tigerpants's Diaryland Diary

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Tehran vs. Team America

This weekend, I saw the movie Team America: World Police, and it got me thinking. Well, ok. It didn�t get me thinking right away. Mostly, as I was walking away, I was trying to remember the rest of the lyrics to America � Fuck, yeah! But these types of movies always trigger a few thoughts in my head, so I have to give them time to swim about a bit and stretch their legs, to mix metaphors a bit.

Don�t get me wrong. I enjoyed the movie. It was hilarious, mostly. I found the puppets a bit difficult to follow, if only because they weren�t terribly interesting. You know how Gary Sinise isn�t THE most handsome man you�ve ever seen, but you NEED to know what he�s doing and saying in each scene he�s in � how people say he could read the phone book and they�d be on board? Yeah, puppets can�t do that. They just can�t. They�re not compelling, and that�s a problem in anything as long as a film. Or a Shakespearean play (Thames River Puppet Barge, I�m glaring at YOU!). But that�s not the point. The movie really accomplished what it set out to do, I think. The Southpark movie did the same thing. Its like Film School 101. By making light of really serious issues, you can get the audience to laugh. A lot! And I did. Poor Kim Jong Il. He�s so ronery.

But here�s the thing. I�m currently reading Reading Lolita in Tehran. This book cautiously describes how what�s happening in the Middle East is not funny. Not funny at all. The book is obviously about Iran, and not Iraq, America�s current Middle Eastern focal point, but the issues, to this stupid American, appear to be similar. As I sat at lunch today, reading, the author recounted the first days of the war in Iran, when Iraq started bombing them, with our assistance. This was just after the revolution in Iran, as it switched over from a secular nation to a Muslim republic. (FYI: My knowledge of history, and of this area in particular, is abysmal. If I�m wrong, I apologize.) Living in Los Angeles, in the very environs of the Film Actor�s Guild (thank you, Team America), we pride ourselves on our pseudo-knowledge of the ills befalling other nations. We know that women are subjugated, tortured, and even killed for �crimes� we can�t even begin to comprehend. For the most part, we don�t want to comprehend. We know these things are happening, but they�re not happening to us. Personally. We know about it, and it�s bad, sure. We could even rattle off some statistics if necessary. But we can�t get too close. And secretly, we might look down our noses at those women. How could they possibly just let this happen? How can they have their freedoms taken away from them without a fight? We can sympathize, absolutely, but we cannot comprehend any of it. What has happened, or why any of it was allowed to happen (Team America�s point?). The utter foreignness of these acts confuses and frightens us. How can we help a country and it�s people, when they do not think the way we do?

But I�m getting ahead of myself. Lolita takes the time to show the reader how it happened. One educated, modern, Westernized woman�s account of how they had their freedoms, and their Freedom, taken away, without a thought or care as to how it might affect women, because that�s exactly the point. As the author says in the book, women in Iran became irrelevant. They were ghosts on the street, desperately scrambling to be invisible, to avoid being stopped by the morality police for exposing a hair, a square inch of flesh, anything. They could be imprisoned for such transgressions. Or worse. The book unfolds as a memoir about the author�s days teaching various works of literature to a small, dedicated group of students, all women, and the effort they went through to study those works. But it�s also about the women as they struggle just to get to the class each day. What they have to go through, who they have to lie to, and for what they are inspected each day, just to learn something. Something Western and foreign. Finally, the book is about the author�s struggle to define herself as a woman in Iran, determinedly NOT irrelevant, and NOT a figment of her own imagination. She is loyal to her homeland and wants to believe that it could not betray her in this manner. By the time she realizes it, the betrayal has already happened, but her apparent complicity is nothing of the sort. She struggled against it as much as she could, and it simply didn�t work.

I�m only about halfway through the book, and am curious to find out what finally drives the author to leave Iran with her family. Or without them? I�m looking forward to knowing more.

In watching Team America this weekend, I was struck by the opposing viewpoints. The movie is clearly not quite so deep as the book, nor is it trying to be. Team America had it�s own axe to grind, by putting all versions of terrorists together in one lump, and teaming Kim Jong Il with the Film Actor�s Guild to stop those terrorists with soft words and celebrities. While it�s possible to do an analysis of the themes in the movie, I�m not sure that it�s really necessary. They blew a hell of a lot of shit up. World landmarks. Celebrities. Michael Moore. And nothing can bring a movie-going audience together like a good grade A explosion, with allusions to homoeroticism. I�m not exactly sure where I�m going with this ramble. I was just struck by the contrast of the lead female character in the film saying �Hey Terrorist � Terrorize this!� to Azar Nafisi�s descriptions of suggestions that women in Iran dress properly during the war, �so that if their houses were hit [by bombs], they would not be indecently exposed to strangers� eyes.�

Explosive words, indeed.

� 2004 Tigerpants Nation (Rebecca Gross)

4:57 p.m. - 2004-10-18

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