Stereotypes and the Movies in the Everyday Maintenance of National Identity

by Alberto Di Felice

October 2007

To be honest, ambassador, when someone starts talking to me about the truth, what I hear is what they’re telling me about themselves, more than what they’re saying about the world.

—Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) in The Invasion, a film by Oliver Hirschbiegel (Warner Bros., 2007)

One of the underlying tendencies in contemporary culture—a tendency indeed of great age—is the desire to refashion what sociologist Jacques Rancière called “the dominant fiction,” the body of ideas reflecting social needs and aspirations, the “image of social consensus” which allows individuals to represent themselves in order to get a grasp of who and where they are in the world. In his description of the concept of dominant fiction, Rancière gives emphasis to narrative and pictorial forms—particularly films—in the cultivation of a sense of national identity, on the basis that they provide an “image of society immediately readable by all classes.” Dating from 1977, his discussion predates many of the most recent analyses of nationalism, all of which usually stress the importance of narrative forms in creating abstract or general ideas of nation. Rancière suggests that the relationship between national identity and the power of narrative is readily and clearly seen especially in the American cinema, where the dominant fiction of “the birth of a nation” is reacted in different ways in an attempt to rearticulate the cultural narratives that define the American nation. However, Robert Burgoyne argues that the nature of what Rancière aptly calls “the legend of the formation of the code” is undergoing a slight but significant change. Rather than engaging simply in a reenactment of the foundational narrative which Rancière labels with the expression “this is where we come from,” contemporary movies often seek to bring under observation a different message from history, which aims to make plain and comprehensible the increasingly composite and intricate reality, and to convey a mental picture of “this is how we are.” [1] This essay will explore how this picture of national identity is created through the use of stereotypes in the movies. It will take contemporary American cinema as a case study and will focus in particular on the recent movie 300.
Hollywood can be considered as a radically distinctive creator of national culture, particularly because it does not depend directly on state policies to indicate the direction where it is headed—in contrast to the film industries of countries such as France, Italy, Canada, or Australia, which serve a semiofficial role as the “cultural flagships” of their nations. This allows American films to challenge in many ways the very system of beliefs within which they are positioned. The quotation which opens this essay is taken from a recent film, which is a remake of a famous science-fiction classic by Don Siegel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Allied Artists Pictures, 1956). Produced during the early years of the Cold War, Siegel’s movie was able to transform the original novel by Jack Finney—a cautionary tale about the threat of an alien invasion which closely echoed Communism—into a hidden allegory for the paranoid and oppressive McCarthyist era, and the loss of freedom and right to free speech it entailed. Similarly, the remake can be read as a critique of a vision of the world (mainly American) which is unable to explain and investigate complexities and differences, and simply tries to dominate them by erasing them in the name of the “truth” it purports to represent.
2006 was a particularly important and contradictory year for American nationalism on film. Clint Eastwood directed two movies centered around the battle on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima in 1945, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (Warner Bros.). In these movies, traditional nationalistic oppositions and stereotypes are at once reproduced and defied. The former calls into question the propagandistic role of the famous photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal, “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima,” revealing the hidden facts behind this symbol of national pride; the latter sympathetically tells the story of the battle through the eyes of Japanese soldiers, and in particular through the eyes of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who had spent time in the United States prior to the war. Both films remove the veil from the mythic and prosaic dimensions of nation by exposing the rhetorical, opportunistic use of myths of heroism. Most importantly, Eastwood decides to do so using the second movie to challenge America’s own perception of “the Other,” by recreating from the Japanese point of view the stereotypical image one usually has of the enemy. One soldier comments: “I don’t know anything about the enemy. I thought all Americans were cowards. I was taught they were savages.” These movies “bring into relief issues of power that underlie the idealized construction of nationhood, exposing the ‘fissures and faultlines’ between national myths and the historical experiences of people excluded from dominant accounts”; they “hold up to scrutiny and drive home the emotional meaning of the imagined community of nation and its bruising inadequacies.” [2]
In the same year, by contrast, another American movie provided a very different perspective on the politics of representation and the use of stereotypes. Zack Snyder’s 300 (Warner Bros.), based on the comic book of the same name by Frank Miller, is a historically-inspired retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 B.C. Contrary to Eastwood’s movies, Snyder’s emphasizes a fictitious historical reconstruction of “good versus evil,” deeply embedded within processes of stereotyping and gendering, blending into one mass an insolvable basket of mostly conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conceptions and images. The film can be seen as a prime example of many strategies of “othering” through processes of stereotyping, and—given its commercial success—is a tangible expression of what George Lipsitz has called “the desire to connect to history, the impulse to pose present problems in historical terms, and the assertion of a temporal and social reality beyond one’s immediate experience.” [3]
The powerful operatic ethos of the movie, and its effective impact on viewers, is well embodied by the narrating voice of Dilios (David Wenham), who calls Spartan soldiers to arms after King Leonidas’s (Gerard Butler) death and tells his story in the present, so that the audience experiences the events as they unfold. This is a very good example of what Benedict Anderson calls “apprehension of time,” in that it resembles in its form and structure the multiplicity and simultaneity of national life. With the use of this temporal parallelism as a way of linking a multitude of actions, the movie reproduces the way the realist novel works in providing people with an image of nation as a “solid community” moving simultaneously up or down through history, of parallel lines moving along parallel pathways, a structure that provides “the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation.” [4] This is the first—and perhaps the most effective—expedient by which the audience is drawn to fully identify with what it sees.
Although the filmmakers and the author of the original comic book deny any connections with current events, the Battle of Thermopylae can be read as a clear allegory for the so-called “war on terror,” and especially the war in Iraq in which the U.S. stands virtually alone in the face of opposition—both in moral and political terms—coming from the rest of the world. Sparta, in reality a military state, is depicted as the champion of freedom and democracy (i.e., the U.S.) against which the Persian tyrant Xerxes (i.e., Iraq, Iran, Islam) has waged war; Athens (i.e., Europe) opposes King Leonidas’s decision to defend Sparta (and consequently all of Greece—i.e., the Western Civilization) by mobilizing his soldiers; the Spartan Council (i.e., the U.S. Congress, where Democrats have long complained about the Iraq war policy) sends Leonidas to consult the Oracle, a young woman corralled by the corrupt Ephors (i.e., the UN), which denies its consent to war.
In an interview, Frank Miller implicitly reinforces this allegorical reading:

It seems to me quite obvious that our country and the entire Western World is up against an existential foe that knows exactly what it wants. […] For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. [5]

As can be seen, when Miller speaks of “these people” he is clearly reproducing the very concept of the Other which the depiction of Xerxes’s army encourages by reducing the highly diverse populace and complex culture of “the East” to the dogmatism of a fictitious imagery. One of the aesthetic/political techniques used in the movie is the representation of the Orient in large numbers in order to de-individualize it and evoke fear of group dynamism. Arguably, no words describe the vast array of stereotypical images and allusions put in place by the film better than those of Iranian historian Touraj Daryaee:

What do you get when you take all the “misfits” that inhabit the collective psyche of the white American establishment and put them together in the form of a cartoonish invading army from the East coming to take your freedom away? Then add a horde of Black people, deformed humans who are the quintessential opposite of the fashion journal images, a bunch of veiled towel-heads who remind us of Iraqi insurgents, a group of  black cloaked Ninja-esque warriors who look like Taliban trainees, and men and women with body and facial piercings who are either angry, irrational, or sexually deviant. All this headed by a homosexual king (Xerxes) who leads this motley but vast group of “slaves” known as the Persian army against the 300 handsomely sculpted men of Sparta who appear to have been going to L.A. (or Montreal) gyms devotedly, who fight for freedom and their way of life, and who at times look like the Marine Corps advertisements on TV? You get the movie 300. [6]

The East of 300, a place of monsters, aberration, darkness and barbarism, is a particular example of Orientalism, a one-sided view of the world which elevates the self-image of the West as intrinsically superior by virtue of a dichotomous contrast with the East, through the mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth, actuality, and validity of a series of stereotypical iconic representations, aiming to exaggerate East/West differences and make East and West appear as existential opposites. “As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge” to control what looks diverse and unfamiliar. [7]
The stylized view of the movie mirrors the Western narcissistic image of manly Greek warriors, who “leave the women behind and display their virility through bravery. It is in the company of other men that they demonstrate their manliness and potency.” [8] At the same time, they resonate strongly as heroes against the female-classified East in an essential clash of civilizations. The Xerxes character, in particular, is a product of the stereotypical feminization of the Other which has been cardinal to the orientalization of the Orient, in the same way as the characterization of the despot Colonel Gaddafi as a transvestite homosexual. [9] The character duplicates the traditional Orientalizing process of the “blending together of romantic images of femininity with images of the Orient as enigmatic and mysterious, suggesting a dark secret behind the veil of both ‘woman’ and ‘the East’ in the contradictory stereotypes of corruption and mysticism, exoticism and sexual instability.” [10] At the same time, it supports the stereotype, fostered in American Orientalism, of Arabs as “lecherous and deceitful, bloodthirsty and sadistic.” [11]
A psychoanalytic reading can perhaps help to understand the processes that belie the movie and nationalism as a “masculinist project … involving masculine institutions, masculine processes and masculine activities.” [12] In the words of Michael Pickering, “the Other is always constructed as on object for the benefit of the subject who stands in need of an objectified Other in order to achieve a masterly self-definition.” [13] We have seen that one of the strategies employed in the process of orientalization is the feminized representation of the Other. As Roland Barthes has claimed, representation has important similarities with fetishization. It can be said that representation is in fact the creation of fetishes. By concentrating on, and repeating, estheticized images endowed with authority and power, representation connects the viewer emotionally with them. From this standpoint, a fetish can be described as the relationship between a subject (the viewer) and an object (the image). This relationship makes it possible for the subject/viewer to control the object/image by means of a connection with the emotional pleasures of violence and eroticism. [14]
One of the most widely studied underlying functions of mainstream cinema is that of “emphasiz[ing] manly ideals, ‘blueprints,’ or sex role stereotypes.” [15] Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey has famously suggested that the pleasure it offers is based on identification, voyeurism and fetishism, and depends on pre-existing psychological patterns at work within the spectator. Her analysis refers to the capacity Hollywood-type cinema has to articulate patriarchal ideology around sexual difference; given the “hierarchical and patriarchal structure of ethnocracy,” [16] it can be fruitfully applied to our field of interest, especially in the light of our discussion on “otherness” and “feminization.” According to Mulvey, the commercial success of a movie is ensured by offering a kind of satisfaction to the subject/viewer. Principal among these pleasures is that of identification, where the subject/viewer narcissistically identifies with an idealized figure on screen (typically a male hero), and scopophilia, or pleasure in looking, through which the subject/viewer indulges in a form of voyeurism whereby the Other (typically a woman) is turned into an object of fantasy, so giving the voyeur a position of control and mastery. [17]
The multifaceted fetishization of both the Self (masculine Spartan warriors) and its perversion (monstrous and feminized Orientals) put in place by 300 links the movie to what Abdul R. Jan Mohamed has called “imaginary colonialist literature,” in that it elaborates on “the affective benefits proffered by the Manichean allegory”—i.e., the narcissist self-satisfaction gained from reiterating one’s moral and cultural superiority. Whereas “symbolic” texts allow a certain dialogue and thus a certain hybridism, he argues, “imaginary” ones preclude a dialectic between Self and Other which always entails a reevaluation of one’s own position. Criticism of the Self is unthinkable in this seemingly universal and essential polarity. [18]
300 sets out for display an orderly, often imposing panoply of stereotypes about the Orient for its audience to contemplate and fetishize, in pure Orientalist fashion. The American audience, and especially the male audience to which it is directly addressed, can immediately establish an egotistic identification with the glorious Spartan soldiers, and simultaneously contemplate with scopophilic pleasure the hideous and frightful looks of the Persian army of monsters. The movie puts to work a carefully thought out strategy which favors identification with stereotypical images which in their precise duality are perceived as an expression of a natural and immutable order. By depicting the Orient as an assemblage of forms that are abhorrently contrary to masculinity, nature, reason, or common sense, 300 allows contemporary viewers to reconstruct the present through the lens of a self-reassuring world picture enshrined in the refabrication of a mythical past, where a clear line is drawn between themselves and the Other. Hence, the movie produces an overall romantic image for the Self, and lets it enjoy a commanding and controlling position over reality.

NOTES

1. See Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 1–2. [↩]
2. Ibid., p. 6. [↩]
3. Cited ibid., p. 5. [↩]
4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised edn. (London: Verso, 1991), p. 25. [↩]
5. Interview on Talk of the Nation (NPR) as quoted in “NPR Interview with 300’s Frank Miller,” The Atlasphere, March 10, 2007, http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/612.php, accessed October 19, 2007. [↩]
6. Touraj Daryaee, Go Tell the Spartans: How “300” Misrepresents Persians in History, iranian.com, March 14, 2007, http://www.iranian.com/Daryaee/2007/March/300/index.html, accessed October 19, 2007. [↩]
7. Edward Said, Orientalism (London, Penguin, 1978), p. 204. [↩]
8. Julie Mostov, “Sexing the Nation/Desexing the Body: The Politics of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia,” in Tamar Mayer (ed.), Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (London, Routledge, 2000), p. 93. [↩]
9. See Michael Pickering, Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave, 2001), p. 164. [↩]
10. Michael Pickering, Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave, 2001), p. 163. [↩]
11. Ibid., p. 164. [↩]
12. Joane Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1998, p. 243. [↩]
13. Pickering, Stereotyping, p. 71. [↩]
14. See Laura W. Riggs, “Desire, Substitution, and Violence in the Contracting Space of Gender,” in William Burgwinkle, Glenn Man and Valerie Wayne (eds.), Significant Others: Gender and Culture in Film and Literature, East and West, Honolulu, College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature, University of Hawaii, East-West Center, 1993, pp. 53–62. [↩]
15. Nagel, “Masculinity and nationalism,” p. 246. [↩]
16. Mostov, “Sexing the Nation/Desexing the Body,” p. 92. [↩]
17. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 803–16. [↩]
18. See David Jan Slavíček, “Debunking Postmodern Orientalism with Barthes: The Case of Betty Mahmoody’s ‘Not Without My Daughter,’” Scholarly Paper (Advanced Seminar), University of Zürich, 2001. [↩]