On the
heels of the Golden Globes and in anticipation of The Academy Awards, Rob
Kall's excellent piece on the big winner this awards season being the
Military/Security Complex perfectly summed up my feelings about the overwhelming propaganda that passes
for normal in today's major Hollywood films and television. His assertion that
the big winner at the Globes and in Oscar nominations was the CIA got me
thinking about why films like Zero Dark Thirty (basically a co-production with
the U.S. military/intelligence services) turn my stomach, and yet I admit
thoroughly enjoying Argo , a CIA romp if ever there was one.
I
thought Argo
was the best film I saw in 2012... and I did not expect to think that, based on
the "glorification' of the CIA and the 'demonization' of the Iranians,
given what was going on in the news (the escalations of hostilities over Iran's
alleged nuclear weapons program) when it was released. In fact, given the endless stream of
anti-Iranian sentiment in mainstream media recently, I was ready to dismiss Argo as yet another log on the fire of
American jingo.
However,
the film began winning me over in the first few minutes, as it gave a
straightforward political lesson: these people were really angry, they were
really angry with us, and, considering what we did, they had every reason to
be. As other critics have said,
it's unfair and nearly impossible to give a two-minute synopsis of two hundred
years of political and cultural developments, but it might have been the first
American film I've ever seen, outside of maybe JFK, that refreshingly didn't
present the political situation in a vacuum or totally from the biased America-can-do-no-wrong
side.
Argo 's introduction is an historical recap, simplistic as it may be, that we, meaning the United States and The UK, meaning the CIA " orchestrated a coup in a sovereign country. As if that wasn't egregious enough, in doing so, we replaced a democratically-elected and popular Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, (who of course supported the idea of kicking out the petroleum companies who were literally siphoning out the natural wealth of the country) and replaced him with a reluctant "vacillating coward" in Reza Shah Pahlavi who kept protected the oil companies, ruled the country with a security/intelligence service that rivaled anything East Germany or the Nazis could come up with and we did it all in such a way that, although it might not have been newsworthy here in the U.S., it was acknowledged in Iran that the Americans executed and paid for the Shah's return to power to protect its oil interests. The shameless and brazen American intervention put in power a dictator who brutalized his subjects and did it in the name of America and its allies, the multinationals. See here.
In that
context, if you are an American with an ounce of objectivity, it's impossible
not to at least understand where the student-led protests were coming from and
why their anger was directed at us.
It seems simplistic to say: but I can only shudder to think what
Americans would have done if the roles were reversed. Iran is no backwater, stone-age medieval country. Its citizens cannot be dismissed as a
swarm of uneducated religious nutcases and, to its supreme credit, Argo doesn't reduce them to that level.
The
Iranians in the film are at times depicted in varying shades of violent, kind,
clueless, smart, incredibly devoted and creative in problem-solving. Some are enterprising in a way that
defies their own political and religious beliefs and some are unexpectedly kind
for reasons that only they can explain.
In short, they're like real people.
Funny
thing is, for a CIA movie, the CIA and White House are hardly portrayed as
do-gooders whose motivations are always pure. There are plenty of gung-ho types back in Washington and a
White House portrayed as alternately dismissive, willing to sabotage the Argo
plan if it conflicts with their own rescue mission, and then capable of doing
he right thing by, finally, authorizing the CIA's rescue plan.
Of
course, not everyone agrees with my take.
Ben Affleck, speaking last year to Huffington Post said it best: " I tried to make a movie that is absolutely just factual.
And that's another reason why I tried to be as true to the story as possible --
because I didn't want it to be used by either side. I didn't want it to be
politicized internationally or domestically in a partisan way. I just wanted to
tell a story that was about the facts as I understood them. And what that meant
was probably two people with different political perspectives would walk away
with two different interpretations."
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