The Big Frame-Up

A movie is potentially the most powerful expression of culture that exists in the world today. More than any other form of communication, movies tell us things about countries and the people in those countries that many of us may never otherwise experience.

In vivid Technicolor (as the movie posters used to read), films depict everything about how a people think, talk, dress, live and love, right down to the way they interact and see the rest of the world.

The bottom line is that movies us take us places where many of us have never been and will never go, then they craftily mold our opinions of those places into established preconceptions.

But what if what those movies are telling us is not accurate? What if the representations of those faraway lands and distant shores are, instead, the contrived perceptions of directors, producers and writers with an agenda? Then the unsuspecting movie viewer, helplessly vulnerable, absorbs that erroneous view. Given the right - or wrong - combination of variables simultaneously at work in the world, such misperceptions across borders can lead to a whole lot of bad stuff going on, not to mention short-circuiting all the good that can come from pure and honest cross-cultural communication.

Anything for a Buck? - America, The Movie Version!

America's movies are its billboards to the world, yet there doesn't seem to be much thought given to how the world might react to the impressions they convey.

Last year, we supplied dozens of teen movies where cushy and comfortably clad American youth rocked, drank and copulated their way into adulthood, never once concerned with their responsibility to their parents or their society, let alone to the rest of the world.

We Americans can mold plots, if not entire franchises of movie plots, around the curve of a woman's hip, the plunging neckline almost completely revealing breasts that would ornament a Hindu paradise, or flashing teeth behind plump lips. The bodies of Angelina Jolie or Pamela Anderson are perfect examples: purely sexual bodies that cause whole populations to sweat and salivate over notions of pleasure and excess. Thus is the image created that America is a land of sybarites.

And so America's cultural tsunami rushes over the whole planet, devastating consciousness with images of wholesale bliss and destruction. We blew up Paris in Armageddon - have the French ever seen fit to show us images of New York destroyed?

In his acceptance speech for his Academy Award for Forrest Gump, Robert Zemeckis said that the duty of the filmmaker was to educate the public. One wonders what it is they are teaching.

But America's take on pop culture defines the world's take on it, whether they like it or not. And in many cases they don't like it at all - though that doesn't stop them from buying tickets.

Yet, while Europeans admire our films, many of them aren't too keen about us all the time. American wealth and ostentation invites international spite, many believe.

The way we represent ourselves in movies may have something to do with that.

Flash back to the ‘80s and early ‘90s of American filmmaking. Writer and sometimes director John Hughes' films such as Pretty in Pink; The Breakfast Club; Home Alone; Planes, Trains & Automobiles; and Ferris Bueller's Day Off are almost case studies of the way in which American life is presented onscreen in Hollywood studio films. Most are set in the familiar American landscape of malls, big houses and high school corridors. Populated mostly by middle- and upper-middle-class suburban white people, they focus on the discontented teenage children of white baby boomers who are practically poster children for the American egocentrism, hedonism and materialism that fosters such outrage overseas. Those movies were about kids who had problems, but who also all seemed to own really nice cars, had great clothes and hot haircuts and lived in beautiful places. Their problems weren't the same as poor kids, like avoiding streets where drive-by shootings are most likely to happen, staying out of gangs or becoming teenage parents. The kids in John Hughes' films had problems of self-actualization rather than survival. It's easy to imagine kids from the rest of the world watching some of these films and thinking, "You'd have to be rich in the first place to think that's a problem."

Flash forward to the ‘90s, and Hughes graces us with the shenanigans of the Home Alone character who, aside from the hilarious hi-jinx in this goofy plot of a youngster left at home to fend off thieves, is surrounded by more toys and stuff than Santa could ever fit into an SUV. Once again, the trappings of American opulence and success abound, and the main character inevitably finds himself safe and snug in his very comfortable and costly world.

Hughes continues, if not perfects, this trend in 2002 with Maid in America, the modern-day Cinderella tale starring beauty Jennifer Lopez as a hotel maid, albeit probably one of the most beautiful hotel maids in the world, who is mistaken as a socialite while trying on a wealthy woman's dress. That's about all it takes for her to be transported into the world of American power and success. Beauty, bucks and power - now she has all that is important in superficial America, or so it may seem to the international audience.

The trend continues in the 21^st Century with a new slew of filmmakers making movies, like last year's controversial The Girl Next Door whose plot revolves around one of those same cushy consumer-style teens from Hughes' ‘80s flicks being graced by the new presence of a former porn star moving in next door and falling in love with him. This is America? Of course it isn't, but it is what the rest of the world might think given the big frame-up we do on ourselves on the big screen.

That impulse to "beautify" is pervasive in America's movie industry. However much we may know that a movie is just a made-up story, we identify with and yearn for the stuff on the screen that's more beautiful, cooler and more exciting than our own stuff. Richard Pells, a professor at the University of Texas, describes it this way: "A characteristic American film...has flamboyant special effects and a sumptuous décor, each a reflection of America's nearly mythic affluence. Furthermore, American movies revel in fast-paced action and a celebration of individual ingenuity embodied in the heroics of an impeccably dressed, permanently youthful Hollywood star. And they feature love stories that lead, inevitably if often implausibly, to happy endings."

In other words, bullets don't hurt, no one gets old or fat, love always wins out in the end - and no one ever has any money problems.

And if we - who live here and, presumably, know the reality - can be affected by the screen "reality," how much greater is the impression on those who do not live the daily truth? Could it be that American film culture sends out the very cues about America that lead so much of the world to regard America as its enemy rather than ally?

Pells tells the story of speaking to classes of secondary school teachers in Germany and asking his class how many students had seen Titanic, which was then the #1 film. It took a lot of anguish for half of them to admit to it, and even then they would only admit to seeing it "because they were curious to see what all the pandemonium was about, all the marketing and publicity and hype on behalf of a $200 million adolescent fantasy."

In Pell's view, "The teachers did not know it, but they had internalized the criticisms of American mass culture, and especially of American movies, that have persisted for nearly a century. Since the 1920s, people both in the United States and abroad have been told that Hollywood's products are ‘bad' for them. According to the defenders of high culture, American movies are brash, superficial, inane and infantile." Yet they are believed.

Although this perverted characterization of America may have begun with our own movies about ourselves, it has worked its way into how foreign filmmakers portray us as well. In his 2001 film In Praise of Love, Jean-Luc Godard criticizes American commercial fervor by dramatizing the ordeal of an aged French couple who struggle over whether to sell Hollywood the story of their love, which had blossomed while they were in the French Resistance during WWII. While Godard's treatment of the couple's dilemma was criticized as being a bit too obvious, his film pointed out how suspect Europeans are about the potential American trivialization of their heritage. "Hollywood no longer has production," Godard said at the time. "Only little pockets of it. Everything boils down to distribution." Yes, America is the land of marketing: of profit, not content.

Talk about how America has no culture invariably includes with the idea that America is a "new" country. The new country idea expresses the notion that the U.S.A., as a political entity, has not had the formative experiences of Europe and Asia - especially the endless wars, fall of governments, revolutions, reformations, religious prophets and iconoclasts. And it is all these things that a European sees in culture and that he accuses us of missing. Hence Bazin sees myth in Chaplin, while Americans accuse Chaplin of taking himself too seriously. A foreigner implants his own cultural heritage into our cultural products.

Contemporary directors such as Lars von Trier make oblique comments about America. Von Trier, who has never visited the U.S., says the only way he would come is if Europe were completely nuked. He goes on to say, "That I know how the U.S. would be a better place, as somebody who is not American, is the most provocative thing I can say, and why is that? It doesn't have so much to do with nationalism or borders, it has to do with politics and your basic idea of what you should do with human beings."

Faraway Places
The Movies about the Rest of the World

Living at a historical moment when tensions between cultures have risen to world war levels, Hollywood - maker of the most powerful, influential media on the planet - plays the role of cultural breaker switch, capable of igniting whole new global animosities based on its portrayal of faraway people and places. An entire generation's idea of Turkey was indelibly shaped by the 1978 film Midnight Express, a drug smuggling drama written by Oliver Stone and directed by Alan Parker that featured sadistic prison guards, a merciless, non-English-speaking judiciary and well-below-average hygiene. Let's face it: What - besides the images of jihad warriors we see every day on CNN and FOX News - are our enduring images of the Middle East these days?

For most of us, they're what we have seen in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lawrence of Arabia, The Mummy, Alexander and David O. Russell's Three Kings - and what we'll see in the upcoming Middle East-located dramas Stephen Gaghan's Syriana and Gilgamesh - a film which reunites Lawrence's co-stars Omar Sharif and Peter O'Toole - and Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, a Crusades drama that's already catching flack for as unlikely a reason as a Hollywood vet could imagine: Scott is being accused of revising history to make the Muslim jihad warriors the good guys. The Gladiator director's latest historical epic is set in the 12^th Century when Muslim icon Saladin conquered Jerusalem. According to British press reports, the Knights Templar - the Christian warrior monks - are portrayed in the script as the villains while Saladin is the hero. "It's rubbish," says Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, Britain's leading authority on the Crusades. "It's not historically accurate at all. It's Osama bin Laden's version of history. It will fuel the Islamic fundamentalists." (Sir Ridley's spokesman said that the film portrays the Arabs in a positive light. "It's trying to be fair and we hope that the Muslim world sees the rectification of history.")

But Scott's film, wrong or right in its assessment, is the exception that proves the rule. One only has to watch the 2000 thriller Rules of Engagement - which features gun-toting, American-killing, Yemeni children and their veiled Arabic mothers, or the FOX TV drama "24," which features bourgeois, Americanized Muslims who are all secretly murdering terrorists - to get the creeping suspicion that whatever vision of Saladin Ridley Scott chooses to portray, Hollywood will respond with a half dozen examples of the clichéd Arab. Anti-Arab imagery is so prevalent in Hollywood it was presented, without comment, in Aladdin, the 1992 animated Disney film that was the top-grossing film of year. Aladdin featured the voice of Robin Williams as the legendary Arab genie who sang, "Oh, I come from a land, 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."

According to Fran Matera, an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Communication at Arizona State University who is writing a book about the way in which Arabs are portrayed by Hollywood, "similar to the role of Native Americans in the old Westerns, it appears the most useful role filmmakers can find for Arabs in the 1990s is that of live props." After surveying the images of Arabs in Hollywood, Matera came to the conclusion that the old stereotype of Arabs in Hollywood films was changing. It's how it's changing that's so troubling. "The difference between previous and recent Arab portrayals," Matera wrote, "is that old stereotypes of the repulsive Bedouin savage, greedy oil billionaires and sex maniacs now lurk in the background, as callous images of Arab human targets, terrorists and killers interacting with a religion unfamiliar to many Americans - Islam - move to the forefront. Although the types of characterizations have somewhat changed, the end result is the same: dehumanizing and demonizing Arabs."

After surveying a number of films made during the 1990s which featured Arabic characters - including Navy SEALs; Robin Hood. Prince of Thieves; Hot Shots! Part Deux; True Lies; Executive Decision; G.I. Jane; The Siege; and The Mummy -Matera concluded that, with the exception of a single character - Tarik Husseini in The Siege - the killing of Arabs was "a commonplace event with which no one takes issue." In most of these films, Matera found, the Arabs were by and large antiheroes - terrorists who "deserve to die."

Well, it's no news flash that Hollywood doesn't teach history; it tells stories. People go to the movies to see stars in action; if a producer has to bend the facts a little to make them fit comfortably into his third act, he will. You want to learn about history? Watch the History Channel.

For 27 years, Oliver Stone kept quiet about the deathblow he'd dealt to the global image of Turkey with Midnight Express. "For years, I heard that Turkish people were angry with me, and I didn't feel safe there," he said. Then he made Alexander, flew to Istanbul - and said he was sorry. "It's true I over-dramatized the script," Stone told reporters in Istanbul. In that single, simple statement, perhaps Stone spoke for an entire industry.

But there are films that break the rule. Matera found positive portrayals of Arabs in Lawrence of Arabia, (which won seven Oscars) and notes that in recent years, Hollywood has done a better job, give or take a Mummy film or two: Three Kings, David O. Russell's 1999 comic anti-war film, featured a balance of Arab characters who didn't conform to traditional stereotype. Additionally that year, the film The 13th Warrior featured an Arab character - played by Omar Sharif - in a positive light.

And a more recent French film, Monsieur Ibrahim, also starred Sharif playing, in this case, an Arab shopkeeper who befriends a young Jewish boy. "I thought it was befitting for me, as a well-known and beloved Arab personality, to make a statement about the relationship between the Arabs and the Jews," Sharif said. "With all the stuff that's happening and the violence and all, to say that it is possible to live together, to love each other, not impossible."

"They (Arab characterizations) were starting to get better towards the end of the Nineties," Matera said. "The thing to watch is how, in post-9/11 America, that Arabs are characterized."

Perhaps the real solution in developing three-dimensional Arab characters in film lies in Arab filmmakers telling their own stories. At the 2005 Rotterdam Film Festival, one of the most eagerly awaited films was Baghdad Blogger, a documentary by someone known as Salaam Pax (‘Peace, Peace' in Arabic and Latin, respectively). The film is an adaptation of Pax's much-buzzed-about online diary about life in Baghdad over the past two years, offering the sort of insider's perspective on the Iraq War that probably no American could come close to providing - both for logistical and cultural reasons.

The Blogger, armed with a trusty video camera, manages to penetrate places most Hollywood filmmaker could not: inside the homes of Muslim women or inside provocative spots such as a Baghdad package liquor store where the less-than-devout stock up in advance of Ramadan. "Until January [2004], things [in Iraq] felt very good, like it was going to improve, but things have been going bad since then. It's just [been] one long, downhill ride," said Pax, who speaks fluent English. "Things are really nasty, but [America] cannot just say, 'This is democracy guys - bye,'" he said, giving perhaps an unintended preview of his documentary.

A second film, Underexposure by Oday Rasheed - the first feature made in Iraq since Saddam was toppled in 2003 - was shot in the streets of Baghdad with old Kodak film scooped up from the remains of the Ministry of Culture building. Rasheed said the title refers to the isolation felt by Iraqis under Saddam's regime and the difficult time the country is now experiencing. "Saddam's regime was Hell, but now I think the Hell has doubled," Rasheed said.

Recently, at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, musician Michael Franti of the band Spearhead exhibited his new documentary I Know I'm Not Alone, a film documenting his recent trips to Baghdad, Israel and Palestine. In Baghdad, Franti found a counter-cultural underground of metal bands and tattoo parlors heavily inspired by American influences. And while playing music for U.S. troops or conversing with Iraqis on the streets, Franti repeatedly observed that the average Iraqi citizen has no set outlook on Americans or our values. Contrary to popular media messages, people in the Middle East don't all hate Americans; they have somehow avoided being completely overcome by the negative stereotypes of rich, decadent, egocentric Americans that we portray ourselves to be in our own movies. "My sense is that people around the world don't hate America as much as they fear America," Franti says. "It's out of their fear that sometimes their statements about America come." But maybe if our movies stop drawing a line in the sand with such adversarial images of foreigners, it might go a long way to dispelling some of those fears. -MPM

Also see "The Big Frame-Up" Part II: Hollywood Meets Smallville