Ross says:
Meanwhile, even 24, ostensibly the most right-wing hour on television, features what Martha Bayles, writing in this season’s Claremont Review of Books, terms a “timid selection of villains,” including “vengeful Serbs, a bitchy German, red-handed Mexican drug lords, a turncoat British spy, a greedy oil executive, power-mad government officials (including one president), and—once in a blue moon, when the Council on American-Islamic Relations is looking the other way—violent jihadists.”
Once in a blue moon? Really? They happen to be among the main players in no less than three of the six seasons. Even if you take the view that they were phoning it in during the sixth season and simply recycling old plotlines from earlier seasons (e.g., Arabs with nukes, the Vice President trying to force the President out via the 25th Amendment, terrorist youths in our suburbs!, etc.), 24 has assembled a small army of Middle Eastern actors and extras over the years. Perhaps the only thing more annoying than general hysteria about “Islamofascists” is the rather bizarre obsession with pretending that American pop culture has not endorsed this hysteria with gusto.
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January 15th, 2008 at 7:07 am
Kosmo
Thoroughly unpersuasive, Daniel. If the best evidence you’ve got is that half of the villains on 24–which I assume is your very best case-in-point–are Muslim, well, I’m afraid you haven’t got much of a case. Not counting docudramas, how many anti-Islamic productions have come out since 9/11? Certainly not enough to warrant the claim that “American pop culture has [] endorsed this hysteria with gusto.”
January 15th, 2008 at 8:00 am
Roach
Daniel, consider the movies. I believe movies are w here Americans form their views of the world and the past. That’s why it’s so important we’ve had umpteen movies about the Holocaust and only two or three about Communist atrocities.
Recently, the films have shown extreme cowardice. We’ve had the Peacemaker, which portrayed Russian Nationalists, and Sum of All Fears, which had neo-Nazis. Hollywood’s so afraid of offending non-white, non-Christian people that it will keep ressurecting the enemies of the past. I mean, is it too much to ask for one decent movie portraying the valor and professionalism of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan? I think the reason for this gap should be obvious: Hollywood is not patriotic and has been mired in resentment since the Vietnam War.
Some of the smaller run movies like The Enemy Within or Paradise Now do a better job of portraying the Islamic enemy as both human but also murderous, but the mainstream stuff is scared to death of “causing offense.”
Also, with respect, is it fair to say your finger is not on the pulse of popular TV and movies?
January 15th, 2008 at 8:10 am
Daniel Larison
I’m sure it isn’t on the pulse of popular TV and movies, which I generally consider a good sign, and I take all of your points. But the argument about 24–one of the bits of pop culture I am familiar with–is still ludicrous.
January 15th, 2008 at 9:10 am
cyrus
Daniel,
Even on 24, behind every Muslim terrorist is a (highly improbable) Slavofascist of the Serbian or Russian variety, and behind all of them, a greedy WASP pulling strings. Last season, it was Philip Bauer and one of the President’s advisers; the year before it was Peter Weller and the President himself; in season one, the only other I remember sufficiently well, it was Dennis Hopper as a crazed Serbian general. While 24 includes Muslim terrorists among its villains, it takes pains not to depart too much from the Hollywood orthodoxy about such things.
January 15th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Zarathustra
Only since the Vietnam War? Hollywood was, for practical purposes, the propaganda arm of the Soviet Union in the United States for decades before the first American serviceman set foot in Indochina. The same movie industry that never tired of producing film after tiresome film about the “unique” evils of the National Socialist regime seemingly could not have cared less about much more horrific slaughter perpetrated by the Bolsheviks.
Curious, is it not?