March 14, 2007
Iran Under Siege
From films to books to politics, nothing but crude caricatures
300 may be tops at the box office this week, but it also deserves to be tops on any critically thinking person's shitlist. Angered by how the film depicts Persians as exotic, sex-driven, and monstrously evil, Persians the world over have been signing an on-line petition protesting the film.
And its not just dumb action movies: this attitude carries over to how present day Iran is viewed. Zach Campbell points out how such hostility is evident in the questions posed to Abbas Kiarostami, Iran's premiere art house auteur, by the New York Times.
As author Fatemeh Keshavarz argues in a recent interview, even the popular image of Iran in books like Reading Lolita in Tehran are full of holes and dangerous omissions.
Film critic Jonathon Rosenbaum notes, "What Bush is choosing to call `Iran' is chiefly a narrow-minded fundamentalist like himself, not a complex society of millions of diverse individuals that is every bit as multicultural as the U.S," a multiculturalism featured heavily in Kiarostami's films.
