CULTURE Argo: Hollywood demonizes Iran
again By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
In his narrative on "soft power," Harvard
professor Joseph Nye has enlightened us about the
powerful American movie industry as a source of
American "ideological attraction" that complements
the Western superpowers' "hard power." This means
that instead of pure entertainment or mere
artistic creations, Hollywood movies function as
propaganda supplements, often by providing a
binary image of "good Americans" versus the
"hostile others" on US's enemy list.
With
Iran topping that list for the past 33 years, it
is hardly surprising that Hollywood has dutifully
dished out a growing number of movies that recycle
the enemy image of Iran, thus warranting this
author's observation five years ago: "Hollywood's
tall walls of exclusion and discrimination have
yet to crumble
when it comes to the
movie industry's persistent misrepresentation of
Iranians and their collective identity immersed in
a long thread of history." [1]
Thus, a
common thread runs through Iran-bashing movies,
including Not Without My Daughter (1991),
Peacemaker (1997), Syriana (2005),
300 (2006), and most recently Argo
(2012). That is, the negative stereotype of
the Iranian "other," as basically overemotional,
angry and diabolically anti-Western, save the
westernized Iranians. The tale is an all too
familiar one: Western imperialism using its
artistic prowess to inculcate an inferior and
enemy image of Iran to serve hegemonic interests
that include a frontal assault on the meaning and
integrity of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which
prides itself as the progenitor of an Islamic
awakening throughout the Middle East.
Comparing Not Without My Daughter
with Argo through critical lenses
simply alerts us to a frozen time, as if in the 20
years separating the two movies focusing on
Americans' escape from Iran, Hollywood has learned
nothing new and is still immersed in its
ideological wheel of self-aggrandizement of the
American as hero, also reflected in other similar
movies such as The Kingdom. [2] If The
Kingdom treated us to a parade of "cult of
FBI-worship," in Argo it is CIA's turn to
be showered with immense love and affection for
pulling off the disguised departure of six
Americans during the Iran hostage crisis. Both
films reek of intense Islamophobia, however, and
neither deserves serious intellectual attention,
given a conventional genre, predictable scripts,
and lack of creative imagination - Hollywood's
main malady nowadays.
To be sure, the
connection between film and history is complex
and, as this author has noted elsewhere, it is
perhaps beyond the pale for the movie industry to
"getting it right," particularly when it comes to
covering revolutions. [3] But, when it comes to
Iran and the Islamic revolution, there have been
no dearth of attempts to deciphering and
comprehending it as US Department of State would
wish; ie, as essentially America's chief post-Cold
War bete noire, anything else would be
cognitive dissonance.
Little surprise,
then, that like an earlier American movie, On
Wings of Eagles (1986), starring Burt
Lancaster, which also dealt with American
hostages' escape from Iran, this year's release,
Argo , is fundamentally bereft of new
insights about Iran, and neither film is even
minimally capable of going beyond the facade of
angry anti-American crowds. Instead, a persistent
de-humanization of Iranians is detectable in the
sub-text of these movies, which, from the vantage
point of the Muslim and Third World audience
around the globe, needs to be de-coded and
deconstructed, as an integral aspect of the Third
World culture of resistance (transcending Iran).
In fairness to Argo, its opening
scenes seek to contextualize the US-Iran conflict,
by referring to US's overthrow of the
democratically elected Iranian government in 1953
and its replacement with a ruthless and corrupt
monarchy. That is a tiny step forward.
Unfortunately, it is effectively neutralized in
the rest of movie's relentless Iran-bashing,
primarily in the form of various voice-over
narratives vilifying the post-revolutionary order,
as well as even more (de-humanizing) cardboard
images of angry Iranians, confronting the "good"
and "innocent" Americans in the streets, bazaar,
airport, and so on.
As a result, if
Argo and its purportedly "liberal"
producers had aimed to create a filmic vehicle to
teach the younger generation of American
movie-goers a thing or two about American foreign
policy, notwithstanding the Arab Spring's downfall
of multiple American-backed dictatorships, then
the end product is at best half-satisfying, given
inescapable main flaws that reduce it to the level
of yet another artifact of the American
ideological apparatus.
This is so because
the movie's subtle critique of past American
interventionism is checkmated by the not so subtle
reproduction of the hostile image of the Iranian
"Muslim other," who elicits no sympathy but plenty
of scorn and hatred among average western viewers
exposed to vile and angry images on the silver
screen. What is conspicuously absent is a genuine
plea for understanding, compassion, and empathy
for the suffering of an entire nation, which was
brutalized in the midst of the crisis in the form
of a massive US-backed invasion by Iraq's Saddam
Hussain, who was America's surrogate for
inflicting pain on Iran that Washington for
various reasons could not manage directly.
Indeed, the history of American hostage
crisis and Iraq's invasion of Iran are highly
intertwined, in light of the ample evidence that
the CIA was instructed to provide Iraq's brutal
dictator with vital information on Iran's military
formations. One wonders how the audience would
react if they would be exposed to another "true
story" about Iran that would show the heroic CIA
agents meeting Saddam Hussain and giving him the
critical intel he used to kill and displace
millions of Iranians during the bloody eight-year
war? Certainly that would not be in line with
Professor Nye's description of American "soft
power". The ever so "civilized" Americans do not
wish to be projected on the screen as
"uncivilized" and they are much obliged in this by
the makers of Argo and other pathetically
familiar Iranophobic movies.
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