This weekend, lettered and I went to see Cairo Time. It's a film about an American woman, played by Patricia Clarkson, who travels to Cairo to meet her husband, who is held up in Gaza doing UN work. She's befriended by his old friend and colleague, played by Siddig El Fadil (aka Alexander Siddig), who now owns a coffee shop.

This isn't really a review, because there isn't much to review. What follows is an update of the orientalist fantasy: white woman goes East, learns that Things Are Different Here and Exotic Men Are Hot, and in the bargain we don't really get a lot of action. Which is too bad, because most of what I took away from this film (other than that this was the same old thing, only a little more PC) was that El Fadil is STILL HOT.

According to IMDB, he said about this film: "It was a real treasure, a treat, to find a character, a role, that wasn't intent on trying to blow up the White House or hijack an airplane." Which, having seen no trailers, made me interested in seeing the film. But there's really nothing new here, and the fact he's not a bad guy is about all you can say about the role. This is ridiculous.

Walking out of the theater, it occurred to me that aside from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine I have never seen el Fadil play a role in which he is not meant to stand in for an entire country. None of which, it must be said, are his own (the Sudan or, actually, England). Granted, the things I have seen him in portray him as intelligent/good/interesting/etc, and not a terrorist. But he's always meant to stand in for "Arabia"/"Syriana"/Egypt. He cannot simply play a man. (Perhaps the question about whether it's any coincidence that DS9 is the only place I've not seen this happen is mitigated by the fact I've not seen all of his movies.)

This is nothing new to you, of course, and in fact I'm using him now to stand in for any actor of quality who is relegated to parts like this, even when the portrayal is more or less positive. The only good part Art Malik ever got was as an English-educated Indian man who doesn't fit in in either world, and thereafter he was an Arab terrorist. But even that one good part was about his being Indian, though of course he's really Pakistani. Few non-white actors seem have made the leap, though I'd argue Ben Kingsley and Denzel Washington are the first who come to mind.

Given the Avatar: the Last Airbender and Earthsea debacles, among others, it should be obvious that if we can't even hire actors of the appropriate ethnicity to play explicitly non-white characters, we should not hope to get non-white actors, even good and/or hot ones, in the roles of everyday people and romantic leads and everything else. But it's a waste of resources, along with being morally reprehensible.

I've been intending to read Jack Shaheen's book for some time, and just haven't gotten around to it. So I was somewhat pleased that it had been made into a documentary, which gives the gist of the argument--that Hollywood films have created a bloodthirsty stereotype we're now exporting to the rest of the world--but doesn't really replace what I assume is a much more in-depth book.

The helpful thing about a movie about movies, of course, is that it can show clips. And Shaheen does: clip after clip of violence, yelling, and justification for an attitude that all Arabs are terrorists. It's a convincing argument, as far as it goes, and Shaheen is careful to include a few of the positive portrayals. There is certainly enough negative to make one angry, as time after time you see the utter disrespect with which entire nations are treated. The film traces the stereotypes from the Sheik/harem days through the greedy and bumbling oil-rich days through today's fundamentalist-with-machine-gun image. Seeing the films stacked together is revealing, as it quickly becomes apparent that the same scenes are playing out over and over, whether it's the blond girl being menaced or the wild-eyed shouting about Allah. There wasn't any question in my mind before I watched the film that Hollywood has indeed done very badly by the Middle East, but the visual evidence was nonetheless shocking.

Another interesting section was about the way Hollywood follows Washington policy, especially as regards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since the country's birth, Hollywood has made film after film highlighting the humanity of Israelis and demonizing Palestinians. For films involving the military, the Department of Defense is a necessary partner if you want access to realistic materials, and the list of films about American forces kicking nasty Arab ass on the DoD's dime is appalling.

There were some conspicuous absences, however. Shaheen cites Syriana as a film that did something right by portraying Arabs all over the place: as terrorists, as families, as Siddig el Fadil's progressive prince. But I wonder if some films and subjects were just too complicated for a film running 50 minutes. What does he have to say about Lawrence of Arabia, for instance, a quagmire of representation? What about the fact (never mentioned) that an astounding number of screen Arabs are played by Indians or Pakistanis, who aren't anything ethnically like?

My own theory is that we need to cast someone sufficiently "other" in those roles, and if our own ethnically Arab actors can "pass" as Monk or Salieri, we must import darker-skinned and unfamiliar races to demonize them. Certainly Naveen Andrews, Art Malik, and Ben Kingsley have all played wonderful roles as Indians (I know Malik is Pakistani, but that's another matter), but all have been pressed into service to terrorize Americans. (As a side note, I just read that Andrews' character on Lost is supposed to be Iraqi. Really? I mean... really? This boggles me. Can we really not tell the difference? Not to mention the fact that many Indian or Pakistani actors are actually also British but hardly ever get to use their real accents.) And let's take Lawrence again: any actual Arabs are in the background (or Omar Sharif, who we stole from Egypt because he's hot enough to play anywhere) while English and American (or American-Irish-Mexican in Quinn's case) actors put on false noses and brownface. Again, I assume, to make them unlike "us" enough (though frankly at the time there were many fewer casting options, so it's not a very good example).

I've gotten away from the point, which I think was a sort of review of this documentary, but not really. I actually don't have a problem with crossing ethnic lines a bit in casting, because it's all acting anyway and I like a lot of the performances that result. But as a pattern, it's more disturbing. And it's combined with another pattern of demonizing the inhabitants of a whole region of the world, which again isn't a problem on an individual basis (there are bad guys everywhere) but becomes one when its endemic.

So what are your observations? What have you "learned" about the Middle East from Hollywood, or have you seen a film that altered the pattern? Do you have a favorite non-Arab Arab performance? Has anyone read this book?

The Pew Research Center and NPR have just released the results of a poll which raises some interesting questions. What's being pulled out most is the idea that class, rather than race, is what segregates America these days; 37% of black people say that the values held by poor and middle class blacks have grown more different over the last five years. Likewise, 37% of black people also question "black" as a single racial identity. It's not a majority, but it's more than it used to be. A growing number of black people agree with Bill Cosby that it's not racism, but black people who are bringing themselves down.

What makes this interesting to me is the touchy ground where race and class meet. I can't speak to the numbers here, and I'd be ill-qualified to answer these questions or speculate about the results. But I do know that the most prevalent form of racism I've seen in my immediate life is the kind leveled by black people against other black people for acting "too white." A few years ago I was being trained on the job in an environment where I was the only white girl, and my trainer had to endure taunts like, "You better go listen to some James Brown, get that Elvis out of your system" because she was, apparently, talking like a white person in order to communicate with me. (As an aside, that was by far the most pleasant work environment I've ever been in, and I really miss those guys.) But it seems to me the "you're not black enough" argument is losing relevance in a world where black identity isn't tied to a certain lifestyle or income bracket. Where no two people can define "black identity" the same way.

Some really interesting semantic debates could open up over whether X is "racism" or "classism." Racism is still prevalent in our society, but the line where it becomes classism is fuzzy. Where, for example, should we classify criticism of hip hop culture? And would it be different depending on the race of the critic? Is it more excusable to be classist, because it ignores the race question? Or is that a smokescreen, "the new racism"?

I'm not even going to try to answer that. What's interesting to me is that this has become a question at all. Will it change the dialogue about race and culture and class?