Orientalism and Argo

Argo movie presented the story on how CIA sneaked six American diplomats out of Iran during the crisis on November 1979. Iran used to be ruled under various different regimes, until 1953 Reza Pahlevi took over the country and westernized Iran. He opened the foreign investment and allowed the US to invest on their oil. Ironically, he lived in wealth while the people lived in starve and poor condition. In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini replaced him and successfully ruled Iran. He tried to return the oil to its citizen, fix the catastrophic condition, and also leaded the chaos, anger to the US, which made the citizen started to attack the US embassy.

This based on true story movie was able to gained many awards and high ratings. Yet, this movie has also become the subject of some criticisms.
Some academics argue that Argo represented the orientalist’s movie presenting the Middle East condition from the perspective of west writers. For instance, through the whole movie the Iranians are blanketed as an undeveloped, untrustworthy, irrational, ugly, poor, fanatical, and antagonists. Iran as the represent of Middle East country was portrayed unrealistically.

Some academics also claimed the film is part of American propaganda. This movie tried to emphasized the negative reactions of Iranians and disregard the backgrounds events that make the Iranians act that way, in order to twist the story. The basic outline on how the diplomats escape from Iran was actually true, but certain dramatic part were just made up. Iranian-Canadian Gomeshi (2012) also criticized how the three of the film’s most wrecking scenes such as the chaos of bazaar, the intense airport interrogation, and the plane taking off leave behind the police cars actually did not happened. Indeed the film maker make it this way in order to make the story more action-packed and neglect its historical inaccuracy fact.

Reference

Gomeshi, J. (2012, November 02). Jian Ghomeshi: Argo is crowd-pleasing, entertaining – and unfair to Iranians. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved from https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/

Indah Shafira Zata Dini 

September 22, 2017

Movie analysis - Political Geography Assignment