Arab in American cinema: From bad to worse, or getting better?, The

Social Studies Review, Fall 2002 by Michalak, Laurence

There is a proverb that says "truth is stranger than fiction." However, at least in the case of the Arab world, it's not really so. The real Arab world makes sense; it is the fictional Arab world-the world of novels, cinema, television, and other media--that is strange. It includes the desert sheik abducting white women, the sorcerer on the flying carpet, the Arab oil tycoon, the tyrannical potentate, the sensuous belly dancer, the fanatical Islamic terrorist, and more. These disturbingly negative images are deeply ingrained in American popular culture. We learn from such images that the Arab is fundamentally different from "us," and this has important consequences.

This short article will examine the stereotyping of Arabs in just one popular medium, albeit an important one-that of cinema. We will analyze the image of the Arab in the movies, and how it has changed in recent years, offering some thoughts about the causes of these negative images, what (if anything) can be done about it, and what might happen in the future.

It might at first seem strange to be concerned with such images. However, images are a powerful force in shaping our national world view. Most Americans have never met an Arab--except through movies-and younger people in their impressionable years are the biggest movie fans. In 2001 there were 1.5 billion movie admissions in the U.S.-up 5% from the previous year. Movies on video are watched even more. By the mid-1990s, Americans were making 4 billion video rentals per year, bringing in roughly $8 billion to $9 billion. Old movies never die; they just go from the movie theater to the video store, prime time television, and then late night television.

CINEMA ABOUT ARABS: SUCCESSION OF GENRES

Cinema is undoubtedly the area of American popular culture that offers the richest and most detailed picture of the American stereotype of Arabs, throughout its historical development during the twentieth century and into the new millennium.

American cinema has been fascinated from its very beginnings with the idea of the Arab. Thomas Edison built America's first film studio in 1893 in West Orange, New Jersey, and one of his first films, designed for a coinoperated viewer-box, was "The Dance of the Seven Veils." Moving pictures later progressed from viewer-- boxes to theaters, spreading throughout the world-- especially throughout Europe and the United States. After World War I, with Europe in ruins, America moved into pre-eminence in world cinema--a position it has never relinquished.

In examining feature films about Arabs, we find a succession of different genres, or representations of the Arab--from desert sheik to international terrorist-which have emerged in American cinema at different historical moments.

The Sheik

Americans in the 1920s fell in love with exotic melodramas about sheiks, such as The Song of Love (1923), A Cafe in Cairo (1924), The Arab (1924), A Son of the Sahara(1924), The Desert Bride (1928), and others. The earliest and most famous of these is The Sheik (1921), in which Rudolph Valentino plays an "Arab" who abducts a white woman. This violates the established social order, under which European men can have native women, but native men, oversexed and lusting after white European woman, must be thwarted. The conflict in the Valentino movie is finally resolved when we learn that the Sheik is not really an Arab, but a European separated from his parents as a child.

The Foreign Legion

These films are closely related to the sheik genre; in them, the European is pitted against the Arab in settings of colonial encounter--especially foreign legion outposts, where French or English soldiers fight desert battles with the Arabs. The classic of this genre is Beau Geste (1926), with a plot about three English brothers who join the Foreign Legion. The common scene in these movies is the one in which waves of hostile Arabs in flowing robes and on horseback attack the Foreign Legion outpost. The Europeans are outnumbered but win with their superior weaponry, and the mostly faceless and nameless Arabs die unmourned. The European perspective and the colonial ideology are taken for granted. We know in retrospect, however, that it is the Europeans who are the usurpers and the Arabs are struggling to take back their countries.

Fantasy and Magic

This genre includes movies such as The Thief of Baghdad (1924), Kismet (1920, 1930, 1944, 1955), and The Wonders of Aladdin (1961), which present the Arab world as a fabulous land of snake charmers, monsters, great wealth, half-naked women, harems, flying horses and the like. In this genre, "Bagdad" is a projection of American fantasies, a place where Western taboos are violated and where even the laws of physics are suspended for flying carpets, magical ropes and cloaks of invisibility. The thieves and adventurers who are the main characters of these magical movies are lazy, thieving, violent and oversexed, but handsome and not without charm. Did people believe that Bagdad was really like the movie? One reviewer wrote that Bagdad "might have been shot in the lands it is supposed to picture. That it is authentic is not questioned, for clever people have aided in its making and persons who have visited some of the far away regions agree the picture is beyond criticism in that respect." (Variety, 3/26/1924).