The Tales of a Modern Muslimah

This past semester (yep, it’s in the past now because grades are in), a professor said that she didn’t enjoy going to the movies much because she could always see these covert messages being sent in a film. At first, I had no idea what she meant. However, I have lately begun to see exactly what she means and I saw it most with the film Iron Man starring Robert Downey Jr., Gweneyth Paltrow, and Terrence Howard. I went to see the film with my husband this weekend. The audience for the film was a mixture. Right in front of us was a white family that consisted of a mother, four boys, and one girl. They seemed to enjoy it especially one little boys who sat in front of my husband. One scene where Iron Man killed Afghan terrorists made him jump out of his seat. Of course, there’s the whole idea of masculinity that could be discussed in that scene and in the boy’s reaction to that scene but that’s not the point of this post. For now I just want to focus on cultural messages in the film.

The first thing that leaped out at me in the film was the mixing up of cultures. The movie starts in Afghanistan. The future Iron Man is kidnapped by terrorists. When the terrorists start speaking, my husband and I notice immediately that they’re speaking Arabic. I had no idea that Arabic was now one of the official languages of Afghanistan. Maybe that’s because its isn’t. The fact that they made the characters speak Arabic instead of Pashto, Dari, or any of the other languages spoken in Afghanistan shows not only an ignorance of the Afghan people but also the really bad habit of equating Muslims with Arab culture. Now, I know Arabic is spoken by a really small percentage of Afghans but I doubt that is why writers of the film had the characters speaking Arabic. I can only imagine the director or producer saying “Well, the characters are in Afghanistan so we’ll make them speak Arabic! No one will know the difference!” For a film that cost millions of dollars to make, you would think the studio could have hired one person to google the languages most commonly spoken in the region and hired another person to actually find actors who can speak them.

The second issue I took with the film is that Iron Man’s epiphany about his weapons often come at the expense of the people of color in his film. As he is held hostage, he is taken by his captors to their stockpile of weapons. He see his company’s logo on their weapons and he has an epiphany. He realizes that his weapons are being used by the “bad guys”. His fellow captive, a man whose nationality remains a mystery throughout his brief time in the film, tells him how the shrapnel that enters the bodies of his fellow villagers, kills them in a week. For some reason this doesn’t provoke the same reaction as Iron Man learning that his weapons are being used by those terrorists. His entire ordeal makes him realize that he is making money off of misery and that he needs to stop selling his weapons. His weapons are being used to kill Americans! I guess the Afghans weren’t quite as important nor were the Japanese civilians killed by the atom bomb his dad made (in the storyline, his father worked on the Manhattan Project). This didn’t sit well with me at all because I felt that the lives of Afghan and perhaps all Muslims were being devalued. Shouldn’t his epiphany had come first by realizing the damage caused to Afghan civilians?

Iron Man does later feel some guilt when he sees an Afghan village being held hostage by those terrorists and he decides to use his Iron Man getup to kill the terrorists (the scene I referred to earlier) and save the villagers. I had two issues with this scene. The first is that this scene just completely glosses over the West’s, including America’s role, in the conflict and subsequent suffering in Afghanistan. It’s the terrorists who are ultimately the bad guys. Second, the scene reinforced the whole idea of the white man’s burden. Iron Man is the savior. He has to save Afghans from the brutish international mixture (apparently some of the terrorists spoke Hungarian too-what a joke!) of terrorists. No matter what people of color will always have to rely on America and her goodness. This is the wrong message to send to our children, especially in a world where we will all have to become more culturally aware of everyone.

I appreciate Iron Man’s anti-war, anti-weapons message (although even this isn’t without trouble since various conflicts in the film are still solved through violence and weapons). However, I do wish the message was delivered in a way that had more respect for Afghans and Muslims. For all of its liberal, anti-war messages, Hollywood still has a long way to go in giving more human and more accurate portrayals of Muslims and people of color.