Interesting take by the LA Times (scroll about a quarter way down the page for the story).
Exploiting fear of Muslims? The far right has nothing on liberal Hollywood
I think the writer of the article has it right. It’s paradoxical that liberal producers, screenwriters, etc in Tinsel Town, while excoriating Trump and the right for their prejudices, do more to portray all Muslims in a bad light than a hundred Steve Bannons.
A fair assessment or not?
Cite for “liberal” screenwriters and producers and directors?
Considering Trump and his minions have lumped all refugees (of which the vast majority are not of the “terrorist” demographics) as possible terrorists, I rather doubt it.
Not one of the article’s pictures depict the elderly and toddlers as terrorists.
Boy, that’s a tall order.
I keep hearing that the HBO series Oz did a good job with the Muslim inmates (although I haven’t watched the series).
Actor Art Malik played a cute, cuddly terrorist (he was on our side, and the public hadn’t heard of al-Qaeda yet) in the James Bond movie The Living Daylights. Seven years later he played an un-cuddly terrorist in true Lies. I don’t think they explicitly said he was Muslim in either case, but that has to be what the audience was thinking. Was it a fair portrayal? I dunno. He’s gone on to play a lot of Middle Eastern characters, both historical and recent. At least two were Sikh, from their names.
There are infinite other characters – various Sinbads, Aladdins, and Arabian nights figures. Sometimes they are explicitly said or shown to be Muslim, sometimes not. If they are the main characters in the story they are treated like “just folks”, and the audience is expected to identify with them. I’d say in those cases they were portrayed fairly – what more would you want? It’s when Hollywood shows Muslims in relation to other faiths that they might get in trouble.
I think that in all those spectacles depicting wars – el Cid, Kingdom of Heaven, etc., the Muslim characters are portrayed as honest and respectable combatants, and are probably portrayed fairly.
but that leaves a cast number of more recent flicks, especially those set in the present day, that I’m not sure about.
There’s this scene from Slumdog Millionaire: Slumdog Muslim Scene - YouTube
Although I guess you could argue that it reinforces Western stereotypes by making it look like the brown people have been fighting each other over their religions forever and there’s no use for the civilized white people to try to get involved.
Perhaps the Hollywoodistas could make amends by a different approach.
Make films about muslims that don’t include terrorism or politics at all. Show them as they really are, no apologetics or propaganda for the faith, just the long [ translated ] prayers and those hairsplitting debates on every issue that define them, their charity and ordinary everyday life particularly in America rather than in foreign countries whose foreignness is a red flag to Americans just for existing.
Much the same could be done for Mormons, an equally fascinating crowd, or Objectivists, or Scientologists.
Persuade liberals, and the bien pensant crowd generally, it is their duty to support this, in order to be better than everyone else and to spite Trump, and to have to religiously watch every moment, even if it’s like trying to find excitement in Australian politics or Early Quaker journals of Pietist Illumination.
Profit.
Hell, “liberal Hollywood” still exploits plenty of racist and sexist stereotypes in portrayals of blacks, women, Asians, etc. Why would we expect their portrayals of Muslims not to do the same?
Show-business people may be personally liberal (though that’s not true of all of them), but that doesn’t mean they don’t still exploit stereotypes if they think audiences will like it. It’s only quite recently that large numbers of viewers have started objecting to such stereotyping, and culturally speaking it’s an aircraft carrier that will take a long time to change direction. (Not to mention that there are still plenty of viewers who don’t want it to change direction, and rail on the internet about every female action hero or interracial relationship or benevolent Muslim that they see on screen.)
I can’t think of any group that Hollywood portrays realistically.
Ethnicities are just one small example.
Incidentally, I’ve being thinking of writing a blog post about America’s overpowering love affair with doughnuts, and entitling it ‘Magnificent Obsession’; that tiresome conscientiousness compelled me to look up the original film, which I never have seen, nor will, and as suspected, it seems total tosh for women. However in one of the IMDB reviews, there was:
Hollywood may sometimes preach a gospel of altruism, but it has more difficulty practising it, and it has never been entirely comfortable with the doctrine that virtue is its own reward. Surely it must bring some more tangible rewards as well?
Which seems to tie in with comments above.
Good point; but “Muslim” isn’t an ethnicity.
In the movie Non-Stop, featuring Liam Neeson, the film specifically goes to lengths to portray an Arab Muslim passenger as a *non-threat *against the misgivings of other passengers.
Well even that plays into the false stereotype that dumb Americans automatically suspect muslims, particularly those from the Middle East.
Muslims in the Eastern European ex Ottoman countries look exactly like their christian fellows.
Who was it that said, “There is no bad publicity.”?
…it isn’t paradoxical at all. And your assessment is not fair. You just haven’t been paying attention.
You are talking about an industry that has given the best director oscar to a woman only once in the last 89 years, and where they have only ever nominated four women ever. Hollywood has had a diversity problem and it has had it for a very long time. And I’m glad you’ve come around to admitting that the problem exists.
And the reason it exists is because white men are the gate-keepers to the industry. Do you accept that? What do you intend to do about the white male problem?
As for Bannon: we should save discussion for that peice of shit for either the Elections Forum or the Pit. His alt-right minions were responsible for harassing and attacking thousands of women and people of colour during goobergate: including an attempt to dox and harass me. And now he is sitting to the right of the most powerful person in the world. “Hollywood” may not universally portray Muslims fairly. But Bannon is doing his damndest to make sure that Muslims are kept out of the United States of America. You cannot compare the two.
OP, liberals are capitalists and I suspect most Hollywood movers and shakes would be closer to brogressives than progressives. You may as well be shocked they objectify women or put out thinly veiled patriotic propaganda about the American military or the effectiveness of torture.
What exactly would be fair?
The article that the OP links to mentions shows like 24 and Sleeper Cell, which included Muslim terrorist groups. Doubtlessly there have been a sizable number of shows with Islamic terrorist groups. But you know what? There are a lot of Islamic terrorist groups. The State Department’s List of terrorist groups has a lot of Islamic groups, and relatively few others that could make good TV villains. TV is fiction, but it hardly seems unreasonable for screenwriters to ground their scripts in some amount of plausibility. Shows where Buddhists or Episcopalians plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in Manhattan might strike some folks as a bit far-fetched.
There are any number of groups that could insist on unfair portrayals. How many times did James Bond and other action heroes battle the Russians? How often did Chuck Norris kick rednecks, eco-terrorists, pot dealers, or Satan worshippers?
(Regarding Jack Shaheen who is quoted in the OP on how Hollywood is so mean to Muslims, he not only has a bit of an obsession with this issue but has elsewhere suggested that it’s those Jews in Hollywood who are causing it.)
In real life, most Muslims are not terrorists. What proportion of Muslims portrayed in movies are terrorists?
Right, the problem isn’t necessarily that there are Muslim terrorists in movies and TV, the problem is that that’s almost the only portrayal of Muslims you see. There was a good article in GQ where they interviewed a few Muslim actors, and they discuss how they can either take the terrorist roles offered or they have very little work. Off the top of my head I can think of very few roles where someone is a regular person and a Muslim, like there is one woman in the group F Society on Mr. Robot.
But also beowulff’s point is true, that a lot of groups aren’t portrayed well in Hollywood. How often are disabled people portrayed as regular people? They are usually either inspirations or burdens or just don’t appear in movies or TV. Things have gotten a bit better for gay and lesbian characters, but it seems like if there’s a bi character it’s because they are such a horndog and so they want to sleep with everyone. Trans people are rarely shown other than as a punchline. A lot of times when Asians are in TV or movies it’s as the nerd or IT guy or ninja or if it’s a woman as the sexual object.
There are no liberal screenwriters, producers or directors? Nowhere in that post do I say or even imply that all of them are liberals, and of course it would be an absurd thing to say. You have either misread my post or misunderstood it.
What you said was:
Leading to the question of whether or not liberal producers, screenwriters, etc are creating these portrayals and if you can show evidence of it.
But, all that said, it’s not especially surprising. Hollywood runs on tropes and formulas and, if you need a bad guy, it needs to be someone who is (a) plausible in the popular psyche and (b) not going to cause a backlash that hurts your product. We’ve spent the last 16-odd years hearing about Muslim terrorists and no one seems to especially care if we portray them that way so that’s what Hollywood goes with. Russians are out-dated and too many people in the Chinese market to risk not selling movies there. Screenwriters can be as liberal as the day is long – they don’t have the $300mil to make the film so their opinion still comes a distant second.