Examples of this — and there are hundreds — are Ben Affleck’s Argo and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. In both films, Iranians and Iraqis are utterly dehumanized, and I don’t recall seeing any mainstream media critics calling this out. In Argo, for instance, the Iranians speak Persian throughout the film, and there are no subtitles (until the very end), which has the effect of making the antagonists even more menacing, but also more two dimensional. In American Sniper, all the Iraqi characters are presented as “hajis” and brutes, including women and children. I could go on, but you get the point.
It is funny that he thinks speaking Persian minimizes the Iranian roles. Speaking Persian is hardly a western narrative, but he seems to be grasping at straws and seems to be fairly imprecise in some of his statements in the interview.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, we lost our greatest enemy, and the evil Russians were soon replaced by Arab/Muslim terrorists. This has become such a trope that the dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims is rarely noticed and protested by U.S. film critics.
Who was it again who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993?
World Trade Center Bombing 1993
On February 26, 1993, at about 17 minutes past noon, a thunderous explosion rocked lower Manhattan.
The epicenter was the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center, where a massive eruption carved out a nearly 100-foot crater several stories deep and several more high.
Six people were killed almost instantly. Smoke and flames began filling the wound and streaming upward into the building. Those who weren’t trapped were soon pouring out of the building—many panic-stricken and covered in soot. More than a thousand people were hurt in some way, some badly, with crushed limbs.
Middle Eastern terrorism had arrived on American soil—with a bang.
...
https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/world-trade-center-bombing-1993
Of course, those acts of terrorism are among many other incidents:
- World Trade Center 9/11 (2001)
- USS Cole (Aden) (2000)
- US Embassy Bombings (Kenya and Tanzania) (1998)
- World Trade Center Bombing (as noted above) (1993)
- Pan Am Flight 103 Bombing (Scotland) (1988)
- La Belle Discotheque Bombing (Berlin) (1986)
- Beirut Bombing (Lebanon) (1983), etc.
It would be interesting to know if any of those stories in the analogy of fiction are about Middle Eastern regional cultural practices such as honor killings or FGM, etc.
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