Why Are We Hollywood’s Villains? Muslims have been portrayed as villains by Hollywood movies for quite some time. I go to lots of movies; I see about 25 a year in the theater and the same number at home. I’ve seen just about every noteworthy movie made in the last 25 years, and many movies that are more footnotes than noteworthy. As such, I have fair amount of familiarity with what Hollywood has done.
One type of film that Hollywood has made huge amounts of money on, and is consistently popular year after year, is the action/adventure/suspense movie. In this type of film, a dastardly villain places a few people, or a city, or even the entire universe in jeopardy and under threat of harm. To stop the villain, the good guy must overcome impossible odds, in the process often enlist the aid of reluctant or unlikely partners, and issue a rousing speech for justice/freedom/independence/ etc. I have seen many of these types of movies, and when done well, they are tremendously entertaining. Hollywood is so adept at this type of movie that it can crank them out with its eyes closed.
The most difficult part in making these movies though has to do with the villain. Specifically, why is the bad guy bad? What is his motive? For a moviegoer, this is very important. For the movie to hold together, the bad guy must actually represent something bad or have an obviously evil motive. When we hear of a crime in the newspaper, especially a really bad crime like a multiple murder, the first thing we ask is why?
Well, for most Hollywood writers, creating a believably evil character and giving him a motivation is very difficult. Which is why many of these movies are done in historical settings where the audience can easily recognize the bad guy. Good examples include Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot” and his earlier “Braveheart” which put English imperialism in the role of the villain. Nazi Germany is the easiest target for moviemakers, because the Nazis are immediately recognized by audiences as evil, and the movie doesn’t need to explain the bad guys any more than to show them in uniform. “Saving Private Ryan”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, and my favorite movie of all time “The Great Escape”, use Nazis as the bad guys. Communism, especially the Soviet Union and the KGB made for obvious villains. James Bond struggled with them on several occasions, although lately he has taken after big businessmen or drug dealers.
The other option for Hollywood is to create a science fiction or fantasy world with an evil character that is so alien we can’t possibly understand his motivation. The Star Wars series, the greatest moneymakers of all time, featured Darth Vader, a bad guy who dressed all in black and breathed as if he was using SCUBA equipment. His motivation was a desire to “rule the galaxy”. Why he needed to do that was never explained. Another big hit was “Independence Day” where a drunk, washed-up fighter pilot destroys an alien ship that is about to annihilate all resistance on Earth. The aliens apparently came to Earth to get our “natural resources”, a ridiculous idea if you think about it for more than two seconds.
But if Hollywood tries to set an action picture in the present here and now they have a real problem. It is very hard to create a believable evil guy with a motive that makes any sort of sense. That’s partly why the serial killer movies are so common (“Silence of the Lambs”, “Seven”, “Kiss the Girls”, etc.) as serial killers are mentally deranged by definition and that’s the only motive you need to know. Money makes a good motive, but is inherently limiting. A bank robber might kill a few hostages for a million dollars, but how do you put an entire city in jeopardy over money? What’s the evil guy going to do with a hundred million dollars in small bills, buy a mutual fund? Power can be used as a motive, but only in very limited situations such as criminal suspense or government corruption movies.
The one motive, which can allow a Hollywood writer to create a massive threat, is ideology. If the bad guy has a belief that forces him to behave in a certain way, and the audience accepts that, then the writer can move on to the actual action part of the story. The last thing a writer wants to do is spend 20 minutes trying to explain to the audience why the bad guy is doing what he’s doing. With the collapse of Communism there is a real lack of ideologically motivated villains. Hollywood, especially in the last ten years, has decided to pick on Muslims as the villain of choice. A number of big Hollywood movies portrayed Muslims, particularly Arabs, as evil terrorists willing to carry out nuclear or chemical attacks on the United States. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “True Lies” and Kurt Russell’s “Executive Decision” are two particularly bad examples of this. There has also been “The Siege” with Denzel Washington which had a scene where a terrorist was tossing a bomb with one hand while holding the Quran with the other.
The reason that Muslims have been picked on is the perception that Muslims have a strongly motivating ideology that leads them to be willing to commit acts of great violence. Much of this derives from the recent history of terrorism in the Middle East, the fiery rhetoric used by some Islamic groups, and the particular interaction between the United States and Iran since the revolution. This gives the writers in Hollywood an easy out, where they can use Muslims as general-purpose villains. The fact that these notions are terrible and false stereotypes has not kept this from happening. The only way to stop this is by a strong and aggressive campaign to educate Hollywood about Islam and Muslims.
There are some in Hollywood who have bucked this trend. Several positive portrayals of Muslims have occurred recently. The character of Saleh, Indiana Jones’ Egyptian sidekick, dates from 1980. But other movies such as “Robin Hood” with Morgan Freeman playing a Muslim who has an adventure with Robin Hood in England, and the Gulf War film “Three Kings” offer positive recent portrayals. So did two recent Science Fiction/Fantasy films, “The 13th Warrior” with Antonio Banderas as a cultured Muslim adventurer with the Vikings, and “Pitch Black”, where a spaceship crash-lands on a desert planet and among the survivors is an Arab family on the Hajj to “New Mecca”.
Muslims are still usually portrayed as villains. I don’t pretend that Hollywood should act as a propaganda arm for Muslims, but it should at least play fair. Muslims should not be made villains in a movie strictly because of their religious beliefs, as that is not only wrong but also hurtful. If we are to be portrayed in films, we should be portrayed as we really are, the good and the bad, and not just used as the convenient villain of the day.
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