How Movies and Pop-Culture Shaped America’s Image of Iran
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Foreign wars often find Western audiences under-educated and scrambling to comprehend. Iran is different.
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Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment In early 1991, just a few years after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, American audiences were feted with Not Without My Daughter , a Sally Field film that touched on some of the most harrowing fears an American could experience. Also, some of the most offensive ones. Based on the real-life heroine’s memoir from a few years earlier, the movie centered on an Iranian man who tricks his American wife into going to the country and traps her there, using their child as a hostage. As one of the first pieces of mainstream entertainment about post-Revolution Iran, it opened Western moviegoing eyes to a country that hadn’t been thought of since the freeing of U.S. hostages a decade earlier (and played on the same anxieties of that incident). But it only did so in the most paper-thin and cartoonishly evil way. The film’s director, Brian Gilbert, and the actor who played the villainous ex-husband, Alfred Molina, were Brits with little obvious connection to the country, and it showed in the cringey final product. Watch it now and see what you think. Or, better yet, don’t. The only reassurance is that the film’s woman-against-the-system plotline was so generic most viewers would forget where it was about in the first place. Related Stories TV Guy Ritchie Returns to Sherlock Holmes With 'Young Sherlock' Stars Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Dónal Finn: "He's Spun It on Its Head" TV HBO's 'A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms' Casts Three New Actors for Season 2 This past Monday, 35 years after Daughter’s release in theaters and with his nation’s tyrannical regime teetering , Jafar Panahi, Iran’s cinematic poet laureate — and, lately, his country’s explainer-in-chief — was a television guest, along with his translator, on Jon Stewart’s night of The Daily Show. The intervi...
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