Hollywood shifted from exoticizing Arabs to presenting them as killable villains
Evidence
There is now, for example, a new wave of large-scale feature films (one of them, True Lies, Karabell reminds us, “had as its villains classic Arab terrorists, complete with glinty eyes and a passionate desire to kill Americans”) whose main purpose is to first demonize and dehumanize Muslims in order, second, to show an intrepid Western, usually American, hero killing them off. Delta Force (1985) began the trend, but it was carried forward in the Indiana Jones saga, and innumerable television serials in which Muslims are uniformly represented as evil, violent, and, above all, eminently killable. One of the changes from an old habit of exoticising the Orient in Hollywood films is that romance and charm have now been completely eliminated, as they have also been in the ninja films that pit a white (or even black) American against endless number of black-masked Orientals, all of whom get their just deserts. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 31
Categorization
- SHARE: The observation that Hollywood’s exotic Orient (romance and charm) was replaced by a killable enemy — someone who follows Bay’s True Lies and 80s-90s action films would enjoy this trajectory mapping.
Related
- Hollywood terrorism narratives frame Israel as rational and Palestinians as violent radicals (similarity 0.79)
- Twentieth-century Arab media portrayals fixated on exotic and terrorist stereotypes. (similarity 0.79)
- Arab and Muslim representation in American film has been persistently vilifying (similarity 0.79)
- More than 1,150 American films have defamed Muslims and Arabs. (similarity 0.78)