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.
Or Turkish movies and its anti Semitic propaganda or Iranian movie and its anti western propaganda?
