Argo Synopsis:
On Nov. 4, 1979, militants storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, taking 66 American hostages. Amid the chaos, six Americans manage to slip away and find refuge with the Canadian ambassador. Knowing that it's just a matter of time before the refugees are found and likely executed, the U.S. government calls on extractor Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) to rescue them. Mendez's plan is to pose as a Hollywood producer scouting locations in Iran and train the refugees to act as his "film" crew.
Throughout the film, Iranians are often portrayed as a mass of violent religious fanatics. It is a meticulously depiction of America’s giant question mark of the Middle East, “Why do they hate us?” Ben Affleck has repeatedly stated that the movie is just a movie, and worries that the movie might be politicized. However, why would these be anything but attempts to take the moral high ground?
The main character is portrayed as a heroically bearded CIA agent saving hostages and American pride. An innocent, white, western David beating up the ugly, otherly, monstrous oriental Goliaths and overcoming all odds and winning. The plot caters to the home audience’s desire, or fetish even, to glory and vanquish the ‘villain’ of the terrorists. Not only that, it adheres to the post-9/11 image of Islam where characters serve only to re-assert existing stereotypes put into play recently. The movie describes the enemy of Islam as monolithic, black to the hero’s white, pejorative, archaic, primitive and ignorant.
On Nov. 4, 1979, militants storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, taking 66 American hostages. Amid the chaos, six Americans manage to slip away and find refuge with the Canadian ambassador. Knowing that it's just a matter of time before the refugees are found and likely executed, the U.S. government calls on extractor Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) to rescue them. Mendez's plan is to pose as a Hollywood producer scouting locations in Iran and train the refugees to act as his "film" crew.
Throughout the film, Iranians are often portrayed as a mass of violent religious fanatics. It is a meticulously depiction of America’s giant question mark of the Middle East, “Why do they hate us?” Ben Affleck has repeatedly stated that the movie is just a movie, and worries that the movie might be politicized. However, why would these be anything but attempts to take the moral high ground?
The main character is portrayed as a heroically bearded CIA agent saving hostages and American pride. An innocent, white, western David beating up the ugly, otherly, monstrous oriental Goliaths and overcoming all odds and winning. The plot caters to the home audience’s desire, or fetish even, to glory and vanquish the ‘villain’ of the terrorists. Not only that, it adheres to the post-9/11 image of Islam where characters serve only to re-assert existing stereotypes put into play recently. The movie describes the enemy of Islam as monolithic, black to the hero’s white, pejorative, archaic, primitive and ignorant.
Due to the inherently covert nature of the operations of the CIA, the details of the rescue are still enmeshed in a web of misinformation, other than what the agency released in 1997. Because Argo preoccupies itself with suspenseful storytelling and weaving an entertaining adventure, depicting a generic Middle Eastern environment. The film achieves its goal in creating this suspense and excitement, but along the way alters many details and adds faux narrative elements, most of which infantilize, demonize, or provide a derogatory impression of the Iranian people. Argo leads the casual viewer to think that the seemingly fanatic crowd outside the embassy was representative of Iran overall, which it most certainly was not. The only Iranians in the movie who did not seem to be from Khomeini’s faction are incompetent bureaucrats.
Argo presents a country of more than 35 million (at the time) exclusively through the lens of terrorism, public executions, and as bearded man shouting so fanatically and hysterically that they spit flies out of their mouth, and one seemingly untrustworthy lonely servile female housekeeper. Through this unbalanced depiction, viewers forego the basic humanity that Iranians share with the rest of the world. Indeed, Argo reduces a century of Western antagonism of Iran—from exploiting its oil to overthrowing its democratic regime and supporting a tyrannical leader—to a few minutes at the most. It does keep in mind that the Shah’s regime often tortured dissidents, but it uses cartoons to illustrate this, dampening the effect substantially and making it seem negligible. More troubling is the juxtaposition of mentions of the Shah’s attempts to “Westernize” Iran (minus freedom, rights, and democracy, of course) with shots of irate protesters outside the American embassy in Tehran. Through this, Argo gives the impression that the protesters were there because the Shah wanted to force them to wear blue jeans—not because of torture, dictatorship, repression, or widespread inequality and poverty. This is massively misleading, feeding into a cultural explanation for the revolution that ignores the obvious political dimensions.
The Iranian crowds are depicted in the film as irrational mobs. The Revolutionary Guards at the airport are depicted as angry puritans, worried about Marvel artist Jack Kirby’s somewhat salacious storyboards for the proposed “Lord of Light” film that the CIA optioned for the operation (based on a novel by Roger Zelazny). No Iranian character in the film who has a legitimate grievance against US policy is permitted to be sympathetic or to have any intimate moments that would humanize him or her.
Argo presents a country of more than 35 million (at the time) exclusively through the lens of terrorism, public executions, and as bearded man shouting so fanatically and hysterically that they spit flies out of their mouth, and one seemingly untrustworthy lonely servile female housekeeper. Through this unbalanced depiction, viewers forego the basic humanity that Iranians share with the rest of the world. Indeed, Argo reduces a century of Western antagonism of Iran—from exploiting its oil to overthrowing its democratic regime and supporting a tyrannical leader—to a few minutes at the most. It does keep in mind that the Shah’s regime often tortured dissidents, but it uses cartoons to illustrate this, dampening the effect substantially and making it seem negligible. More troubling is the juxtaposition of mentions of the Shah’s attempts to “Westernize” Iran (minus freedom, rights, and democracy, of course) with shots of irate protesters outside the American embassy in Tehran. Through this, Argo gives the impression that the protesters were there because the Shah wanted to force them to wear blue jeans—not because of torture, dictatorship, repression, or widespread inequality and poverty. This is massively misleading, feeding into a cultural explanation for the revolution that ignores the obvious political dimensions.
The Iranian crowds are depicted in the film as irrational mobs. The Revolutionary Guards at the airport are depicted as angry puritans, worried about Marvel artist Jack Kirby’s somewhat salacious storyboards for the proposed “Lord of Light” film that the CIA optioned for the operation (based on a novel by Roger Zelazny). No Iranian character in the film who has a legitimate grievance against US policy is permitted to be sympathetic or to have any intimate moments that would humanize him or her.
In fact, a film is being sponsored by the Iranian government to rectify what it says are numerous distortions of Argo. On its release, “Argo” was condemned by Iranian officials as being anti-Iranian rather than telling the story from an unbiased perspective. Argo serves as an example of a supposedly modern movie moving modernization of realities backwards. The movie industry must catch up with modern day realities and global responsibilities. By making Iranians into a monolithic group of angry religious fanatics—in effect, easy villains--Argo fails abjectly.
The film tells but doesn’t show some of the US atrocities in Iran. It showsthe plight of the hapless US diplomats. In making that key dramatic decision, and then in Orientalizing the Iranian protagonists as angry and irrational, the film betrays its subject matter and becomes propaganda, lacking true moral or emotional ambiguity. Roger Zelazny’s and Jack Kirby’s “Lord of Light” would have been more nuanced.
…History cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that “we” might inscribe our own future there and impose our own form of life for these lesser people to follow.
—Edward Said
The film tells but doesn’t show some of the US atrocities in Iran. It showsthe plight of the hapless US diplomats. In making that key dramatic decision, and then in Orientalizing the Iranian protagonists as angry and irrational, the film betrays its subject matter and becomes propaganda, lacking true moral or emotional ambiguity. Roger Zelazny’s and Jack Kirby’s “Lord of Light” would have been more nuanced.
…History cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that “we” might inscribe our own future there and impose our own form of life for these lesser people to follow.
—Edward Said