The emergence of new technology in the recent decades have revolutionized how people spend their leisure at the same time work. The computers are proving more modern ways of access to information and how people communicate with one another. However, the new media presents new challenges such as social control and manipulation by the social class. Today sounds, photography, film, social media posts, and spectacles are part of everyday life. Such contents dictate our leisure time, shape the social actions and political views. Most people use media culture to display their identities. Mainstream media, social media, film and other forms the culture seems to be the reference when defining what is successful or failure, male or female, and influential or powerless. It is through media culture that most people construct a sense of nationality, ethnicity, class, race, and sexuality. Furthermore, media culture outlines the prevailing views of the current world and is the most profound values. The paper aims at using the monster theory to analyze and interpret the use of Arabs as villains in most Hollywood films and how that has contributed to the anti-Arabism topic.
Humans have always theorized monsters. In most instances, the monsters are used to understand the culture that might procreate them. The theorists are taking the study of monsters to examine the different cultures presented in the world today. The enormous body, therefore, is metaphorical, and the contributors of Monster Theory believe the monsters are symbols representing the cultural unease encompassing the society, therefore, shaping its behavior collectively.
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For a long time, Arabs have been misrepresented as untrustworthy, sinister and violent nations who are majorly motivated by dominion, greed and destroying the Americans. The depiction of the Arab world in the movies is extraordinary. The representation by the Hollywood producers of Arabs seems to build a negative perception in the mind of others (Beville, 2013). One cannot say that it is by accident that most Hollywood films have a trajectory symbolizing that of United States government foreign policy. Movies in the recent past have turned into the highly capital intensive venture, and the producers of the culture industry are keen with what is trending politically and in the social spheres. Hollywood particularly during the president Reagan through to Obama time had the Arabs as an enemy and used the Arabs as Villains for political demonization.
One such film is the Iron Eagle. The film begins with an air fight between United State fighter plane and MIGs. In the process, a U.S pilot gets shot. An Arab country, not named in the film, claims that the United States airplanes had violated the air space. Another United State soldier gets captured and detained in the Arab prisons. The son of the pilot later learns to be a fighter pilot though he gets disappointed since he was not admitted into the army. The boy together with a friend and retired pilot conspire to save the captured pilot in the Arab country. With the airbase connection they got, they gather intelligence to where the father is detained, steal two Air Force plan to do the rescue. In an implausible scenario, they succeed in rescuing the father by downing half of the Arab army.
The film is very racist and portraying the Arabs as being less of humans, and villain. The Arab leader in the film resembles Saddam Hussein and depicted as a vicious and dictatorial leader. In the final scenes of the film, the leader decides to commandeer a plane to fight the Americans after having liberated the pilot, but the young boy blows the leader up. The scene is widespread in many Hollywood movies even in the current productions were scenes of destruction pleasure the audience. The audience is therefore conditioned to hunger for the destruction of enemy states like Iraq.
The second version of the film produced in 1988 is equally interesting owing to the political theme behind. The United States relaxes its war on the Soviet Union to fight an Arab enemy. The plot involves the U. S/Soviet joint project to knock out a secret nuclear bomb plant in an Arab country. The mission succeeds with the Soviet now being partners with the United States against a common enemy. The representation of Arabs in this film is disturbing and encourages racism, antimuslim in a similar way of the Jews in the fascist movies. Arabs get portrayed as the terrorist who coldly murders innocent victims with no human feeling. The Arabs equally allude as greedy and capitalists. Such stereotypes dehumanize Arabs as they get presented as criminal and violent hence an incarnation of evil while the Americans are the picture of good.
The Arabs are the monsters in the case of these anti-Arab films. The anti-Arab movies show how the artifacts of media culture are not just mere entertainment (Corner, 2013) They are thorough ideological artifacts which are bound by struggles, political rhetoric, and different policies. It is therefore vital to learn how to digest media culture politically to enable one decode the ideological messages being presented in the different films.
The war against the Iraq in the 1990s was more of cultural-political event that military. The then United States government with Bush as the president were able to conduct successful public relations from the invasion of Iraq. The media, in particular, played a major role in supporting the war by being compliant with the government thereby manipulating the public. The situation turned worse especially after 9/11 (MacCormack, 2016).
The current portrayal of Arabs has shifted from the desert dwellers to villains. Perhaps the monster in the Arabs got unleashed as a result of the negative publicity they were receiving from mainstream media globally (Naficy, 2013). There have been a lot of anti-Arabs campaigns by the citizen of major cities of the western world and Europe. Getting a visa when you are from an Arab nation may be challenging. There have been instances where people of Arab origin have been denied services in restaurants, airport or supermarkets because of the constant association of the Arabs with groups of terror.
Conclusion
One particular problem of media culture in the United States is the capitalist nature, and it is commercialized mainly for profit. If media is solely for profit, the executives of the culture tend to produce artifacts that are popular and sell to the public. Such media will serve the interest of the class with ownership of the large media. Media culture today has replaced the high culture. The visual forms are displacing the book culture; therefore a new form of literacy would be required to decode new cultures that seem to emerge more frequently.
References
Beville, M. (2013). The unnameable monster in literature and film . Routledge.
Corner, J. (2013). Theorising media: Power, form and subjectivity.
MacCormack, P. (2016). Posthuman ethics: Embodiment and cultural theory . Routledge.
Naficy, H. (2013). Home, exile, homeland: film, media, and the politics of place . Routledge.
