Hollywood's effect on Muslim world attitudes

By HOWARD ROSENBERG

July 14, 2003 12 AM PT

Wake-UP calls from abroad have made this a turbulent millennium for Americans. We remain stubbornly indifferent to much that occurs beyond our borders, however, even as American culture is exported globally through the media, along with Starbucks and McDonald’s, requiring others to take note of us.

It’s bracing when TV occasionally dents systemic U.S. ethnocentrism instead of nourishing it. Yet talk about a worthy concept getting clobbered by bad timing and the thunder of events.

Cable’s AMC channel tonight airs a documentary measuring the impact of American TV and movies in the Middle East, from Cairo to Baghdad-controlled Kurdistan, that was shot before the U.S. implanted itself like a panoramic palm in Iraq.

Veteran filmmaker Charles Stuart’s interviews appear to be post-9/11, and he’s added here and there a voice-over that takes into account this year’s military invasion and occupation of Iraq by a U.S.-dominated coalition.

Yet “Hollywood & the Muslim World” would have been fresher, and its Arab attitudes about the U.S. possibly even darker, had he visited the region after this year’s thrust into Iraq that deepened America’s imprint in the Middle East and Arab suspicions about its ultimate agenda.

The West’s cultural invasion began long ago, of course, with satellite technology and U.S.-made TV and movies preceding the Bush-and-Blair brigades by many years, creating a residue of “Friends” and “Terminator” zealots, along with resentment.

One of AMC’s monthly documentaries on Hollywood’s influence, Stuart’s film is admirably restrained and never shrill while stating up front: “American culture is threatening Arab and Muslim identity.”

That message emerges with clarity only after a slow, unfruitful start that has Stuart doting on an Egyptian TV diva, who has her own talk show in Cairo and imports such U.S. series as HBO’s “The Sopranos” and NBC’s “The West Wing” for her privately owned network, and an Al-Jazeera reporter who leads a tour of the controversial, Qatar-based Arab network’s impressive digs.

In a healthy development, Arab TV production does seem to be on the rise. Affirming that inanity is transportable, though, Stuart visits an Egyptian sitcom that appears every bit as low-brow as the worst of U.S. comedies. Who knew from nothing there about making a sitcom. So the producer, a former investment banker, and his associates learned from books and an Internet course how to create an American-style one. “It has to be three cuts per minute, and the scene cannot be a very long scene,” he explains.

This is Egypt, after all, so there is virtually no sex on the show. Which sets it apart from a typical U.S. sitcom. Yet a cast member says, “The point of the series is to stay away from anything controversial but simply make people laugh.” Which is exactly like a typical U.S. sitcom.

In addition to occasional support for the values that come bundled with U.S. TV and movies, Stuart turns up plenty of critics, including a pair of articulate young women he chats with in a Cairo cafe he brought them to because it’s modeled after “Friends.”

“Falcon Crest,” “Dallas” and “Knots Landing” are some of the U.S. series they grew up watching. “Everybody had like big fashion houses,” one says about those prime-time soaps, “and their biggest problem was who was going to marry which one of them. And ‘Whose son is this?’ is a major theme.”

They laugh about that but add they’re also troubled. “I don’t think Hollywood directors are intentionally ruining our youth,” one says. “But the damage is done.”

How much damage? Plenty, say students interviewed at American University in Cairo. One believes that the U.S. uses movies and TV to impose its values on other cultures. She insists it works. “Look at how we are dressed,” she says about the Western-style clothes she and her fellow students are wearing (even though the women are in head scarves). “Look at how we are sitting, how we are talking. We are being hypnotized.”

You wonder if the Arabs with Stuart would be as measured in their comments today and just when simmering bitterness becomes a rapid boil. As facile as it may seem, is there a connection between the likes of “Will & Grace” and terrorism against Americans from Muslims in the Middle East?

A young Beirut filmmaker suggests here that Muslim radicalism may be a backlash to U.S.-delivered values, because “you return blindly to your roots without realizing what you are doing.”

And an American-born journalism professor in Cairo (a Jew who converted to Islam) also maintains that “radical fundamentalism is a reaction to radical modernization” exported by Hollywood.

A related issue, still sizzling in the hot beam of 9/11 and its aftermath, is the caricature of Arabs and Muslims that Hollywood aims at Americans and sends abroad year after year.

In his perceptive book, “Reel Bad Arabs,” Jack G. Shaheen documents in detail this “systematic, pervasive and unapologetic degradation and dehumanization of a people.” It ranges from hate-filled images of Arabs as less than human to bearded, limosined, oil-rich sheiks in dark glasses wielding their billions like spiked clubs.

Outside a Cairo video store, in fact, Stuart is confronted by a 19-year-old who objects to just these images.

“You can see, we ride in cars,” the young man says. “We don’t ride camels and say, ‘Ho, ho, Allah Akbar.’ It is not true we hate Americans. We are not terrorists, and we are not fanatics. If America insults us through its media, this means it is also insulting itself, and don’t expect us to be happy about it.”

Later, an Arab woman sees a glimmer of a silver lining in 9/11. Perhaps, she says, “American people will begin to wonder, ‘Who are these people?’ ”

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at howard. [email protected].

‘Hollywood and the Muslim World’

Where: AMC

When: Tonight, 10-11

Production credits: Directed, written, produced by Charles Stuart.