‘Sinister Muslim’ stereotype fades.
Muslim voices are finally being heard by and from Hollywood, and it’s in Tinseltown’s best interest to listen.
Negative stereotypes of Muslim characters date to at least the black-and-white era, but by the 1990s and the end of the Cold War, one-dimensional Muslim terrorist characters were the generic “bad guy” in countless movies and television shows, including True Lies (‘94) and Executive Decision (‘96). Even the cartoon Aladdin (‘92) portrayed villains with Middle Eastern accents while the hero and heroine had standard American voices.Such repeated portrayals have colored public perceptions of Muslims and Middle Easterners. The events of 9/11 crystallized and, for some, affirmed the stereotype. But nearly a decade later, Hollywood seems to be changing its tune toward Muslims and Arabs.
It’s about time.
Recently, especially on television shows, Muslim characters are being treated differently. On 24, federal agent Jack Bauer protects the U.S. against terrorist attacks, but those attacks aren’t all coming from stereotypical Muslim characters anymore.
cbarwa 1:05 am on December 15, 2009 Permalink |
I dunno about this, don’t quite agree with Jack Sheehan’s thesis about Hollywood and Arabs – though I think his ‘Reel Bad Arabs’ is well worth a read. The general protrayal of Arabs in particular is so thoroughly racist, it is depressing. Hard to think of a movie where Arabs are humanised effectively from Hollywood, even movies that are meant to do this, like “The Kingdom” or “Three Kings” set up a rather simplistic good Arab-Bad Arab dichotomy, with the “good Arabs” inevitably being those who help the White Christian protagonists of the film. I haven’t seen ‘Sleeper Cell’ but it sounds awful to tell the truth.
Portrayal of Muslims are somewhat better, I quite liked the ones in the series ‘Oz’ since it covered issues of homphobia, Islamophobia and racism head on, without providing any easy solutions. Liberal American imagination has always struggled with this, I just saw the DVD of the series ‘Over Here’ about an infantry unit in Iraq, which implausibly has an Arab-American as one of the members of a combat platoon on a tour of duty there. It makes an effort to be balanced (by Bochco of NYPD Blue fame) but some of the stereotypes made me wince.