It was quite a surprise to see Jian Ghomeshi writing on the film Argo in the Globe and Mail the other day. But the biggest surprise wasn’t that it was Ghomeshi who was writing on film (he did after all famously stay away from the topic when interviewing Billy Bob Thornton), or that he was writing in the Globe and Mail away from his usual home at the CBC. It was that he was criticizing Argo for its negative depictions of Iranians–a bold move and one that the online readers (at least those who comment and vote on comments) reacted strongly against.

It probably also comes as little surprise that I more or less agree with Ghomeshi’s assessment. Especially after reading the original story in Wired (a very interesting and highly recommended read), I was struck by the way co-producer, director and lead actor Ben Affleck contrived the majority of drama and suspense in Argo. After a promising beginning the story seemed to falter and become episodic in its attempt to keep things moving. Some episodes are exciting and tense; but there are a number of lamentable moments. For example, Affleck’s character Tony Mendez spends a mopey night with a bottle of Scotch thinking about his boy back home before he decides to disobey his upper command’s foolish order to “pull the plug” and leave the captives to face their unsuspected doom.

Affleck being mopey

Likewise, the final chase scene was just an unfortunate directorial disaster, especially for a film that prides itself on historical accuracy (even to the point of bragging during the credits where they reveal how well they constructed actual images from the 1979 Iranian Revolution). Basically, the plot moves from tension to tension with very little reference to anything beyond the immediate tension.

But to return to Ghomeshi’s point, the most lamentable of plot contrivances involve the characterizations of Iranians. On the one hand, we learn that Iranians are fanatical and irrational to the point of violence if they get their pictures taken unwillingly; on the other that Iranians become infantile to the point of communicating not through language but rather  hand gestures and laser sounds when presented with a relic of the western imagination (ironically the story boards for the fake movie itself).

Of course, Argo does try to give some balance to the story by showing news footage of Americans beating up an innocent (I assume) Iranian man. But as Omer M. Mozaffar has cogently argued, these instances are simply pseudo-balances that allow the characterization of an entire nation to be masked:

when we watch these films, we regard that savage behavior by our people as the exception to our norm. When we watch the footage of the American young men beating up the Iranian, the first thing that comes to mind is that those punks are Rednecks, not normal Americans. In contrast, when nearly every speaking Iranian character seems to possess a gun, and if not that, then at least a determined vendetta to kill Americans, and if not that, then at least a swarthy frown, it is hard to consider that as anything except the norm.

And yet the fact remains that most people really liked the film and had no problems with the way that almost all of the Iranian characters in the film are boiled down to a single anonymous group prone to rage who serve no other cinematic purpose than to move the plot along. (I do also admit that most of the non-Iranian characters are pretty flat, with the exception of Alan Arkin and John Goodman, but at least they have names and unique motives that form their individual characterizations).

I figure that a much more interesting film would have dealt with the role that media played in America at the time. As Edward Said has tirelessly bemoaned, western media during the hostage crisis wasn’t really interested in (or perhaps capable of) understanding the complex political nature of Iran or Islamism. Instead, mainstream media helped promote an “us-vs-them” dichotomy by focusing on an Islam “writhing in self-provoked frenzy … whose manifestation of the hour was a disturbingly neurotic Iran” (Said, Covering Islam, 84).

Just a month before Argo opened to general release, the world was captured by the riots in the Middle East following the attack on the Libyan embassy and the awareness of the “Innocence of Muslims”. During these one or two weeks of “Muslim rage” I was most struck by the parallels between today’s media presentation and those criticized by Said in the 1981 and 1997. Most significantly, Middle Eastern online English papers, such as Egypt’s Ahram Online or Al Jazeera, generally presented the causes of the protests and riots as politically motivated, whereas western media generally presented the causes as religiously motivated.

Moreover, western media, almost as if they were unable to get away from the “Orientalist” discourses, couldn’t resist describing the “rage” (a la Bernard Lewis) occurring in the Middle East. Probably the most unfair (on my part) example is Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s now infamous Newsweek cover story “Muslim Rage”.

Muslims raging

Outside of Newsweek, I did note that the noun “rage” or the adjective “angry” were favored terms in more moderate media during those two weeks. For just a few examples, The New York Times title, “Angry Libyans Target Militias, Forcing Flight”, is complimented by an article on “Frustrated Protesters fill the streets in Syria’s capital”. In the Associated Press’s account there is a subsection entitled, “Peaceful but angry crowd”. And The Economist ran the story “Muslim Rage: Why they won’t calm down” with a cover picture of a silhouetted man holding a machine gun in front of a burning car. The Economist did have another article in the same issue entitled “The Rage in Spain”, but this article focused on the political issues; the article on the Middle Eastern riots addressed “Arab dysfunction”, Islam’s “inferiority complex”, and “the world’s least grateful people”.

My long-winded point with all this is really just to express how disappointed I was with Argo. It could have been a masterpiece that explored the illusions set up by American media that obfuscate the complexity of the actual events and causes as mirrored in the fake movie illusion that obfuscates the escape of seven Americans.

Well, to be honest, I didn’t really expect this level of nuance, and the only thing I can do now, as Aerosmith sings in the trailer, is to dream on.