Palestine and the Middle East in the Popular Filmic Imaginary: Historical Memory, Grievable Lives, and Encountering the Other in Film

Abstract

This study explores how American audiences encounter Palestine and the wider Middle East through popular films, and how our collective memories of conflicts in the Arab world are constructed in media. Taking into account how the discourse of film critics often prime audiences to understand films as realistic and historically accurate, this project takes an incisive critical look at how films that are framed as sympathetic and progressive actually deny Palestinians and Arabs agency, and render their lives as disposable and ungrievable. In framing films as a motivated public memory project and analyzing the textual elements and narratives of popular movies, this study also uncovers how the cities and spaces of the Middle East are presented merely as sites of danger and trauma for American and Israeli protagonists. It also delves into the work these films do regarding the malleability of collective national memory and how they rewrite conflicts of the past to help maintain senses of militaristic masculinity and the ideology of exceptionalism. This study also expands on the concept of the Israeli ‘Shoot and Cry’ narratives to demonstrate how that same effect is prominent in American war films and displaces the audiences’ sympathy from the victim to the aggressor. The project closes with an analysis of two films, Amreeka and Forget Baghdad, both of which complicate notions of memory, place, and Palestinian and Arab identity, in stark contrast with what is seen in most mainstream films portraying the peoples and places of the Middle East.