Hollywood

Why Hollywood Suddenly Loves the Muslims It Vilified for a Century

Trump’s travel ban turned Hollywood into the champion of the Muslims it had cast as villains for a century. Its history with Jews, black and gay Americans explains why.

Husam Sam Asi 13 February 2017

Protesters hold a sit-in at Los Angeles International Airport against Trump’s travel ban in January 2017 — A sit-in at Los Angeles International Airport against Trump’s travel ban, January 2017. Photo: Marcy Winograd, CC BY-SA 4.0.

When Donald Trump signed an executive order barring travellers from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, Hollywood reacted with outrage and disgust. Many of its stars took to social media to condemn their president and his decree, others joined demonstrators at the country’s airports demanding the release of detained visitors, and the SAG Awards ceremony was turned into a political stage, where celebrities rallied to support Muslims in impassioned speeches.

The stars backed their words and slogans with their pockets, making generous donations to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the non-profit organisation that mounted a legal challenge to Trump’s order and won an emergency court ruling that temporarily halted deportations under it.

Though heartened, Muslims were surprised and overwhelmed by the entertainment industry’s passionate support for their cause. After all, this is an industry that has been stereotyping and vilifying them in its movies for over a century. Muslim characters are usually the terrorists and evildoers, and very rarely seen in meaningful roles, let alone lead ones.

Interestingly, sixteen years ago, Hollywood did little to stem the surge of Islamophobia that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Washington and New York. Instead, it joined forces with the government in reassuring an anxious American public by offering jingoistic movies in which American heroes decimated villainous Muslims, reaffirming and perpetuating the prejudice that all Muslims were terrorists. So why is Hollywood now defending the same people it helped to vilify in the first place?

A Pattern as Old as Hollywood

This is not the first time that Hollywood’s attitude towards a vulnerable community has changed. Looking back at its history, we find that Hollywood’s moral codes are governed by business and political interests and aligned with public taste and sentiment.

During the 1930s, when antisemitism was rife among Americans, and the US authorities were refusing Jewish refugees entry and turning them back to Europe, where many were murdered by the Nazis, Hollywood didn’t rally to support the Jews. Some historians have even suggested that it was in bed with the Nazis, conforming to their racist agenda in order to secure access to the German market. Hitler had a representative in Tinseltown to ensure that movies were sympathetic to his agenda and sterilised of Jewish characters. Only when the US joined the war did Hollywood change course, portraying the Nazis as the villains and giving the Jews the heroic roles. There is no doubt that the positive depiction of Jews in the movies made a dramatic impact on diminishing antisemitism in the US.

In recent years, similar shifts have occurred in Hollywood’s attitude towards other groups, such as African Americans and the LGBT community, whose members now occupy lead roles in mainstream cinema such as Brokeback Mountain and Carol, something that was unimaginable twenty years ago. The normalisation of LGBT characters in television shows and movies over the last two decades made them acceptable to society and paved the way for the legalisation of same-sex marriage across the United States in 2015. Similarly, the surge of African American stories in mainstream cinema shed a new, positive light on a community that had often been depicted as a burden on society and a source of crime.

The question is: why does it take so long for such a liberal entity as Hollywood to change its ways?

The Talent and the Money

Calling Hollywood liberal is not wholly accurate, because if we look closely at its structure we find that it consists of two parts: the creative (the talent) and the corporate (the executives). While the former is indeed liberal in its political and social views, the latter is more conservative in its way of thinking. And since the creative part is what the public sees and hears, one gets the impression that Hollywood is liberal, but in reality it’s the corporate part that makes the decisions in this town and dictates its rules.

In the 1930s, Hollywood was swarming with Jewish creative talent, who did try to challenge its friendly policy towards the Nazis, but they were thwarted by the powerful executives, many of whom were also Jewish. The most notable case was the screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, who was prevented from making a movie about the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews.

Gay and African American artists’ attempts to tell their stories also faced an impenetrable wall of rejections. Not because the executives were racists or homophobes, but simply because they couldn’t see the business logic behind those stories. They firmly believed that the public was not ready for them and hence that they would not be able to sell them. For corporate Hollywood, profitability comes before morality. “I was not hired to defend or spread ideals,” one studio boss once told me. “My job is to ensure that my company is profitable.” A few months later, I bumped into him at a fundraiser for Syrian refugees, where he announced a $100,000 donation. When I commended him for his generosity, he leaned over and whispered in my ear: “It’s good for business.”

And when the corporate part decides to steer Hollywood in a specific direction, the idealistic artists have no choice but to obey. Case in point: when the Chinese market began to expand rapidly in the last decade, the artists bowed to the executives’ demands to insert Chinese characters in their movies and portray China in a positive light, even when their ideals collided with China’s policies on human rights or Tibet. Hollywood is so eager to please China that one can hardly hear any of its talent mentioning Tibet or the Dalai Lama these days.

Sundance and the Small Screen

The artists are not without power, though. Over the last few decades, they have increasingly relied on independent cinema to project their idealistic vision of the world. Film festivals such as Sundance have acted as a publicity platform for these independent movies and a springboard to the Academy Awards, bringing them closer to the mainstream. Sundance winners such as Desert Hearts, Pariah, The Birth of a Nation and Fruitvale Station highlighted the issues facing LGBT and African American communities, and their success piqued corporate Hollywood’s interest in their subjects, leading to the creation of offshoots such as Fox Searchlight by 20th Century Fox and Focus Features by Universal, which concentrate on making and distributing such movies.

The recent surge in television production and broadcasters, including cable and streaming, has also offered artists a new avenue to explore diverse issues that were impossible to touch in mainstream Hollywood. Shows such as Modern Family, Six Feet Under, Orange Is the New Black, Empire and Black-ish brought the issues of diversity and racial and gender equality into people’s living rooms, breaking taboos and demolishing false prejudices.

So one could argue that independent cinema and television have levelled the ground for corporate Hollywood to take a different path in its attitude towards these communities. Political events have also contributed to this change. The election of a liberal black president in 2008 no doubt signalled to Hollywood that the multitudes were ready to accept black leads in its movies, while his display of sympathy for the LGBT community left Hollywood with no choice but to follow suit.

Now It Is the Muslims’ Turn

It seems that it’s now the turn of Muslims and Middle Easterners to get similar treatment from Hollywood. In the last few years, decent Muslim characters have started to pop up in television shows, such as those played by Yasmine Al Massri in Quantico and Riz Ahmed in The Night Of. Muslim and Middle Eastern artists are winning Emmys and Golden Globes in television, such as Mr. Robot’s creator, Sam Esmail, and its star, Rami Malek, and Master of None’s Aziz Ansari. This year, the most talked-about film at the Sundance Film Festival was Kumail Nanjiani’s romantic comedy The Big Sick, about an interracial couple: a Muslim man and a white woman. The film sparked a bidding war among buyers and was sold to Amazon Studios for $12 million, in one of the biggest deals in the festival’s history.

Sundance also screened four documentaries highlighting the plight of the Syrian people. One of them, Last Men in Aleppo, won the Grand Jury Prize for world cinema documentary. Meanwhile, three short documentaries about Syria’s war and its refugees have been nominated for Academy Awards.

As with other communities, it took a humanitarian crisis and an anti-Islamic president to get to this point. Muslim artists are now embraced and applauded. This year’s Oscar-nominated and SAG-winning actor Mahershala Ali was rewarded with warm applause when he spoke about his Islamic faith at the SAG Awards ceremony last month, while the Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, nominated again this year, was showered with support and praise after Trump’s executive order led him to announce that he would stay away from the Oscars ceremony. Just a few months earlier, Farhadi had told me that “Hollywood’s conception of the Middle East is detached from reality,” and hence he couldn’t work there.

Mahershala Ali at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. Photo: Gordon Correll, CC BY-SA 2.0.

With such passionate support for Muslims on social and mainstream media and from other businesses, corporate Hollywood has no choice but to react and start ameliorating its portrayal of Muslims in its movies. This change is not being spurred by moral obligation but by commercial necessity. Trump’s executive order created a sense of acceptance, respect and inclusion of Muslims, and the public is now more willing to hear and see their stories on the big screen. “Four years ago, no one wanted to hear about my Muslim stories. Now they are seeking them out,” says Sam Esmail, who is working on a Middle Eastern project.

The question is: will Hollywood’s movies be able to polish the tainted image of Muslims in the US, when Washington is determined to label them as potential terrorists? The former Vice-President Al Gore believes that film is more powerful than politicians in affecting people’s consciousness and shifting their views. “The power of cinema to open people’s minds and put before them issues of importance to humanity is unparalleled,” he told me at the Sundance Film Festival a couple of weeks ago, where he was promoting his second environmental documentary, An Inconvenient Sequel.

Of course, Hollywood doesn’t have absolute power over people’s minds and feelings. In spite of its efforts to empower marginalised communities, antisemitism, homophobia and racism are still alive in the US and other countries. Denzel Washington, whose movies have shed light on so many African American virtues, told me in a BBC interview: “You can’t legislate love. If you go home and teach your son to hate, then nothing can stop you.”

Read in Chinese: 好莱坞怼川普？但自己其实有一堆黑历史 (Tencent Entertainment, 27 February 2017)