The Flesh and Blood(shed) of Popular Culture

A friend of mine is due to leave for Iran in the coming weeks, where she plans to stay for several months visiting family. As she awaits her departure, she’s bombarded each day with media from all angles - film, print, politics - that seem custom-designed for U.S. confrontation with Iran.

The latest sour bit of propaganda is the sword-and-shield blood-and-guts dude-fest 300, currently tops at the box 0ffice, which pits its “heroic” Spartans against what it paints as a bloody-thirsty Persian Empire. A review in the Village Voice (”Man on Man Action“) assures me the film is as dumb as it looks, but lack of smarts has never been known to keep away American film-going audiences, nor has it ever kept the US government away from military interventions. In response to the film (and its politics), a petition is circulating demanding that Warner Bros. own up to its ahistorical warmongering.

But war-mongering needn’t be blood-red and blunt to be dangerous. Whether its art film or action film, the same stubborn assumptions keep popping up, as in a recent interview with Abbas Kiarostami, the celebrated Iranian filmmaker who has been in New York City recently for a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. The interview is with that most ostensible of liberal media, The New York Times, and “The interviewer, Deborah Solomon,” observes Zach Campbell, “seems to have one guiding theme–hit home that ‘over there,’ in Iran, those people, those Islamofascist tyrants who presumably control every facet of every citizen’s life, are … well, bad. And how crazy is it that Kiarostami is able to make his beautiful masterpieces in the midst of all that crazy oppressive fanaticism over there?”

It’s not that Iran doesn’t have its political problems - it’s that Iran is not the sum of its government’s vices. As film critic Jonathon Rosenbaum writes, “What Bush is choosing to call `Iran’ is chiefly a narrow-minded fundamentalist like himself, not a complex society of millions of diverse individuals that is every bit as multicultural as the U.S.” This a diversity featured heavily in Kiarostami’s films - from the severe class chasms and urban/rural divides of the informal Koker earthquake trilogy (Where is the Friend’s Home?, …Life and Nothing More, and Through the Olive Trees) and The Wind Will Carry Us; to the various nationalities of the passengers in Mr. Badii’s Range Rover in Taste of Cherry, to the varied ages, classes, occupations and love lives of the female passengers in Ten.

You might say the violence of the State is reflected in the violence of a film 300 - not only in its desire for bloodshed, but in its purporting to represent diverse and complex histories and peoples as the whole they are not. Kiarostami’s films, with their hours of driving, talking, driving, running, talking, and driving some more, are the very antithesis of violence - and perhaps at times, the antithesis of the State as well.

Elsewhere, author Fatemeh Keshavarz discusses similar problems as they exist in popular literature, in a recent interview posted at MRZine. According to Keshavarz, in print media of the past decade, such as the popular Reading Lolita in Tehran, “everything [about Iran] would revolve around religion or politics, and people would be villains or victims… I felt like saying to people, ‘This picture is full of holes! That is not about me! The culture I grew up in has its flesh and blood just like yours. It has good and bad things just like every culture. Shake my hand and you will feel it!’ ” Her own book, Jasmine and Stars, aims to rectify these oversights.

I recently read Seymour Hersh’s piece in The New Yorker about the Bush administration’s strategic swing against the Shi’ites, as represented - to them - by the Iranian government. Personally, I hold onto the hope that the severe U.S. shortage of troops (what I consider the biggest political booty of the anti-war movement so far) prevents invasion of Iran, but troop shortage doesn’t preclude a U.S. bombing campaign or other military attacks.

What does preclude military attack (at least of the overt variety), I realize, is popular opinion. Popular opinion, however nebulous it always is, however indistinct and unquantifiable, remains indispensable to the achievement of the U.S. government’s political objectives. After reading over the above interviews and commentaries, and reflecting on my friend’s feelings, I’m struck by how insidiously popular culture can prepare society for war - and I wonder to what extent pop culture swings public opinion.

For years, Kiarostami has played himself off in interviews as an apolitical person - and he has every right to be so, though I personally find a great deal of the political in his films. Nevertheless, whoever organized his retrospective is making a small, but very smart political maneuver: bringing attention to Iran as a nation, broader than its State, and beyond whatever designs the US government has on the region.