FILM
REVIEW Iranian hostage crisis
revisited Argo,
directed by Ben Affleck Reviewed by Dinesh
Sharma
As a young teenager, looking up at
the portrait of president Jimmy Carter through the
shiny window panes past the security counter at
the US Consulate in New Delhi - where all bags
were checked and bodies scanned - I felt like I
was entering the security zone of the "Brave New
World". Next, I recall the flashpoints of the same
presidential images looping across the news alerts
during the Iranian hostage crisis after arriving
in the United States.
The visits to the
consulate in New Delhi and the turbulent events in
Tehran were my first introduction to America's
foreign outposts. They are burned in my mind like
the flashbulb memories of worlds colliding.
Earlier they were just images, now they hold
layers upon layers of meaning.
Thus, the
recent preview of the film Argo, released
on October 12 in the United States, took me back
to those early years when I
found my way in a
Midwestern American suburb during the winter of
1979.
The movie chronicles the story of
storming of the US embassy in Tehran; six
foreign-service officials holed up in the nearby
home of Canadian ambassador later escape in broad
daylight with the help of a covert operation -
devised by the CIA and some creative Hollywood
producers and movie-makers.
The tagline of
the film - "The movie was fake. The mission was
real" - does full justice to this thrilling drama.
The cinematography relies on historical realism
with handheld camera shooting interspersed with
actual footage of the 1979 hostage crisis to
narrate a story that gripped America and 54
hostages for 444 days from November 4, 1979, to
January 20, 1981.
The crisis led to the
ouster of Carter in the 1980 election, the
Iran-Contra affair, and built-up the prestige of
Ayatollah Khomeini as the Supreme Leader. The
reams of news footage accentuate the film with
actual documentary evidence and give it the look
and feel of a docudrama.
In an interview,
Affleck suggested it is difficult to sell a
historical film in Hollywood unless it happens to
be an action thriller as part of a franchise or a
well-funded historical epic. But this film is
neither.
"The story was completely
unbelievable, only if it was not true," he said.
It is the bizarre and distorted realism of
the story that holds the audience's attention.
Affleck helps carry the film on his shoulders with
stellar acting and direction. He plays CIA
operative Tony Mendez, who masterminded the
operation to rescue the officials hiding in the
Canadian ambassador's house and then wrote about
it when it was declassified by president Bill
Clinton in 1997. His account serves as the basis
for the screenplay.
With calculated
confidence and firmness, Affleck's Mendez designs
and executes the mission under a very demanding
timeline.
During a key scene in the film
when one of the housemates is doubtful about the
CIA plan to fly the embassy personnel straight out
of the civilian airport as a disguised film crew,
Mendez persuades with complete certainty, "Trust
me, this is what I do, get people out. And I have
never left anyone behind."
The film plot
is historically accurate with some dramatization
for effect. Yet, even for those who may be
familiar with the Iran hostage crisis, there is
much to gain from watching this retelling of the
inside story, with great script writing (Chris
Terrio), cinematography (Rodrigo Prieto of
Babel and Brokeback Mountain) and
production value (George Clooney among others).
Viewers may feel like they have stepped
into the world of Islamic theocracy stuck inside a
time-machine. Since life has moved at a snail's
pace in Iran, not much has probably changed in the
30 years since the events took place. As Pepe
Escobar at this website has commented, "The wall
of distrust between Washington DC and Tehran still
remains."
We are neither anywhere near
solving the nuclear program stalemate nor sowing
the seeds of democracy there. While the recent
trade sanctions by the Barack Obama administration
have been taking their toll, there is still no
deal or rapprochement between US, Iran and Israel.
This is where the satirical aspects of the
film offer some levity and perspective. Given the
CIA plot to free the housemates from the Canadian
embassy included scouting for Iranian locations to
shoot a science fiction film, we get an inside
view of the world of Hollywood where life imitates
art while scripting life.
In this case,
the real-life producer, Lester Siegel (played by
Alan Arkin), buys a cheap script as a cover for
the CIA plot; the real life make-up artist, John
Chambers from the Planet of the Apes
(played by John Goodman), comes up with the fake
production company and double identities for the
six housemates. In the end, we all believe it is
real because "it works".
In a gripping
scene in the film, Mendez takes the six Americans
disguised as Canadian film crew to a bazar in
Tehran. As their van meanders through a street
protest with an angry mob surrounding them, the
tension and the hint of violence breaking out is
very palpable. We are forced to follow every
interaction, facial twitch, and flickering of
nervous eyes.
The viewers are left with
sharply contrasting views of multiple or clashing
worlds:
The world of Hollywood make-believe, where
freedom of thought and expression fuels creativity
at any cost, where what is "fake" is "real" and
conventional "social reality" is simply made-up;
The covert world of dedicated CIA operatives,
often working in a hidden parallel universe, with
cryptic codenames, shredders, incinerators and
secret tunnels;
The world of Iranian revolutionaries, where
young impressionable individuals - religious men
and veiled women - are busy fighting what they
believe to be "the evil empire" at the behest of
the clerics.
When I asked a friend, a former CIA
official, about the film, he admitted that often
the stated policy is not the same as the covert
policy. Culture is a mass illusion, or a cultural
relativist's dream - perched atop Clifford
Geertz's "turtles all the way down" - only if
these divergent worlds did not bleed into each
other, gruesomely and violently, as they do in
everyday politics and international relations.
By travelling back in time, Argo
shows us that while the Western world and most of
the Asian liberal democracies have accelerated the
pace of change, Iran seems frozen in a time-warp;
and given globalization is now the baseline human
condition, isolation feels like a painful
anachronism.
It is not clear whether the
film will be released in Iran, but if it is
smuggled in through social media or other
distribution channels, it may offer some impetus
to Iranian democratic impulses. Alas, life may
imitate art, yet again, even though art in late
capitalism, as Walter Benjamin said, may simply be
a reproduction of politics.
Dinesh
Sharma is the author of Barack Obama in Hawaii
and Indonesia: The Making of a Global
President, which was rated as the Top 10 Black
history books for 2012. His next book on President
Obama, Crossroads of Leadership: Globalization
and American Exceptionalism in the Obama
Presidency, is due to be published with
Routledge Press.
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