Reel Bad Arabs

In the movie, Reel Bad Arabs, narrated by the author of the book with the same name, Jack Shaheen, the audience is shown how Hollywood has vilified the Arabian people.  These stereotypes have been seen in everything from Indiana Jones to Disney movies like Aladdin.  Hollywood seems to have a vendetta against the Arabian people in the way they are so staunchly against the idea of a good Arabian character. 

“Where they’ll cut off your ear if they don’t like your face/it’s barbaric but hey, it’s home.”  First, when I was a child and saw the movie Aladdin, I did not realize how Disney, a company that has portrayed itself for decades as the epitome of wholesome family entertainment, could objectify an entire race of people like that.  I am sorry to say that if I had not seen Reel Bad Arabs I most likely would not have recognized that from a very early age, after watching the antagonists in Aladdin, that my impressionable brain was already imprinting a negative stigma towards Arabs.  My brain began stereotyping all Arab men as having beards, large noses, husky voices as well as an aggressive demeanor while Arabian women were weak, helpless and submissive against their male counterparts.  It is strange to think about how I have an index for my childhood when I think about Aladdin, not how Arabian people are being disrespected.  I guess that is the entire point of this movie.

Second, I found it extremely interesting about how Reel Bad Arabs touched on the issue of politics and Hollywood.  I knew that America had never waivered in its support of Israel but I never saw the conflict from the Palestinian point of view.  As they as are constantly being depicted as terrorists in American cinema, the American people never see the plight the Palestinians face at home.  Furthermore, most media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is pro-Israeli so even on TV there is prejudice. With all of this media saying that each Palestinian is a criminal or extremist, it is hard to go against and ask people to look at the conflict differently; especially since society chose with whom to ally years ago. 

In the movie Rules of Engagement, marines are sent into Yemen, a country in the Middle East, to help evacuate the U.S. Embassy because of demonstrative protests.  While they are there, they open fire on a seemingly peaceful crowd of people.  However, as the lawyer for the marine, played by Tommy Lee Jones, dives deeper into the case, in a twist, he realizes that the Yemeni people in fact fired upon the marines first.  Even the little, innocent girl, with one leg was involved in the shootings against U.S. marines.  This shatters all the purity of the Arabian people up until this point in the movie therefore shattering the trust of the audience. This message will be interpreted by the audience as all Arabians are untrustworthy terrorists and anti-American, including women and children.  This will lead to a greater disconnect between Americans and Arabs.  With 9/11 happening a year after the release of this movie, I am sure that screenwriter James Webb, former Secretary of the Navy, was pleased with the fire that he ignited under the American people. 

The American film industry is so cavalier with its negative portrayals of Arabs and Arab culture for many reasons.  First, there needs to be an antagonist, so why not pick one that Hollywood has been using since the creation of cinema.  Second, people already have a negative stigma attached to Arabian people so the audience will be able to relate to the film and perceive it as real life easier.  Third, it would not be tolerated for these types of stereotypes to exist in films so constantly if the ethnicity of the attacks were directed towards Jews, Catholics, Irish, Africans or anyone else.  If the antagonists were always Irish, people would have a hard time relating to the film because one cannot simply pick out an Irishmen from a crowd.  However, it is fairly easy to pick out a person from Middle Eastern descent based on the stereotypes that are prevalent through media culture.  The larger socio-political consequences of representing Arab culture in such a negative light are as I have previously said.  The negative stigma and stereotypes will only become more and more prevalent as more films are made like this. No good can come from singling out one race to pick on while the rest of the world laughs. 

I was shocked by the amount of movies that I had seen from this list and yet never recognized the horrible effects of this type of cinema.  To name a few, I have seen Aladdin, Protocol, Back to the Future and Indiana Jones.  When I first saw these movies, I believe that I was judging the films based on the world around me.  Even though these movies came out before I was born and 9/11, I did not see them until after and therefore accepted the stereotypes as being accurate and current.  I would watch the news every night and see the conflicts in the Middle East and relate them back to the antagonists of these films and come to the conclusion that all Arabs must be like that.  After viewing Reel Bad Arabs, I am ashamed of the way that my country has shown Arabs and their culture.  I am also embarrassed of the way I gobbled up these movies as being real, true and factual. 

We can learn from Reel Bad Arabs the lesson that if a message, such as that all Arabians are terrorists, is constantly being imprinted into our minds we will begin to believe it to be true.  Also, that groupthink is extremely powerful and that we must always be open to new and alternative point of views or we will classify a people based on a few persons. 

Ultimately, we can all agree that Arabians have not been given a fair shake in terms of what is shown on the silver screen.  We must change the way we feel about the Arabian world around us and begin to see cinema as a story and not identifying it as real life.