Hollywood replaced real captives with a white-virgin and dark-monster binary built to titillate

Evidence

Filmic Barbary monsters are numerous, and include the 1975 Sean Connery-Candice Bergen movie The Wind and the Lion. The film is loosely based on the 1904 kidnapping of Jon Perdicaris and his father-inlaw, Cromwell Varley, who, when released by their captor, described their lodgings to the New York Times as “Mr. Perdicaris’s Summer Home.” Their captor Raisuli was described as “a tribal gentleman of the old school, lodging his captives in a magnificent tent and dining with them each evening.” In the film, these details are transformed, starting with “the balding businessman Joe Perdicaris,” who “is transmogrified into a nubile Candice Bergen.” The captor (played by Sean Connery) beheads people with a smile and a wink while uttering Arabic phrases like “Bismillah.” Even though he does not rape or murder the Perdicaris family—a widow and her two innocent children all dressed in white—the threat is ever present. Bergen’s character’s white virginal dress, juxtaposed to her captor’s dark skin and clothing, is an example of the “chromatic sexual hierarchy” utilized in many films, in which the “white woman is desired” and is “made captive and virtually raped.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 593

Categorization

• XREF: Strongly echoes the medieval ‘white maiden carried off by Saracen’ motif (fits the book’s own earlier chapters) and the contemporary complaint-about-immodesty thread on how white female virtue is weaponized as a boundary marker.
• SEED: A piece comparing the real Raisuli kidnapping — reported in the New York Times as a polite hostage situation at a ‘summer home’ — with its cinematic transmogrification into a rape-threat drama shows how completely the projection replaced the event.