We saw Reel Bad Arabs last night. Sadly it was a very frustrating film.
The movie is based on Dr. Jack Shaheen's best-selling book, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Unfortunately instead of interviewing actors, writers, film historians, heck, even the clerks who sell movie tickets, the movie interviews only Dr. Jack Shaheen. What's left is a fairly one-sided portrayal of the issues.
It's very easy to prove that many movies made in Hollywood have horrible Arab stereotypes. Reel Bad Arabs does do a good job of assembling clips to support that arguement, they pull up everything from old 1940s cartoons up through 2000's Rules of Engagement. Take the cliched belly-dancer, for example, this film assembles quite a montage of clips with scantily-clad women gyrating. Or the lecherous sheikh who's after the American or European blonde. We're treated to virtually every blonde bombshell Hollywood has produced getting leered at by a dude in a dish-dash.
And then sadly Reel Bad Arabs goes in a different direction than I would have.
The film trots out a whole host of movies that have had crummy stereotypes. While some of the clips were spot on, for the most part the selection was very weak. As I guessed yesterday, they brought up the sheikh that Jamie Farr played in The Cannonball Run. However, for some reason they chose instead to discuss the sequel, Cannonball Run II, which is horrible. I mean, even worse that the first movie. Yes, bad movies can be racist, but I feel you really have to put the characters in context. The two Cannnonball movies are very questionable in their representation of gays, blacks, Asians, hillbilly crackers, women, authority figures as well as Arabs. Virtually no group comes away not being insulted. But by quoting the films in a scholarly context, it seems to give them more weight than they really carry. I mean, can anyone really take Ricardo Montlebon seriously?! He played the Jamie Farr's sheikh's father in the second film.
Ricardo Montlebon!!
But that wasn't the worst choice in movie clips. Oh no.
Made in 1998, it stars Jim Varney (God rest his soul) as Ernest P. Worrell. And apparently they fight Arabs. I'm not really sure, and I don't think anyone really is as nobody in the world has ever heard that this film exists. I bet the director's own mother hasn't seen it.
But now I've seen twenty seconds of it. And it was way worse than Cannonball Run II.
The clips go on, some Las Vegas showgirls turning into Special Forces soft-core rubbish, and a whole host of movies made when my parents were in high school. It was laughable.
Also laughable? Shaheen's clear bias against liberals. It's not Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark.
And then he gets to True Lies. The bad guys in this 1994 film are Arab terrorists who blow up the Florida Keys with a nuclear bomb. Does Dr. Shaheen refer to it as Twentieth Century Fox's True Lies? Or maybe News Corporation's True Lies? Perhaps Rupert Murdoch's True Lies? Wait, I know, as the star of the movie is California's current Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is it Arnold Schwarzenegger's True Lies?
Nope.
And it would have been perfect, too, as the segment of the film bridging Hollywood and Washington politics was pretty weak. But instead of pointing out that the man in charge of what is technically the seventh largest economy in the world was in a horribly racist movie a little more than a decade ago, he lets the Governator off scott free. In fact, the only Arnold clip that they use is the "You're fired" part at the end of the movie. And even then, Schwarzenegger is on screen for about a second. To contrast, the film plays the entire scene of frightened daughter Eliza Dushku being threatened by the Arab villian up on the crane.
One can only wonder, did Shaheen and the filmmakers let Schwarzenegger off because he's a Republican?
But Disney and Spielberg get called out by name ... that hardly seems fair.
This brings up another interesting choice that Shaheen and the filmmakers made - what to skip and what to delve into. Sadly the television program "24" was all but glossed over. I feel that the Araz Family in last year's season four would have been an excellent topic to discuss. It's post-September 11th, so it's higher profile, it deals with a family of Arab terrorists, including a teenage son who's dating a little blonde American girl.
Sounds like a compelling part of their argument.
But instead the filmmakers choose to spend quite some time discussing Network, which was made three decades ago. That was the year I was born.
At least the documentarians place this film in historical context by touching on the mid-1970s oil crisis, which gave rise to the anti-Arab sentiment in the film. They weren't that nice when it came to 1985's Back to the Future.
The villians who shoot Doc Brown in the opening of Back to the Future are Libyan terrorists. They have machine guns, a VW bus, no real dialogue, and they kill a beloved character.
Now, I'm not speaking on behalf of the writers or director of Back to the Future, I have no special insight into this film, but I can assume why the Libyans were chosen as the bad guys for the brief opening scenes. In the early 1980s Colonel Moammar al-Ghadafi and the country of Libya were widely regarded as the principal financier of international terrorism. It's believed that they financed the "Black September Movement" that partook in the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics. And in 1984 a British police constable was shot outside of the Libyan Embassy in London while policing an anti-Gaddafi demonstration. It's believed that machine gun fire from within the building killed her.
I don't think that Libyan terrorists were picked because they were Arabs. I don't think that their brief potrayal on film was paticularly racist. Had the movie been made in the mid-1990s, I bet the villans would have been some relgious zealots such as the Branch Davidians or a group of home-grown terrorists like the Michigan Militia. And they would have acted the exact same way.
The Libyans were a dominant terror group in the twilight years of the Cold War. Who else could they have been? Not Soviets, the USSR already had a nuclear bomb, why would Doc Brown have to make it for them?
It's terribly frustrating.
But the saddest part of the movie for me was that this conservative-bias took too much time from the pertinent facts. The most compelling part of the documentary is nightly news footage from the day of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. How Connie Chung et al were reporting a "Middle East connection". It's horrifying. It's saddening. It's real.
But it's not explored fully.
It's too bad the filmmakers made so many of the decisions that they did. They spent too much time dealing with antiquated movies, and not enough time with the post-September 11th Hollywood. The complete lack of voices other than Dr. Jack Shaheen's is a very poor choice, I mean, did they even ask anyone else? How about Leonard Maltin? He loves to be in everything! But seriously, it's too bad that the filmmakers didn't ask some of the writers and directors of the chosen clips why they wrote or directed these Arabs in this fashion.
While the topic is quite interesting, it needs to be discussed and studied in a nonpartisan and transparent fashion, which this film sadly isn't.
