The hotly anticipated release of Towelhead, the controversial Alan Ball adaptation of Alicia Erian's well-received coming of age novel about a young Arab-American girl, gives me a chance to finally feature one of my all-time favorite subjects in a Friday Take Five: the horrendous stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood films. Naturally, I'll be hitting the theaters bright and early this weekend to get my ticket to Towelhead; my hopes are high that it will do a small part to reverse the dismally one-dimensional portrayal of Arabs in cinema since the invention of the medium. (It would have been nice if they could have gotten an actual Arab-American actress to play the lead, but that's a rant for another day.) One of Thomas Edison's very first moving pictures portrayed a seductive odalisque, and ever since then, Arabs have been portrayed on screen as one of what Mazin Q'umsiyeh of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee calls "the three Bs": belly dancers, billionaires, or bombers. Since the late 1970s, when blacks made it known they were a bit tired of being Hollywood's favorite punching bag, Arabs have been killed on screen at a pace that far outstrips the slaughter of Indians in movie Westerns, and with a very few exceptions (sala'am, Tony Shalhoub), if you're an Arab in the movie business, if you don't play a terrorist, you don't work. So I'm off to the multiplex, hoping that Towelhead can start to clean up the mess made by movies like these.
BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)
Although it's one of the most beloved comedies of the '80s, Back to the Future didn't win a lot of friends in the Arab-American community for its mindless portrayal of north African terrorists. Typically, the Arab villains are portrayed as both sinister (gunning down poor old Doc Brown and, in so doing, teaching a whole generation of American kids to hiss at the swarthy bearded kaffiyeah-wearing dirtbags) and incompetent (so dumb that it took them the whole movie to figure out that they'd been sold a "shiny bomb casing filled with pinball machine parts). Worse still, that's not even the movie's biggest ethnic crime: there's that whole business of whitebread Michael J. Fox teaching black people about rock 'n' roll...
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