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Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. 50 minutes. 2007. Jack Shaheen. Sut Jhally, Director. Media Education Foundation. (800) 897-0089. Purchase: $250.00.
Professor Jack Shaheen has spent his career studying the stereotypes of Arabs in popular culture. The production of a DVD directed by Sut Jhally, based on Shaheen's (2001) book of the same name, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, is a natural product of Shaheen's work. In the mid-80s, Shaheen published The TV Arab, a book focusing on the ways in which Arabs were portrayed in television up until that time. That book, however, scarcely scratched the surface of this complex topic of Arab stereotypes. In Reel Bad Arabs, Shaheen seems to have left no film unnamed. In the book he examines the ways the Arab has been portrayed throughout film history, looking mostly at American films but also at some non-American films. The book consists of a 38-page introduction followed by over 500 pages summarizing over 900 movies. The 50-minute DVD includes
Shaheen's commentary which he illustrates with dozens of clips from the movies he discusses. Shaheen makes two significant points in the DVD: First, Arabs have been repeatedly stereotyped in negative fashion from the beginning of the twentieth century (the "most vilified" ethnic group, he claims), and, second, these stereotypes reflect a very specific political perspective.
Regarding the first point, Shaheen demonstrates how Arabs are depicted as money hungry, greedy, sex-crazed, and violent. Often stupid, also, as in the famous shootout scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Arab assassin is brandishing a huge sword in a menacing fashion and the hero, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) merely pulls his gun and shoots the assassin, then walks away. Shaheen details the huge difference between the "real" Arab and the "reel" Arab, pointing out how Hollywood has developed a place called "Arab-Land" and has peopled it with actors in "instant Ali Baba kits," which he summarizes as "billionaires, bellydancers, and bombers." This image, gready intensified in the past fifty years, began in earnest just before World War Two. Professor. Shaheen argues that America...