Everything
seemed so silly. All these movies, all these stereotypes…how was
there so much ignorance. The movies were actually so misinformed; it
was hilarious. The camels, the desert
odyssey,
the mummies
and Egyptology,
the made up Arab cities, the men on horse with guns, the women in the
imaginary
of harems
– those were the only images shown of Arabia. I saw the images and
repeated
tropes
as ridiculous but I could not put my finger on exactly why. Until I
realized these movies were filmed in a Eurocentric perspective.
People who are different cannot be explained and must therefore be
something either mythicized (as in not real) or degraded as savages
which brings into the idea of binary
opposites which
are continued to be used today. Being western entailed positive and
progressive traits and being anything but was conflated into one set
of inferior and savage traits. The movies shown to us from The
Mummy, The Sheik, and
Road
to Morocco;
I think everyone agreed that the movies did not depict the reality of
Arabia in any way. They were fantasies of a mystical land that did
not exist.
It
was hard to understand how such misconceptions could have even
existed at the time. But, I think the reason it was so easy for all
of us to agree was based on the fact that it was during another time
period where the prejudices and normative ways of thinking were very
different from how we think today. We’ve moved past those
prejudices and come to understand things in a completely different
manner and therefore, it is easy to criticize ways of thinking of
past times. This does not make us forward or intelligent; we are part
of today’s norm and what would make us progressive is thinking of
how current prejudices can be moved past. It will be interesting when
we get into current day issues and how we as class will react to
different things and whether we’ll find everything an issue as we
did with these older movies.
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