July 06, 2007

Movie-Media and Pakistan

One of the unintended side-effects of 9/11 has been increased interest in Pakistan. Once limited to official and journalistic circles, Pakistan’s role after 9/11 has come on the radar screen of Hollywood. And the movies Hollywood produces have the potential to shape the thinking and perceptions of mainstream America.
Before 9/11, Pakistan was on the margins of academia and media in the US. Not any more. This rising curiosity presents an opportunity to tell Pakistan’s side of the story. But it also provides space for misinformation if distortions go unchallenged.
The biggest movie of the summer is “A Mighty Heart”. Made by British filmmaker, Michael Winterbottom, it is about the tragedy of American journalist Daniel Pearl, who was abducted and slain in Karachi in 2002. The key role of Daniel Pearl’s wife, Mariane, is played by Angelina Jolie, who has been described by the Washington Post as “perhaps the world’s best-known actress.”
Already, this movie – favorably reviewed by the mainstream press – is being talked about as a potential contender for the Oscars next year. Much of the dialogue is in Urdu and the cast of actors has been drawn from both India and Pakistan. This $16 million movie is set in Pakistan, and filmed both in Bombay and in Karachi. In the movie, Pakistan comes across as a menacing place overlaid with cloak-and-dagger intrigue.
Earlier, the same director, Winterbottom, had made a movie called “The Road to Guantanamo”, which featured the story of three British Muslims held in Guantanamo Bay.
Pakistan, heretofore, has not been in the frame of Hollywood’s creative imagination. Arabs, however, have been castigated as the “bad guys” in movies and also in TV serials like “24” and “Sleeper Cell”. Professor Jack Shaheen, who has produced a new film documentary, “Reel Bad Arabs”, commented that Arabs often are presented as villains.
It is a new and important development that Hollywood is now depicting Pakistan on the big screen. This may arguably be good for Pakistan if the challenge is met, but bad if it is not. “A Mighty Heart” is a major introduction of Pakistan to a mass US audience, and is framed in the context of terrorism, violence, and hostility to the West. It may be the beginning of a trend. There is new demand now for Muslim and Arab actors to fill roles set around terror themes.
It is ironic that Pakistan, which is a technical and tactical ally of the West, could end up being portrayed as a long-term strategic foe of the West. And also, significantly, as a hatchery for global zealotry.
For too long, Islamabad has been geared to rebutting critiques from the print and electronic media, but it is not prepared or equipped to meet the new challenge emanating from the powerful movie media, which is Hollywood.
Conventional methods won’t work. This challenge will require a fresh strategy and a singular new approach.
In this connection, some segments of the Pakistani intelligentsia might be of little help because they may be busy doing their own Pakistan-bashing.
Historical omissions make misinformation and misinterpretation about Pakistan both possible and plausible. First, there is very little reference to the context that unwise policies pursued by the West in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 helped fan the very flames engulfing the region today.
Second, leaving the Palestinian-Israeli question unresolved has added fuel to the pan-Islamic blaze.
Third, Western officialdom’s insulting attitude toward Muslim sensitivities and its unwillingness to face up to its own share of culpability keeps the cauldron boiling. In a daring rebuke, 50 of America’s top high school graduating students selected for the Presidential Scholars program, on June 25, hand-delivered a letter to President Bush at the White House urging a halt to “violations of the human rights” of US-held detainees and to “apply the Geneva Conventions to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants.”
Finally, there is insufficient recognition within the Muslim world on the damage done by self-inflicted wounds.
The ineptness of the Muslim elites to deploy proper men and materiel to seriously challenge all of the above is, in effect, a tacit admission that much of what is wrong in the world today is due to Muslim misconduct. This relieves the West of any responsibility to make adjustments in its own attitudes and policies.
Now may be the moment in Pakistan to forge and develop a creative infrastructure to contest and compete in the court of world public opinion.