While we have all enjoyed Arnold Schwarzenegger rescuing his family and saving the country from a group of Arabic Terrorists who wanted to smuggle nuclear weapons in True Lies or Mike Banning fighting tooth and nail to save the American President from an Arabic violent extremist in London has fallen, little did we ever notice that this disturbing concept of Arabs being violent and radical has continued to be a part of Western Media for quite some time now. For instance, Aladdin, an animated Disney Film released on 25th November, 1992, opened with these lyrics, carried by a haunting or terror background music:
Oh, I come from a land
From a faraway place
Where the caravan camels roam,
Where they cut off your ear
If they don’t like your face
It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.
As the movie went on to become the highest grossing film of the year, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee protested heavily against this description. While these lyrics were changed in 1993 to “Where it’s flat and immense / and the heat intense”, the producers left intact the last line over “barbaric” as the film was re-released in tapes. However, the occurrence of the Al Qaeda attacks in 9/11 has since then modified the already existing theme of the West in movies, games and series as more and more Arabs were continued to be portrayed as either villain or barbaric to have a better appeal to the general community. The extent of the consequences were so large that this was eventually taken up by the Organisation of Islamic Countries in their observatory report on Islamophobia. The report studied events that contribute to this anti-Islam feeling from 2007 to 2008 and concluded that Western media had played a serious role in giving rise to Islamophobia. As the “new normal decade” sets in with populist feelings driven by populist leaders, my intention in writing this review is to simplify this idea of the “Arabic othering” that has already been worked upon by eminent scholars and personalities. In this process of simplification, the idea behind this essay is give readers an alternative insight on how although movies have although been a parallel dimension of our lives, the persistent trend of Arabs as violent, has significantly contributed to the concept of the other in a society as they play a vital role in shaping public opinion.
MOVIES: A NEW WAR ZONE?
Although movies such as True Lies (1994) and Executive Decision (1996) show that perfect Muslim villain was not something new, the plethora of textual and visual narratives over the Twin Tower attack on September 11th have had a strong influence on Western cultural production. As America looked to strengthen its Global War on Terror, the representation of September 11 became the ideological lynchpin and a rhetorical construction that promoted the idea of America as a victim and a defender of freedom not only in its official discourse but a vast cultural production that ranged from Hollywood films to American video game designs. When we look at the concept behind cinematics specifically, Bella Balazs film theory and the understanding of cinema aesthetics in relation to the notions of subjectivity and identification play a vital role in assessing this representation. He underscored the importance of close-ups, affirming that it not only serves to depict the state of mind and the feelings of the actors but they also bridge the characters feelings and motivations to the spectators. While closes-ups have become a popular practice in tensed or traumatic plot scenes, the Hollywood’s intensity over productions to create a master narrative of the terror attacks have played an important role in how the American society remembers the events of 9/11. This process of enculturating and framing how a society develops an understanding of the traumatic events, not just for the generation that experienced it, but just as significantly for those generations that follow it, have provided an overly simplistic and unperceptive view of American vicitmisation, disregard of geopolitics and an elaborate erasure of political and historical contexts. Hollywood productions directly relating to America’s War on Terror post the attacks such as the American Sniper (2014) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) have successfully dehumanise and stereotype Muslims and Arabs in their quest to solidify their stand with the country. For instance, there are plots from the movie American Sniper (2014) where the audience sees Chris Kyle, the protagonist, witnesses the attacks on US Embassies which ultimately led him to join the military and ‘kill some terrorits.’ This allowed for more Islamophobic approaches in the rest of the movie without upsetting the audience as it made it look a justified retaliation. While the movie humanises Kyle by showing signs of trauma in his civilian life after his kill record of 161 in Iraq, it dehumanises almost Muslims by portraying them as terrorist and savages without humanity. Further, the movie employs the use of gun scope shots when filming certain scenes. Use of such camera shot is a very deliberate choice, aiming to portray that characters that are viewed through it Muslims as being potentially dangerous. This makes it seem as though every Muslim that happens to be in the vicinity of an attack is dangerous. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s letter to movie’s director Clint Eastwood and star Bradley Cooper is a direct reflection of the stereotyping that the movie created. The letter stated that the movie’s description of Arabs and Muslims resulted in hundreds of violent threats by its viewers against the Arab community in the US. Zero Dark Thirty (2012) takes one step worse by depicting that brown bodies are not equal to white bodies, nor are Muslims equal to Christians. While the movie reminds of its viewers of the 9/11 attacks through audio recording the emergency calls, it as justification for the drastic scenes of torture against casted prisoners that it employs for the first 20 minutes. The transition from 9/11 scenes to the torture not only justifies the right to retaliate but also creates a sense of supremacy among its Western viewers. Further, the movie’s screen name diversity is only limited to names and casts of Western origin, leaving behind Muslims as either interpreters or terrorists. This makes the narrative of “Good vs. Bad Muslims even more visible with the Good who are usually an agent of the state or volunteers of American militarism always secondary to the West.
REFLECTION IN REALITY
But do such representations have consequences in the realm of reality? Yes. Stephen Harold Riggins writes in his article, The Language and Politics of Exclusion: Others in Discourse, that there are three separate aspects of the relationship that forms between the Self and the Other. They are a) value judgment (e.g the Other may deemed to be good or bad, equal or inferior to the Self) b) social distance (physical and psychological distance the Self maintains from the Other) c) knowledge (the extent to which history and culture of the Other is known by the Self). With the 9/11 edged into the memories of the Western generation, the constant portrayal of American victimisation and the vast diversity of history culture of such Arabic countries too big for normal school curriculum, it becomes very evident for the concept of the Other to emerge in Western society. Such content not only shape perceptions but studies have additionally found that “violent programming increases the aggression of their viewers.” Russel Geen and Susan Thomas, in their article “The Immediate Effects of Media Violence on Behavior,” discuss competing theories pertaining to the effects of media violence on real world behaviors. They conclude that media violence becomes the premise on which actualized violence occurs for three predominant reasons: media is capable of rousing, inspiring and justifying various forms of violence. Roger Schank and Robert Abelson’s script theory proposed the idea that human behavior is understood through patterns known as “scripts.” A script consists of a sequence of short, encoded events represented by an image and a conceptual representation of the event. These scripts, in turn, “define situations and guide behavior.” We may consider such episodes appearing in the popular culture media as a script defining a proper method of dealing with interpersonal conflict. Such a definition is likely to be formulated if the violence or the supremacy is placed in the context of social approval and justification. Subsequently, the observer may activate this script as a guide for behaviour in some personal situation of conflict and place themselves in the participant role of the aggressor. With widespread media usage of words like “Islamic terrorism”, “Islamic extremism” and “Islamic bombs”, such popular culture representations only become the building blocks to this process of the Othering. Craig Stephen Hicks, 46 year old white man’s murder of three Muslim students inside their house in 2015 should be a clear indication of the process of othering going to its extreme. In a predominantly Muslim community in Brooklyn, the prevalence of stigma have spawned the creation of the Muslim Community Patrol Services, a civilian petrol patrol organisation created to protect its citizens and bridge the gap between the local police and community members. But why should they have to resort to this? Why can’t globalisation promote the nature of inclusivity for we are all but only humans? With incidents such as these that question the system of entertainment that prevails in American societies, the culture industry needs to play a vital role its system of catering to Western sentiments for the world is a contribution of every human being beyond one’s geographical location or nationality.
