Reel bad Arabs

Christian Century, August 1, 2001 by James M. Wall

MOVIES FLOOD our consciousness, and build a public worldview with their accumulation of stereotypes. From the silent screen shorts of the early 20th century to today's digital products, filmmakers have built on stereotypical images to reinforce what we think about one another.

Stereotypes are important to filmmakers because they provide easily recognized images that don't have to be explained in the script. Early westerns, for example, put black hats on the bad guys and white hats on the good guys to prepare viewers for a picture's final shootout. Fortunately, with the rise of political correctness and increased racial sensitivity, negative racial stereotypes that had been accepted as standard Hollywood issue began to disappear. Today virtually no mainstream films display negative or demeaning images of African-Americans, Native Americans or Jewish-Americans. There are exceptions: Italian-Americans still have to live with the problem of the Mafia as an easy organization to include in crime stories, and white, southern "rednecks" continue to appear as stereotypes in the occasional low-budget picture.

On those occasions when negative images slip through our national political-correctness screen, as was the case with Jar Jar Binks, an African-American stereotype in Star Wars: Episode I--The Phantom Menace, the protests are swift. (One "fan cut" of the film has appeared on the Internet with Jar Jar removed entirely. You can be sure that the offending figure will not return in subsequent Star Wars films.)

Pearl Harbor, this summer's failed blockbuster, tried to depict the story of the Japanese attack on Hawaii without offending Japanese sensibilities. This was not an easy task for a commercial film about the surprise and "sneaky" (no longer an acceptable term) attack on Pearl Harbor. An art film more comfortable with ambiguity could have handled the attack by including flawed characters on both sides of the battle, but Pearl Harbor was made for a mass audience. Artistic ambiguity lacks legs at the commercial box office--as the Kubrick-Spielberg film A.I. demonstrated.

In spite of changing sensitivities on racial issues, one ethnic group still provides Hollywood with a consistent set of villains. Jack G. Shaheen's Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Olive Branch Press) demonstrates in painful detail the degree to which Arabs continue to serve as bad guys in Hollywood's visual lexicon. Shaheen meticulously examined more than 900 American-made films over the past century, then wrote a historical overview of negative stereotyping of Arabs.

I became aware of Jack Shaheen's battle against media Arab stereotypes in 1978 when the CHRISTIAN CENTURY published his article "The TV Arab." He recalls that before the CENTURY published his article pointing to the negative stereotypes of Arabs on television, he had received more than 60 rejection letters over a three-year period, a testimony to both his persistence in dealing with editors and his determination to get his message out. Shaheen has subsequently published several books on the topic, including Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture, and he has served as a consultant to CBS News on Middle East affairs. He is professor emeritus of mass communications at Southern Illinois University.

I was already aware of some of the more egregious examples of negative Arab stereotypes on screen, including one that makes Shaheen's "Worst List," Rules of Engagement, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson and directed by William Friedkin. This film is based on a story by former Secretary of the Navy James Webb, and produced "in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Marine Corps." (Your tax dollars at work.) The film is set in Yemen and shows women and children killing American troops. That film, as Shaheen correctly describes it, is blatantly anti-Arab in both content and attitude.

Two recent box office hits, The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, both starring Brendan Fraser, build their comedy around an ancient Egyptian narrative. The films are especially popular among younger viewers, who are still developing their views on race. Shaheen quotes critic Anthony Lane on the first Mummy film: "Arabs have always had the roughest and most uncomprehending deal from Hollywood, but with the death of the cold war the stereotype has been granted even more wretched prominence. In The Mummy, I could scarcely believe what I was watching ... here's a party game for any producers with a Middle East setting in mind; try replacing one Semitic group with another--Jews instead of Arabs--and THEN listen for the laugh."

Shaheen's research not only turns up stereotypes in blatant examples like Rules of Engagement or the Mummy films, but also points out such elements in a distinguished film like Patton, in which George C. Scott, in the role of the American general, looks over the site of the battle of Carthage in Tunisia and recalls: "The brave Carthaginians defending the city were attacked by three Roman legions and massacred. Arab women stripped them of their tunics and their swords and lances ..." (emphasis added).