The Trump administration is seeking to demonize Iran. Hollywood has been doing that for years.
/Full article in the Washington Post
There was the time that Iran pursued a secret nuclear-weapons program with North Korea and possibly facilitated the killing of dozens of people at CIA headquarters.
There was the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when an entire country of religious fanatics supported an attempt to kidnap Americans.
Then there was the Iranian doctor who duped his American wife into bringing their daughter to his birth land so he could cruelly hold them hostage.
These might sound like tales spun by anti-Iran hawks in the U.S. government. But they come from a more unlikely source — they are some of the most prominent stories Hollywood has told about Iran in recent years.
As tensions between the United States and Iran percolate — over incidents such as the killing of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian rocket response, the apparently accidental Iranian downing of a Ukrainian airliner, and President Trump’s announcement of new sanctions against Iran — some U.S. politicians have painted the country as a land populated entirely by anti-American fanatics.
But the image may have nearly as many roots in Hollywood as in politics. U.S. entertainment companies have for decades been using Iran as a go-to villain, portraying a country bloodthirstily and monolithically interested in bringing down America.
Some of the stories are fictional, with Iranians chosen by screenwriters as the villain for little apparent reason. Even the fact-based tales tend to whitewash good Iranians; the viewer is given the impression the country contains only radicals and bad actors.
Experts say these types of stories (the above come from the Showtime hit “Homeland,” the Oscar best-picture winner “Argo” and the Sally Field film drama “Not Without My Daughter”) have helped shape U.S. public sentiment and, perhaps, even public policy.
“The portrayal that Hollywood has been putting out for a long time is that Iran is not just a place of bad leaders or regimes but a nation of terrorists, radicals and bad guys — that this is the entire culture,” said Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian American professor at Rutgers University and the founder of the think tank the American Iranian Council, which aims to foster understanding between the countries. “That’s poisoned how a lot of Americans think about Iran, especially people who are too young to remember it before the revolution.”
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