghazi-based extremist group called Ansar Al-Shariah, was indeed the result of lax security. The compound’s safety, we now learn, was entrusted to a little-known, obscure British security outfit, with offices in Wales, called Blue Mountain Group, which had hired 20 local guards with minimal training to screen visitors and to nightly patrol the consulate with flashlights and batons instead of guns — hardly a shield against the heavily armed militants who stormed the rented villa that was serving the mission.

The end result? J. Christopher Stevens, an idealistic, much admired ambassador, who had the interests of Arabs at heart, was killed along with three of his colleagues. Stevens, who spoke Arabic and, because he understood the value of public diplomacy, often got out of his residence to interact with common Libyan folk. Ironically, the day he was gunned down, on Sept. 11, he was opening a new cultural center that would have provided these very common folk with access to books, magazines and movies from the US.

The question is how far do you go, without resorting to indecency, in blaming the administration for the tragedy? You can tighten security, and then tighten it some more till it becomes oppressively stringent, but that comes at the cost of limiting an ambassador’s ability to interact with the people he is introducing his country to. There will always be terrorists out there with a grudge and a score to settle against the US.

Security was tightened, for example, in Feb. 1979 (months before the Iran hostage crisis) when Adolph Dubs, US ambassador to Afghanistan, was killed in an exchange of fire after a kidnapping attempt. Security for overseas missions became an even more pressing issue after the 1983 bombing of the embassy in Beirut, and yet again after the Al-Qaeda-linked simultaneous bombings against the diplomatic missions in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, that left 200 people dead and 5,000 wounded.

Ambassadors, along with other diplomats, cannot function when surrounded by not just marines and local security forces but also by traffic barriers, blast walls and concertina wire. You cannot do your job and serve your country’s interests as a foreign service officer while secluded in Fortress America. Diplomats need breathing space and elbowroom to meet with locals. You cannot live, say, in a place like the Green Zone, the high security compound in Baghdad, shielded from ordinary Iraqis — as they are from you — and still pretend to know what the devil is happening in the country. You cannot understand a country’s culture without touching base with its zeitgeist.

To blame a president and a secretary of state, as Republicans are brazenly doing these days, for the tragedy in Benghazi — as if President Obama and Secretary Clinton could have anticipated the assault and thus pre-empted it — is hitting below the belt. Diplomats, like soldiers, like adventurers, like tourists in strange locales with equally strange customs, must take risks. And taking risks, as the saying goes, comes with the territory. After what happened in Banghazi, Americans became like Howard Beale in the 1976 movie Network — “mad as hell and [they] can’t take it anymore.” But thank heavens for Argo, which put a smile on many a face after its opening night. I can attest to that after I came out of the Uptown Theatre in my neck of the woods in Washington with a group of friends recently.

Well, sometimes art is not just for the sake of high art, but for the sake of emotional release.