Zusammenfassung
Summary IGC Reading week 4 2018- Auge & Shaheen
- Kurs
- IGC
- Hochschule
- Erasmus University Rotterdam
IGC 2018 week 4 readings: Hollywood movies Terrorism 101 (Auge) & Hollywood's Muslim Arabs (Shaheen)
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Augé: Hollywood Movies Terrorism 101 When asked in 1998 “What is it that these terrorists want from the United States?” Richard
Hass, head of the foreign policy department at the Brookings Insttuton replied: “Well, the
answer is it’s not anything we’re simply doing. It is who we are. It’s the fact that we’re the
most powerful country in the world. It’s the fact that we’re a secular country. […] It is simply
who we are and it is our existence that really bothers them.”2 This vision of terrorism against
American interests is shared by many, and has become somehow the ofcial positon on
terrorism. That same year, President William Clinton stated: “Americans are targets of
terrorism, in part, because we act to advance peace and democracy and because we stand
united against terrorism.” And for Thomas Friedman, the famous columnist of the New York
Times, terrorists “have no specifc ideological program or demands. Rather, they are driven
by a generalized hatred of the U.S., Israel and other supposed enemies of Islam.”
Afer the September 11, New rork City, even more than the rest of the country, had to learn
to live again, and launched a series of measures, including ads to help people recover, and
show tourists life was going on. One of those commercials featured Actor-Director Woody
Allen, explaining why he loved NrC so much. The same Allen later said, in a sentence that
could sound wity, but was in fact very accurate “too bad the Terrorists of the 11th of
September learned life in Hollywood movies…”
Terrorists are not the only ones: many people get to know the U.S. and the world through
the eyes of Hollywood cameras. Umberto Eco once said that 70% of our knowledge comes
from Hollywood.
Hollywood is the pre-eminent cinematography in the world, and has been so for almost a
century, since the end of World War I. Unlike France, or to a lesser extent Great Britain and
Italy, the Hollywood cinema, distnct from the rest of the American cinema, is proud to call
itself an industry. This business is a very proftable one, entertainment being the second
largest U.S. exportaton, right afer aeronautcs.
Hollywood’s infuence is overwhelming, but the American government does not control the
cinema industry, and some might say it is the other way around.
All movies good or bad are educatonal and Hollywood is the foremost educatonal insttute
on earth, an audience that runs into an estmated 800 million to a billion.
Federal Trade Commission: We are not trying to tell the entertainment industry what to
produce. We know it would be unconsttutonal to regulate the content of their products.
Nor are we trying to substtute our judgment for that of parents and put the government in
the positon of determining what is appropriate for children. We are simply saying that if a
movie studio, record producer, or video gamemaker voluntarily labels something as
unsuitable for children, then they should not market those products directly to children.
That’s not censorship. That’s common sense.
Violence is a key issue in the Hollywood industry. Although it is opposed by many
associatons in the United States, violence sells and atracts audiences to Hollywood movies.
Credulity is the entertainment industry’s most dangerous product, and the violence it
promotes isn’t destructve to people but to their sense of reality, their ability to perceive the
world they live in.
Morally instructve fare that promotes maximum unquestoning viewer identfcaton. In
other words, a positve, edifying kind of violence— patriotc gore.
Two types of violence coexist in Hollywood, one considered positve by society, and one
perceived as negatve. In the movie The Patriot (2000), the Britsh are shown as brutal and
violent troops, whereas the Americans are depicted as good and ordinary people who
struggled for freedom. No one complained about this descripton, except the Britsh who felt
they were treated like Nazis. Hence, the jubilaton of audiences when the savage Green
Dragoon commander Colonel Tavington is murdered by the heroic farmer-turned-soldier-for-
the-love-of-freedom Mel Gibson. In the same way, when terrorists are killed in a movie, the
audience cheers, although blood and guts have been spilled all over the screen. If hostages
, are murdered, no one applauds: the lives of innocents are wasted. Violence is acceptable, as
long as it is directed against forces of evil, as they are defned in Hollywood movies.
Hollywood has its own world and the American way of life shown in the movies only exists in
flms. Some people do not perceive the diference, and ofen believe what they see in movies
to be America’s reality. Films do infuence people in a number of ways. For some, it is a
dream of a beter life that pushes them to try and immigrate to the land of opportunites. For
others, Hollywood is a new Babylon, a violent place of depravaton that must be annihilated.
This state of mind does not apply to Islamic terrorists only. When Last Temptaton of Christ
by Martn Scorsese was shown, some theaters were burnt or bombed, as in the French town
Besançon in 1988. In its movies, Hollywood addresses important social and politcal issues
that permanently impact audiences and can easily be reduced to mere entertainment. The
truth is more complex, but few people watch Hollywood movies while keeping their distance.
We can assume the terrorists of September 11 all knew what Hollywood cinema was, thanks
to satellite dishes, VCRs and the spreading of illegal copies of flms. Except for two Egyptans,
the terrorists of September 11 all came from Saudi Arabia, which, unlike its image of cultural
isolaton, is a greatly receptve to American movies. Many channels can be received in the
Kingdom through a satellite dish. It is perfectly possible to watch western movies in the
Middle-East even if some are censored mostly due to moral criteria. Was Bin Laden’s
propaganda the only factor that pushed nineteen people to sacrifce themselves to try and
destroy cultural symbols of “The Great Satan”? Terrorists probably saw in Hollywood’s
movies the same as any other audience in the world can watch: a cocktail of sof-core sex,
violence and outrageous wealth. Diferent from its reality, America’s image is the one of a
country that is big, arrogant and bored.
Thus Hollywood provides the world with an alternate America, using not only movies, but
also books, newspapers, television, or Internet thanks to the massive mergers in the
entertainment industry, creatng behemoth like AOLTime- Warner or Vivendi-Universal. Walt
Disney for instance controls not only mass media, but also sport teams, cruise lines, theme
parks and even a town in Florida called Celebraton, where the happy few can live in a secure
environment “the way it used to be in the good ol’ days.” Is Hollywood’s world so unbearable
that terrorist could kill because of it?
Talking about terrorism is talking about politcs, for it implies defning where America’s
enemies are hiding, and where its friends stand. During World War II, the Hollywood industry
shot several movies proclaiming the greatness of the Soviet ally, which was perceived as ant-
American when the Cold war started. Hollywood does not want to make the same mistake
twice. Politcs is not fun, and can bring powerful enemies. Although the relatons between
the West Coast movie center and the East Coast politcal center remain unclear, it seems that
Hollywood wants to stay away from politcs, being part of the establishment and keen on
serving the best interest of the country.
Therefore, afer the end of the Cold war, when the former USSR and its allies were
Hollywood’s most credible villains, fnding a decent enemy became a hard task in a tme of
politcal correctness. Among the world’s populaton, the Irish long remained the reference
for terrorism in Hollywood during the 1990s. The I.R.A. and other terrorist organizatons from
Northern Ireland are appreciated as villains by American audiences: they do not atack the
U.S., but threaten Great Britain, which is allowed in the former American colony of the Royal
Crown. With 65 millions Irish Americans, the U.S. and the Irish peoples are quite close, and
even if the I.R.A. can be seen as a terrorist organizaton, Hollywood appears more than
supportve of its ideology. To Hollywood, the Irish struggle is fair it is closer to resistance
than terrorism.
Terrorism is neither random, spontaneous, nor blind it is a deliberate use of violence against
civilians. […] In another useful atempt to produce a defniton, Paul Pillar, a former deputy
chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, argues that there are four key elements of
terrorism: It is premeditated—planned in advance, rather than an impulsive act of rage. It is
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