Dehumanizing film narratives grant viewers a perceived right to kill the Other.

Evidence

Hollywood films often feature Muslim “savages” who are exterminated like flies. In True Lies (1994), Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a CIA agent who fights a legion of Arab terrorists who are killed with impunity. To be clear, these are not Muslim monsters: they are human characters (bad humans, but humans nonetheless). Still, the punishment of the Arab bodies is disturbing. Avi Nesher, a former Israeli commando who works in Hollywood as a consultant, “incensed by the sick humor of a scene in which an Uzi tossed down a flight of stairs inadvertently mows down a roomful of Arabs,” had this to say about the scene: “You were supposed to laugh? I fought Arabs and I had Arab friends, but this was completely dehumanizing a group.” This type of film narrative dehumanizes Muslims and helps validate the claim that we have a right to be violent toward the Other. Talal Asad calls this “the right to kill,” which is “the right to behave in violent ways against other people—especially citizens of foreign states at war and toward the uncivilized, whose very existence is a threat to the civilized order.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 629

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: Angle: mass-casualty comedy violence as a litmus for whose bodies are expendable—comparing True Lies with similar scenes targeting white bodies.
• XREF: The ‘right to kill’ connects to the reader’s thesis that the monster figure licenses violence against its makers’ dehumanized objects.
• QUESTION: How does the distinction between ‘monster’ and ‘dehumanized human’ shift the moral weight of fictional violence?

Related

• Cinematic dehumanization of Muslims legitimizes violence as a right (similarity 0.96)