Why Hollywood portrays Muslims as
villains By Chan Akya
An article about the new film 300
and its neo-conservative pretensions (Battling evil with abs of
steel, March 23) in Asia Times Online
distracted me from usual pursuits and, indeed, the
article I was writing at the time. While I have
nothing to add to Eli Clifton's article, nor do I
intend to partake the pleasure of watching the
film in question, the current brouhaha does remind
us of the rational economic thinking that
underpins Hollywood as an industry. For all its
liberal persuasions, the Hollywood film model is
firmly rooted in the "if you are not with us, you
are against us"
line
of neo-conservative thinking.
Cinema is a
two-dimensional art form, lending itself more to
simplistic caricatures than either literature or
its poor cousin theater ever could. While initial
audiences were impressed with screen size and
vistas of unvisited destinations, the advent of
television upped the stakes. Needing to provide a
compelling excuse for people to be weaned away
from the idiot box, films simply became more
grandiose and, in so doing, changed the economics
of the business forever.
While productions
of yore revolved around the big studios, the need
for grandiosity ushered in the age of the film
star. Thus movies became about the actor, rather
than "merely" a compelling view of an oft-told
story. This marked cinema's departure from its
parents, namely literature and theater.
This departure is too often glossed over
by the news media when reviewing cinema as an art
form. In particular, the advent of close-ups in
film accentuated facial features, exaggerating the
impact on the audience. That change had the
less-than-subtle impact of forcing the audience to
identify with or against the screen personalities.
In other words, whether you like the face
on the screen becomes the dominant consideration.
The option of having an equivocal opinion on
characters bathed in shades of gray that is
afforded in both literature and to a lesser extent
theater is mostly unavailable in cinema unless the
filmmaker chooses not to engage a mainstream
audience.
Forcing art to conform to the
audience's empathy produces horrible results all
too often, a recent example of which would be
Hollywood's homicide of Homer's Iliadin the
film Troy, which not only sees the Trojans
as the heroic figures but also portrays the Greeks
as marauding hooligans. The mistake would be to
evaluate the film as a rendition of the
Iliad, rather than as a political
commentary on the current US government, an
intentional rebuke of America's war on Iraq.
Narrowing the choice of
villain The logical
follow-through from that process of identifying
with the protagonist is to have villains one
cannot simply abide. Thus the sneering stereotypes
of Italian gangsters and drunken Irishmen
represented the wholesale rejection of Roman
Catholic values by Protestant Americans. As these
peoples were more directly integrated into the
mainstream, the search for the next set of
villains focused on black Americans and then on to
other ethnic groups. Common to all these peoples
was their economic backwardness, a cold
calculation of Hollywood forsaking non-existent
revenues from the poor while chasing box-office
success.
However, the United States
itself was changing during this period, with rapid
economic growth helping to broaden the possession
of wealth. Meanwhile, the broader social movement
toward politically correct art forms robbed
Hollywood of its main stereotypes. Thus while an
"American" policeman could chase a "black"
gangster, the new rules dictated that he would
himself have a "black" supervisor.
Filmmakers who wished to rebel against the
strictures had no option but to focus on the
science-fiction or fantasy genre, where garish
special effects and makeup helped to mask (all too
often literally) the specific ethnicity of the
villainous caricatures. The Star Wars
series, for example, indulged in an open
celebration of Nazi-era military societies,
cultivating in turn a plethora of imitations.
In any event, the rest of Hollywood
wishing to document the more tenable human
condition had to confront the perverse effects of
the politically correct portrayal of villainy.
Simply put, they were left with no option but to
exaggerate the villainy of certain groups of
people. The most obvious victims of this sublime
Hollywood trend are Muslims, who have come to
represent all that is against the American way of
life. Other, less obvious victims of this trend
include Europeans, whose increased demonization is
simply a reflection of their declining economic
prowess.
In a contrasting vein to my above
observation about the film Troy, the notion
of casting the Muslim hero Saladin as a noble
conqueror in The Kingdom of Heaven failed
because mainstream America could not adjust to the
idea of a Muslim superhero, much less the morally
ambiguous Christians populating the film.
The path less traveled has too many
potholes from an economic perspective for the big
movie studios, thus sticking to well-worn
stereotypes of villains is essential. Thus it is
that a big studio backs 300, safe in its
assumption that Americans will revel at the sight
of the barbaric Persians.
Meanwhile,
modern-day Iranians are taking entirely the wrong
approach by protesting this movie, as the
portrayal of a homosexual army marching under an
androgynous Xerxes is presumably far enough
removed from the elite Iranian Republican Guard as
to warrant a reiteration of the principles of the
Islamic Society. President Mahmud Ahmadinejad
could conceivably say, "See, if you are homosexual
or pagan, you lose to the West - that's why being
heterosexual and Muslim guarantees your victory."
With financial risks rising and, more
important, concentrated in the fragile facial
muscles of fickle film stars, the celebrity
culture was firmly embedded as a way for studios
to gauge the relative appeal of leading men. The
constant coverage of such "celebrities" generates
its own economics, one that newspapers around the
world are now slaves to.
The most bizarre
example of this came in February 2001, when news
of an earthquake in Afghanistan that had left
thousands dead was pushed to the fourth or fifth
pages of mainline US newspapers, as the front page
was devoted to "news" of Tom Cruise divorcing
Nicole Kidman. The crude message thus delivered
was that millions of Afghans and Pakistanis had
less economic clout than Hollywood's star couple.
This rubric is observable in the choice of
villains and heroes as I noted above - Hollywood
does not dare insult or ignore any culture that
could provide it significant future revenues.
Hence its grudging respect for China's communist
government, even with all the liberal pretensions
that actors and directors cling to.
No
studio can afford not to show its films in China
when the market opens. Thus the idea of placating
the powers that be remains firmly entrenched
across these companies. Chinese people are now
portrayed as hard-working if a little boring in
Hollywood movies, a marked contrast to their
portrayal during the previous 50 years as poor and
desperate immigrants. In much the same way, the
portrayal of other ethnic groups has undergone
serial upgrades, commensurate with emerging
economic realities. The bottom line to Muslims
upset with their portrayal in Hollywood is thus
quite simple - the greater the economic clout they
gain, the less likely movie moguls are to airbrush
their proud history.
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