‘Now more than ever, we need to talk to each other, listen to each other and understand how we see the world,” said Martin Scorsese. “And cinema is the best medium for doing this.” And if Scorsese, one of the most influential figures in filmic art, is right, then American cinema, which, where it thematically dealt with Arabs on-screen, has chalked up a dismal record in that regard, as it consistently portrayed them as the brutal “other”.
These are movies that stretch all the way from the Sheik (1921) — where Rudolf Valentino plays a caricatural Arabian lech who becomes infatuated with an adventurous, modern-thinking and independent English woman and abducts her to his Saharan desert-home with salacious thoughts on his mind — to those brazenly racist, big-budget films released in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s featuring Arabs as blood-sucking terrorists and murderous Muslim fanatics, like True Lies (1994), Executive Decision (1996), Black Sunday (1977) and the epic Gladiator (2000), about which the less said the better, since talking about them is likely to leave a bad taste of ash in one’s mouth.
Trouble is that these movies, along with many, many others like them, were cinematic works that helped reinforce that stereotype of an Arab as a villain. Film does indeed affect — as much as it is affected by — the social values and the national mood of the culture where it is anchored. And the release last week of Beirut, director Tony Gilroy’s political thriller set during the chaos in Lebanon in 1982, could be an opportune occasion to ask if there has been a shift, nebulous though it may be, in how Hollywood sees Arabs.
As for Beirut, if you’re a film buff, or just a devotee of movies made for mature, discerning audiences, don’t waste your time standing in line at the box office to buy a ticket. The film is, well, kitschy and not altogether credible.
To begin with, his film is shot in Tangiers, Morocco, not in its namesake city. The Arab characters are played by Moroccan actors who speak Maghrebi Arabic and obviously look North African, making it difficult to relate to them — difficult, that is, to believe that the characters on the screen, communicating in their heavily accented Moroccan Arabic, are in fact Palestinian or Lebanese. Then the sonorous music that fills the sound track is unmistakably North African. Fine music, but not Middle Eastern. All of which attests to the director’s cluelessness about the cultural and semantic heterogeneity that defines the different countries, or regions, in the Arab world.
So, is Beirut really another one of those notoriously bigoted Hollywood productions, as Arab-American groups
are touting it to be, including the Arab-American Anti-Defamation Committee in Washington, which has issued a call to boycott it? Most decidedly not. If you opt against seeing it, do so not because it is anti-Arab, but because it is kitschy.
Look, I don’t blame Arabs for the weariness with which they approach Hollywood movies depicting them on the screen, a weariness that, alas, has often driven them to reflexively dismiss out of hand all, or almost all, Arab-themed movies produced by Hollywood as an assault on their ethnic sensibility, including those non-toxic, benign movies like The Siege, starring Lebanese-American actor Tony Shalhoub as Special FBI Agent Frank Haddad, which was actually more anti-American than it was anti-Arab, and in which Annette Bening speaks sympathetically of how “Palestinians seduce you with their pain”.
Time for Arabs, I say, to liberate themselves from this conditioned reflex, because, as the lyrics have it, the times they are a’changing.
There has indeed been a shift — painstakingly slow — in how filmmakers project Arabs on the screen, a shift that recalls similar instances in modern American history in which other ethnic groups were stereotyped on the screen into bad-guy roles, such as Native Americans, Germans, Russians, Japanese and even treacherous American Communists.
And if you want evidence attesting to that shift, consider, among other cases, Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Three Kings (1999), Rendition (2007), Babel (2006) and A Perfect Murder (1998), the latter a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, starring, along with Michael Douglas, David Suchet — the actor who gained international recognition as Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot. And let’s face it, film aesthetics play a role in creating an emotional bond between us and the likeable characters we are watching on screen, a bond that stays with us, if subliminally, long after we’ve left the theatre.
Why the shift? When and how did it begin?
To be sure, it began imperceptibly several years ago as political correctness gained ground in American society and filmic art was put to scrutiny by an array of engaged scholars who saw the act of portraying Arabs on the screen as villains and brutes to be reprehensible. The shift accelerated — irony of ironies — after the 9/11 terrorist attacks incited professionals from both the media and academia to approach America’s view of Arab-Islamic culture with a measure of detached, unbiased intellectual inquisitiveness, aiming at a better understanding of that culture’s principal canon.
According to Jack Shaheen, professor Emeritus of Broadcast Journalism at Southern Illinois University, and author of Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Villifies A People (revised 2012): “Though [in recent years} the majority of films did in fact vilify Arabs, I am somewhat encouraged to report that since 9/11, silver screens have displayed, at times, more complex, even-handed Arab portraits than I have seen in the past. Instead of dehumanising them, some producers presented decent, heroic characters — in some films, even champions.”
Sure, Beirut is playing this week in theatres in America and one may be heedless enough to fork out $15 (Dh55) in order to see it, but don’t be impetuous enough, like Arab American activists in Washington, as to undertake a leaflet-distributing campaign, urging people not to see it. Featuring murderous Muslim fanatics on the screen is an enterprise that may be reaching the end of its lifespan. About time, tinsel town.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
