Interview With Matthew Alford

Hollywood, Afghanistan, And Crackpot Realism

How can we understand Hollywood’s role in laying the groundwork for the Global War on Terror?

Hollywood has been open to Islamophobic movies from the early days of the industry, as in The Sheik (1921) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924), deploying stereotypes consistent with what the brilliant scholar Jack Shaheen (2015) called “The Alibaba Toolkit” – longshots of deserts, evil princes, kidnapped white women, and the like. These depictions were left largely unchecked until this century, although organizations like CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relations], and indeed Shaheen himself, were able to exert pressure on a handful of pictures – hence the considerable creative improvements made to the George Clooney movie Three Kings (1999), for example.

September 11th focused minds on entertainment industry depictions of Muslims, what was sometimes called “the last acceptable prejudice.” They certainly weren’t rectified but there was a small improvement, according to Shaheen’s (2015) authoritative work, and this in part came from the Bush administration making it clear to leading executives in a series of high-profile meetings early on that they didn’t want to stoke a civilizational war.

In this sense, the Bush administration did the “right” thing. But it also points to how habitually horrible the treatment of Muslims has become. Not just that, but after issuing a long list of demands to Hollywood, the government simultaneously insisted they were not trying to change content and that there was to be “no propaganda,” a classic example of George Orwell’s concept of doublethink.

Furthermore, while there is certainly a strong strain of racism in American policy, the state’s underlying imperatives are more “rational.” It – and the media – will demonize all opponents, not just ones with a differing religion. Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, and others have all been vilified in substantial entertainment products this century. The main exception is China, which will not tolerate such snubs from the USA. When Hollywood attempted to make China a villain in the 2012 remake of Red Dawn Beijing forced the producers to undertake $3 million of work to convert the villains into North Koreans in post-production.

Oh yes! I believe something similar occurred with the video game Homefront, released in 2011, where the villainous army occupying the USA was changed from Chinese to Korean (see Totilo, 2011). That’s the power of the Chinese market, I suppose. Corporations can’t risk being left out of it. Now, what about Afghanistan specifically, since that was where the War on Terror was initiated and, in many ways, where it originated with the CIA’s Operation Cyclone?

As usual, on Afghanistan, the entertainment industry follows state lines. There are