Posted on 05/30/2002 4:49:35 PM PDT by remaininlight
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2066272
The Sum of All PC
Hollywood's reverse racial profiling.
By Reihan Salam
Posted Tuesday, May 28, 2002, at 2:41 PM PT
The threat of al-Qaida terrorist attacks is currently scaring America
stiff. But you'd be hard-pressed to find Muslim terrorists in any of
today's blockbuster action movies, which instead offer such
uncontroversial bad guys as killer aliens and abusive husbands. Why is
Hollywood shying away from al-Qaida-like villains?
Movies have always relied on politically relevant villains, from
Russian spies to South African apartheidniks to Serbian ethnic
cleansers. Tom Clancy's much-loved Jack Ryan series is the gold
standard. Based on Clancy's best-selling novels, the movies featured
hero Jack Ryan tackling the decaying Soviet empire in The Hunt for Red
October, Irish nationalists in Patriot Games, and Colombian drug lords
in Clear and Present Danger. Recently, Clancy has been credited by
everyone from former CIA Director R. James Woolsey to Fox News' Bill
O'Reilly with foreseeing the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
But in the about-to-be-released film version of The Sum of All Fears,
based loosely on Clancy's 1991 novel of the same name, Paramount
pulled a switcheroo. Clancy's original baddies were a motley crew of
unreconstructed German Communists, a Sioux convict, and—the stumbling
block—Hamas-like Palestinian terrorists opposed to the peace process.
Long before Sept. 11, these were replaced with slickly dressed,
easy-to-hate European neo-Nazis. While the basic plot remains the same
(terrorists try to spark armed conflict between Russia and America by
detonating a nuclear device at the Super Bowl, and Ryan saves the day)
the movie is, for obvious reasons, far less relevant than the novel.
It is also far more acceptable both to Hollywood sensibilities and the
Arab ethnic lobby.
Though a staple of political thrillers since the days of the Ayatollah
Khomeini, the number of Muslim terrorists on-screen has been dwindling
since the mid-1990s. Since then, groups like the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee and the Council on American-Islamic
Relations have condemned movies like 1994's True Lies and 2000's Rules
of Engagement, both of which featured violent, fanatical Muslims (as
opposed to 1996's The Rock, which featured violent, fanatical Gulf War
veterans or 2001's AntiTrust, which featured violent, fanatical
software executives). They even protested 1998's critically acclaimed
The Siege, a searing critique of anti-Arab hysteria. According to CAIR
Executive Director Nihad Awad, "The barrage of negative or
stereotypical portrayals of Muslims in this film," which presumably
refers to the movie's all-too-realistic anti-American cabal, "will
overpower any positive message."
By the time The Sum of All Fears movie was being developed, CAIR
launched a pre-emptive campaign to rid the adaptation of the novel's
Muslim terrorists ("Before we had typed a word on paper," producer
Mace Neufeld has said, "I was getting complaints.") Harrison Ford,
then slated for the lead, reportedly felt much the same way. Early
script treatments cast Timothy McVeigh-style "superpatriots" as the
heavies behind the bomb plot, not Muslims—a PC move par excellence.
Later, director Phil Alden Robinson settled on neo-Nazis, a perennial
favorite, at which point he wrote the following in a letter to CAIR:
"I hope you will be reassured that I have no intention of promoting
negative images of Muslims or Arabs, and I wish you the best in your
continuing efforts to combat discrimination." Ben Affleck, the new
Jack Ryan, has applauded the decision, arguing that "the Arab
terrorist thing has been done a million times in the movies." (As
opposed to the neo-Nazi thing?) And the terror attacks only heightened
concerns over ethnic insensitivity. In late September, Paramount
chairman Sherry Lansing expressed sympathy for "these Afghan or Arab
children in high schools who are getting picked on," suggesting that
she'd steer clear of movies with Muslim villains.
But Americans have demonstrated that they can separate a small,
violent minority from the vast majority of peace-loving Arabs and
Muslims, and a little realism in the movies wouldn't change that. This
kind of ostentatious nonracial profiling can make action movies feel
clueless and irrelevant. Besides, the real victims here may be the
chills that are supposed to run down your spine during one of these
films. With al-Qaida threatening more attacks on U.S. cities,
moviegoers may not quiver at the sight of a few more imaginary
neo-Nazis.
P.S. The author implies that Harrison Ford pulled out of the project
because of Arab pressure and script alteration?
Didn't Arnold Schwarzenegger's Harry Tasker battle Middle-Eastern terrorist types in True Lies?
There's nothing new about this kind of Hollywood prevarication. The James Bond movies took Ian Fleming's KGB villains and replaced them with a bunch of made-up villains. SPECTRE, as I recall.
Disney & Hollywood: the best reasons I can think of for reading, not viewing.
Sadly, I have a feeling the movie will be successful.
Such loquacious diction and command of the English language ...
Probably because most of them are commies or Castro-loving communist sympathizers. Bring back McCarthy...
Yeah man yeah, that DANGEROUS new rise of neo-fascists...like that Pim Fortuyn guy, man! Yeah, that's it! Forget the communists and the middle-east terrorists originally in the story, watch out for those NEO-NAZIS!
Is this supposed to be set before Patriot Games??
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