Reel Bad Arabs Film Review
Directed by Sut Jhally
IMDB Top Documentary Films My Rating
7.6/10 7.9/10 ✰✰✰
Based on a book written by Jack Shaheen, "Reel Bad Arabs" is a short documentary depicting how Arabs or people generally from the Middle East are depicted in American mainstream Hollywood films. The short documentary shows how these demeaning and violent images of Arabs are harmful to people from Middle Eastern descent and essentially demonizing them. This wasn't anything entirely new to me but the movie examples and clips that were used really gave strong evidence in just how many times these concerning and racist stereotypes are being used over and over again. We truly only see very few archetypes of Middle Eastern characters and none of them really describe real people and depict them as less than human.
The documentary goes more into the background of where these stereotypes come from and how they have changed based on political climate and current events going on in the world. Earlier depictions of Arabs in cinema were more mystical and sensual before the threat of terrorism from the Middle East rose and fear began to change how we viewed people from the Middle East. Shaheen narrates 3 political events that shaped the Western world's depictions of Arabs from mystical to purely violent: the Israel/Palestinian tensions, the Iraqi oil conflicts, and the Iranian Revolution. Western cinema's depictions then turned towards violence and intolerance based on the agenda and support of a certain side of all of these conflicts. In the Israel/Palestinian situations, the United States is outspoken about its support of Israel and therefore sees the Palestinians as the perpetrators rather than the victims of having their country invaded and being thrown into refugee camps. In the Iraq oil situations the United States sent over troops to Iraq in a war that would last for 8 years. And lastly, (as noted in the film Iranians are not necessarily Arabs but are lumped in anyways) the Iranian Revolution further agitated the United States with the Hostage Crisis. These are very oversimplified summaries of events that changed Hollywood to harsh depictions of extreme violence from Arabs.
This documentary brought up a lot of questions about stereotypes that may have flown under the radar for some and not realizing that the amounts of islamophobia, false information, and general ignorance shown to us in the theaters. One thing that affected the documentary's impact was it didn't go into more detail about the behind the scenes of how these movies set in the Middle East are made and what their agenda for the film is, what casting choices may have been made, and scriptwriting that gives a much more malicious impact. Was it intentional to depict Arabs this way or is it a result of a lack of knowledge about these conflicts and the countries? More information would have given the short documentary a much stronger hitting impact but I still think it got the point across well regardless.
The main takeaway questions from the documentary are how can we avoid these stereotypes and depict Middle Eastern people in a humanizing and fair manor? And are these depictions improving in modern day cinema? In our current political climate it may seem like these unfair ignorant depictions of the Middle East continue with Trump's "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry" bill banning people from "Muslim countries" from entering the United States and further spreading the fear of Islam and people from these countries in the United States. It may seem like these stereotypes and ignorance are here to stay but more and more people are lashing back and calling out the unjust grouping together of people and continuing to dehumanize them as a result. We still rarely ever see any characters from the Middle East much like we see diversity for other ethnicities in modern cinema so this is still a work in progress. We have our token people of color that activists petition for so we can see diversity in the media and yet we STILL don't see Middle Eastern characters in a "diversified" TV series or film. When will we ever see a Middle Eastern character depicted in an accurate way?
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