This post is a response to a posting over here at Man, Robot, Monster about depictions of Arabs on television. The initial question, posted on another blog, was "where are the positive Arab characters in movies/on tv?"
This was my off-the-cuff comment. Standard disclaimers about boring political discussions etc.
I remember a discussion I had in high school with some black friends. One of them told me "Before we started going to the same school with y'all, we thought white people were all like 'the Brady Bunch.' "
Besides going a long way towards explaining a sort of reflexive distrust for the mysterious ways of white people (I hated those damn precocious blonde rich kids too, and I certainly didn't feel they reflected my experience), it also highlighted something that I've been thinking about ever since. In a nutshell, it's this: TV does not exist to make the world a better place or to promote understanding between races or in any way enhance the overall well-being of its viewers. Commercial TV is intended to sell people products. It does this by selling fantasies.
This is the light I shine on any discussion of how there need to be more positive portrayals of this or that group on TV in order to promote understanding between the races. I ask myself if black people ever sit around and say "You know, things really turned the corner for us when Good Times came out." Or "Yep, before Good Times and the Jeffersons, things really were bad in the inner city. Thank God for TV and its incredible healing powers. Then Cosby came along and finished the job. Now there's no more poverty and racism, because that show allowed white people to see we're just like them!"
When the show Friends was popular, I realized early on that it was aimed squarely at my demographic. Urban middle class white singles in their late twenties/early thirties struggling to get by, to find rewarding work and love etc etc. Poor in wealth but rich in friendship. Or something. Except, of course, for the hilarious disconnect when you realize what the apartment they live in would actually cost in Manhattan. Ditto the shoes they are wearing. Or the haircuts. And nobody is fat or unattractive! Well, nobody who matters anyway.
Research has shown that our brains recognize faces we see on TV pretty much the way we do the faces of real people, and that even though we consciously realize that TV is not real, on some level our brains are internalizing those faces as social contacts. So naming a show "Friends" is weirdly appropriate. On a subconscious level, that's what those characters are to us. Except of course they are funnier, better-looking and richer than our real friends. And the more time we spend with them, the less real friends we have.
Viewed in this light, the oddly income-inappropriate features of the everyday lives of these characters who are supposedly waitresses and out-of-work actors and so forth makes more sense: When judged against the standards that shows like this help us to internalize as "normal," our own lives start to look a little threadbare. And the ads running during the show are for things that are designed to enhance our lifestyle. Hey, if your friends all have nice shoes, why shouldn't you? Don't you deserve nice things? Again, I'm not saying most people have a conscious problem separating fantasy from reality, but one need only look at figures for consumer debt to realize that Americans routinely try to maintain a lifestyle that is beyond their means. And they typically watch four to five hours of TV a day. So maybe it's just possible that the people creating the entertainment for our consumption know a thing or two about how to manipulate people into doing what they want.
This is not to underplay the importance of positive depictions in the media in terms of public perception of minority groups and the self-image of members of those groups. But speaking as a member of the most well-represented demographic of people on TV, I feel a need to remind folks that it's at best a mixed blessing.
I would like to see more consideration of the fact that the way that people are portrayed in our make-believe world of TV is not nearly so big a problem as the way real people are treated in the non-make-believe world, and that in fact our over-reliance on TV to tell us what's going on around us may be a big part of the problem. But I'm reasonably certain I won't see this point raised in a meaningful way by television.
This is to say nothing of the narrative structure of TV and movies and the impact it makes on our understanding of real-life situations, such as our tendency to understand conflicts by identifying the "good guy" and the "bad guy" in any situation. That's a whole other can of worms, best left to a later post.
Posted by flamingbanjo at June 20, 2006 06:17 PMYou do a good job here of arguing beyond the original point without actually losing the original point.
Posted by: anne at June 20, 2006 11:49 PMWell, my original point wasn't so much that if there were more Arabs on TV everything would be better (though one might argue that more Arabs on TV would be a reflection of things being better, the way more gays on TV in the 90s was a reflection of the massive gains the gay rights movement had made). My original point was just - holy shit, she's right, I really *can't* think of ANY Arab characters out of all the TV shows and movies I've seen in my life that aren't terrrorists.
Though someone pointed out the guy from Office Space (Samir?) and then I remembered the guy from, The 40 Year Old Virgin.
By the way, I just finished Craig Ferguson's book Between the Bridge and the River and his take on Friends was really funny. In it he describes a fictional sitcom Roomies about "six White people in Boston who have plenty of money for airline tickets and clothes but can't seem to afford their own apartments."
Posted by: DG at June 21, 2006 05:01 AMDG: Yeah, I realize that neither you nor the original poster were saying "more minorities on TV = perfect world." This is actually one of those points that's been kicking around in my head for a long time. I remember asking a gay friend if he thought Will and Grace was a good thing or a bad thing. He answered that he thought it would make him slightly less likely to get beaten up when he travelled in certain areas of the country, so it was a good thing. Which, okay, fair enough.
But it's hard for me to see Will and Grace as anything but Madison Avenue waking up to the fact that some gays have a lot of disposable income. The characters on the show are the broadest of stereotypes and they are, to a one, compulsive shoppers (who mention brand names at every opportunity, almost as if they were getting paid to do so.) So it all looks like an ad for the lifestyle to me. And I think the jury's still out on whether my friend's right about it making him less likely to get beaten up.
I've noticed that some of the mainstreaming of gay culture seems to have eroded the sense of solidarity and community that developed during the AIDS crisis of the eighties. And indeed infection rates are on the rise again, especially in the generation that came of age in the nineties. While some chalk this up to better AIDS drugs, I wonder if there might be more to it than that. In some ways I think that subculture was better off before it was co-opted.
As to the original question, I just watched Three Kings again recently. There are some sympathetic Iraqis in that movie, although I guess they mostly fall into the "hapless victim" category. But other than that, you have a point. Maybe Sallah, from the Indiana Jones movies? Except of course that guy's Welsh.
Posted by: flamingbanjo at June 21, 2006 09:36 AMThis is exactly the sort of stuff Vance Packard was talking about in his 1957 pop-sociology expose "The Hidden Persuaders"; the notion that advertisers and media executives had developed very sophisticated techniques for creating this sense of dissatisfaction in the minds of viewers, which in turn made them more open to the persuasive effects of sales pitches.
And the only positive Arab depiction on TV I could think of was Isa Totah's turn as the moon-obsessed Farouk El-Baz in one of the episodes of the 1998 HBO series "From The Earth To The Moon".
Posted by: COMTE at June 21, 2006 10:41 AMholy shit, she's right, I really *can't* think of ANY Arab characters out of all the TV shows and movies I've seen in my life that aren't terrrorists
The character Nasim in "Whoopi" (2004). Played by British Iranian Omid Djalili, best known (at least in my world) as the obnoxious disgusting prison warden from the Mummy. His role in "Whoopi" was funny and sympathetic.
The TV show "Lost" has a highly sympathetic Iraqi character who is a former member of the Republican Guard (played by an Indian).
The movie The Siege has an Arab FBI agent played by the excellent (half-Lebanese) Tony Shalhoub. To the extent that Tony, as a Lebanese actor, plays "Arab characters" by default, an argument could be made that Shalhoub's "Monk" character is also a sympathetic Arab.
Season 2 of "24" has an Arab intelligence agent from an anonymous Middle Eastern country who's not only sympathetic but he actually gets beaten to death by rednecks while trying to stop a war that's based on false intelligence (ahem).
Movies are easier. Ardeth Bay (ironically, played by Oded Fehr-- a Sabra) from "The Mummy," Morgan Freeman's character (not specifically Arab, but certainly a Moore) in that god-awful Kevin Costner movie, etc.
The whole loss of solidarity within the gay community can be seen in the fact that what used to be "gay rights" events are now "pride" events.
But the example of Will & Grace (which I've never actually seen) or Queer Eye or whatever is reflective of two things:
1. Gay people have lots of disposable income (not necessarily accurate but perpetuating that myth helps The Advocate sell lots of ad space and helps right-wingers defeat antidiscrimination bills).
2. Straight people will watch shows about gay people, and such shows will not prompt a succesful boycott of the network or its advertisers.
I think the first factor has been in play for a while, but I think its only in the 90s that the second has really become true.
Posted by: DG at June 22, 2006 07:45 AM