That focus frequently makes the book less convincing than it should be. In fact, at times Reel Bad Arabs is anti-convincing; here is a discussion of a one-liner in Mike Judge's superlative Office Space:
An American software engineer (Ron Livingston) tries to convince his co-worker (Ajay Naidu) to rig the computers in order to steal from their cold-blooded employer... The engineer tells his friend not to worry: "This is America... This isn't Riyadh. You know, they're not going to saw your hands off here."
Note: Though the Saudi criminal justice system does sanction amputations for theft, the Saudis never saw a criminal's hand off; they surgically amputate it, and only after three proven offenses.
Now that's a relief! Until I read Shaheen's explanation, I had thought the movie was merely poking fun at Livingston's Orientalist notions of the Middle East—an impression underscored by the fact that Naidu's "Samir" is one of a handful of intelligent, sympathetic, positive characters in the movie. (Shaheen fails to note this last point, though elsewhere he urges Hollywood to depict "an Arab or an American of Arab heritage as a regular guy.")
The key to Shaheen's passion, however, may be that he is right on the overall issue. If you thought Jamie Farr's last act of entertainment terrorism came when he stopped wearing a dress on M*A*S*H, Shaheen's study of Farr's "Abdul bin Falafel" character in the Cannonball Run movies will set you straight. You don't need an encyclopedia to demonstrate that Hollywood presents cartoonish and hostile images of Arabs, but the book's 900 entries make the point in the starkest possible terms.
Nor is it impertinent to note, as Shaheen does, that the industry doing the vilification employs a disproportionate number of Jews—it was an implicit recognition of this fact that gave this year's email hoax about Steven Spielberg's plans for a "Palestinian Schindler's List" its particular artistic punch. The Israeli producers Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus have devoted much of their output to pictures where villainous Arabs—and Palestinians in particular—are terminated with extreme prejudice. (Globus, Shaheen notes, is also a former director of Israel's Film Industry Department—a significant position, since that country stands in for the Arab world in most American film shoots.)
On the other hand, Golan and Globus haven't had a hit for more than ten years, and their company, Cannon pictures, is out of business. Golan has lately been reduced to obviously penning his own bio page at the Internet Movie Database. Audiences are nothing if not fickle, and that characteristic tends to weaken the argument that screen images have real-life consequences. In his book's introduction, Shaheen does not inspire confidence by citing a film-as-teacher wheeze by Jihad vs. McWorld author Benjamin Barber, nor by speculating that "[f]requent moviegoers may even postulate that illusionary Arabs are real Arabs."
If that's the case, then why hasn't the image of Arabs in America plummeted in the past three decades, under a concerted propaganda campaign by the entertainment industry's finest? Instead, American opinions about Palestinians have at worst remained stable or slightly improved. In the 1970s, an Oscar-winning actress could derail her own career with ill-considered comments about Palestine; today, the President can call for a Palestinian state with relatively little political fallout. The Carter era's widespread paranoia about oil sheikhs buying up our national treasure—a form of public hysteria that drove message-movie relics like Rollover and the dated, overrated Network ("SHEIKHS, WORST LIST")—is a thing of the past. This is a trend even Chuck Norris and Charlie Sheen, together!, can't reverse, and it can only accelerate as Casey Kasem's Arab-American top 40 list sweeps the nation.
This trend is even more marked in the international market toward which American films are increasingly directed. It's a widely acknowledged truth that Hollywood films and television shows are the most potent, ubiquitous cultural products in the world, driving local films out of theaters in France and Mexican telenovelas off the air in Lebanon. Yet outside the United States, antipathy toward Israel is widespread and opposition to American policy in the Middle East all but universal. Why haven't these foreigners gotten with Hollywood's program? Shaheen (and ironically, film industry professionals themselves, whose estimate of Hollywood's power is dependably inflated) may prefer to believe in a Pavlovian audience reaction, but evidence for this is thin at best.
You can see the proof in the way the film industry reacted when confronted with an actual Arab terrorist act on U.S. soil (an act that, in the ultimate slap in the face to Southern California's imagineers, was both more clever and more destructive than anything Hollywood has ever cooked up). Producers could easily have seized on September 11 as proof that they were merely being realistic with all those terrorist films over the years. Instead, they ran away from the issue as quickly as possible. Confronted with a choice between real life and make believe, Hollywood producers, to their immense credit, will take make believe every time.
Which may be the answer to our last question: Why does Hollywood continue to give such a hard time to the Serbs? Extreme Ops, the latest entry in the burgeoning snowboarding-antiterrorism genre, is also the latest film to feature Serb terrorists marauding on U.S. soil. Among the 277 pictures listed on the IMDb's keyword page for "terrorism," there is more than a hefty sampling of features in which the dirty work is done by Serbs, Croats, Russians posing as Serbs or Croats, Croats posing as Serbs or Russians, and so on. Shaheen cites 18 films with Arab terrorists invading the U.S. since 1977, but in the past decade alone there have been more than 20 pictures with Serb villains, and more than a dozen featuring Serb terrorists.
In this time period, there has not been a single act of Serb terrorism against U.S. interests anywhere in the world—this even though Bill Clinton's illegal air campaign in Kosovo provided a more sanguinary motive for terrorism than anything our country did to the Saudis and Egyptians who slaughtered Americans on September 11. The Serb has value as a movie villain not because Americans have poor opinions of Serbs but because Americans have no opinions at all about Serbs. A Serb villain offends nobody, except maybe Serbs, and who's ever met one of those? Nobody's claiming Bosnians run the movie industry. But the effects are disturbing: Fed on a steady diet of Behind Enemy Lines, 24, The Peacemaker, Bad Company, and countless Serb-baiting episodes of JAG, how will our children ever make their peace with the Kostunica administration?
They will, of course, because audiences aren't as easily hoodwinked by Hollywood fantasy as Jack Shaheen and Sherry Lansing like to believe. There's an unacknowledged deal at work when you buy a ticket for Passenger 57 or any of the three Die Hard films: You will pretend to find the suave Euro-terrorists on screen menacing, and in exchange Hollywood will give you bullshit in its most thrilling form. And when you leave the theater, you'll continue to find Osama bin Laden (or his ghost) a more worrisome figure than Arkan, let alone Rutger Hauer. To the experts' frustration, Americans continue to get their real-life ideas from real life; even the most special of Special Edition DVDs is unlikely to change that.
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دردشة|1.27.11 @ 5:09AM|#
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