What I found to be most interesting was Walt Disney’s depiction of the protagonists and antagonists in Aladdin. Jasmine and Aladdin, unlike the rest of their village, speak English very well, which lead me to identify with them and not the other characters. Another disappointingly inaccurate prejudice was served to me through the film score. Never have I realized how demeaning the introduction song, Arabian Nights, was because as a child I just went along with the program. Here is an excerpt of the song:
“Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place
Where the caravan camels roam
Where they cut off your ear
If they don't like your face
It's barbaric, but hey, it's home”.
Knowing my love of film scores, this newly found information lead me to feel shameful and outraged; I had never stopped to acknowledge the inhumane aspects of what the media forced into my seven-year-old mind or even my mind today. Another movie I’ve seen with more false apprehensions of Middle Easterners is the Mummy. Brendan Fraser played the protagonist role and Arnold Vosloo was the antagonist, the Egyptian mummy. In one of the scenes, the protagonist and his team of mummy fighters fought to protect the damsel in distress, played by Rachel Weisz, from disease rampant Arabians, forced allies of the Mummy. Before watching Reel Bad Arabs, I thought nothing of the way Hollywood depicted the characters in The Mummy; this movie was an exciting, adventurous fantasy and I loved it. However, now that my eyes have been opened to the unjustly provocative depictions of Arabians, they have also been opened for every social group I’m familiar with.
Of all the many comments from Dr. Jack Velenti about the way Arabians are falsely depicted in Hollywood movies, the most important comments were about the way American society depicts themselves in these movies. For the most part, the American character is always the protagonist or the beautiful damsel in distress; the American character’s intelligence, hygiene, charm, and overall health is much more superior than the primitive Arabian character. American women are portrayed as more attractive and more independent than Arabian women. Since Hollywood is using the American cultural values and ideologies to depict a completely different country, American society can view the other country as negatively as they feel necessary. These comments were the most memorable to me because I had never thought about why Hollywood would depict Americans as the more superior country; seems to me that America has a self-esteem issue.
Although 9/11, I believe, is used as fuel to continue the prejudices and false portrayals of people from the Middle East, the choice to do so is nonsensical; the consequences for the actions of nineteen Saudi Arabians should not be the burden of an entire social group. People should be identified with their life’s story, not by the commonalities of their ethnicity because no one person is the same. Popular culture is more harmful than helpful to society in some aspects. When a society creates a social group, the individual who belongs to the group has no other choice than to play that role until it is changed.
In the end Dr. Velenti expressed his optimism for the transformation of the villainous depiction of the Middle Eastern world. His confidence comes from previous cultural changes in history with African Americans, Jews, and even Russians. Personally, I totally agree with him on every possible level. America’s popular culture will one day accept people in general as just people and not as representations of their social groups.
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