Like any kid with a cable box and too much time on their hands, I watched a lot of TV and movie reruns growing up. My personal favorite was Brendan Fraser’s (“The Whale”) 1999 classic “The Mummy.” It wasn’t just the explosive action sequences or the larger-than-life visuals that built my love for the film; it was the nuance of the characters. As a voracious reader with a specific fascination for Egyptology, I saw myself in Evie (Rachel Weisz, “The Favourite”), the leading-lady British librarian with a knack for historical research. She was practical, cautious and judgmental beyond belief but did all those things while still pursuing a sense of adventure and romance, showing me who I could grow up to be.
That made it particularly painful, then, to rewatch “The Mummy” as an adult and come to terms with who the film thought I could be. While Evie stood out as an admirable representation of complex womanhood, the film’s representation of Arabs and the Middle East and North Africa are nothing short of disappointingly one-note. “The Mummy,” made for a white Western audience, relied heavily on orientalist caricatures of MENA culture as “mystical and dangerous,” choosing to sacrifice their characters to prop up its white leads. Despite taking place entirely in Egypt, the only named Egyptian characters are Beni (Kevin J. O’Connor, “Deep Rising”), the spineless, greedy traitor who becomes the evil mummy’s lackey, and Gad Hassan (Omid Djalili, “The Infidel”), the equally greedy, perverted prison warden. Both characters serve as nuisances to the central characters and, in what little screen time they have, spend every second nefariously scheming until meeting a gruesome end.
This is how the film treats its few Arab characters who have the privilege of a name. The vast majority of MENA characters are silently relegated to the background — props used to flesh out the caricature of a backward fantasy world for the leads to traverse. The women are either scandalous belly dancers who make Evie look like a chaste heroine or they’re dressed in modest religious clothing that contrasts Evie’s sheer version of the same styles, thus making her seem like the perfectly liberated ideal of “exotic” womanhood. Either way, Arab women are admonished by the film so it can then exalt a white female lead. The same can be said of the Arab men when compared to Rick O’Connell’s all-American charm. He seems even shinier and braver when examined alongside Beni and Gad’s griminess, inside and out.
MENA people in this context are not treated as complex human beings, instead serving as storytelling devices that stand in the way or remain in the background of a white lead’s self-actualization. More often than not, they are villains. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen TV shows and movies sink to the classically racist “Arab terrorist” villain storyline. “Ghosts of Beirut,” “American Sniper,” “Liaison” and many others use MENA people as de-facto scapegoats. Visual media have always been the most effective vehicle of modern ideology, so for this to be the most pervasive form of Arab depiction in Western media propagates the harmful painting of MENA individuals as violent and heartless. “Homeland” built an entire brand around this stereotype for multiple award-winning seasons, undeterred by a protest within their own show. When a group of artists hired by the “Homeland” team spray painted “Homeland is racist” in Arabic on set for a scene, the words of protest made it through final cuts because there wasn’t a single Arabic speaker on set or in production. It didn’t matter to the show what the Arabic script said, just that it could be in the background to “complete the horror-fantasy of the Middle East.” Co-creator Alex Gansa even said that he “admired” the act of protest, but clearly not enough to change the way he steered depictions of MENA people in their storylines.
This is how Hollywood chooses to see MENA people when it chooses to see them at all. Arabs are mostly missing from Hollywood projects. Often, our stories and culture are stripped away and repackaged in exchange for watered-down non-MENA portrayals. “Dune” is a recent high-profile case of this type of glaring commodification of Arab culture. Despite the book being an obvious allegory for Western imperialism and environmentalism in the Middle East — even drawing up heavy inspiration for the fictional Fremen of Arrakis from Middle Eastern culture — there is not a single MENA person on the cast, let alone portraying one of the Fremen. Even the mangled Arabic used by certain central characters shows the artistic cost of this intentional exclusion of any Arabic speakers on set or in the writer’s room. You’d think they’d learn after “Homeland.”
There is a distinct lack of empathy in the repackaging of Arab culture into something so “other” that, even in a sci-fi universe, it doesn’t warrant respect. These Western creators have essentially exploited this culture for entertainment and profit in a story about our exploitation by the West. It doesn’t matter how many rave reviews “Dune: Part Two” gets or how many millions it rakes in at the box office, it has failed at its ultimate thematic duty. It’s not as though there is a shortage of Arab talent that is willing and capable of taking on a project like this, so to shut them out cannot be mistaken for anything but an intentional decision to strip the story from its inspiration.
All of these failures to accurately and humanely portray Arabs and Arab culture, when examined together, demonstrate more than just negligence. They speak to a long-term, deliberately consistent series of choices by Western creatives to exploit Arab culture and exclude Arabs from the narrative unless specifically to admonish them. It’s an informal conspiracy, but sinister all the same.
And it doesn’t end with sci-fis or action thrillers; this conduct can be found in even the flashiest of dramas. “Sex and the City 2” follows Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker, “Hocus Pocus”) and her friends on a trip to Abu Dhabi dressed in appropriated versions of traditional Middle Eastern clothing. The girls just had to bring a bit of New York flair to the drab, centuries-old customs that don’t belong to them, didn’t they? Traipsing through the desert in their sequin robes and golden headdresses, they attempt to embody what Western audiences deem an acceptably “liberated” way to wear traditional Arab clothing. All they really end up embodying, however, is orientalist ignorance. We all remember the scene of Samantha (Kim Cattrall, “Mannequin”) throwing condoms into a crowd of horrified onlookers and shouting about her oh-so liberated sex life, right? The tendency for Western women to be praised for altering or appropriating Arab clothing while Arab women are often seen as oppressed for their clothing choices goes beyond this horrible movie. Appropriations of niqabi clothing are plentiful in “Dune,” used in the background as living props to build up the Fremen culture — all still without a single Arab actress to wear them.
It’s no wonder that I can’t think of a single Arab woman role model I had on-screen growing up. The closest I ever got was Evie, and I’m not sure if the movie saying she’s half-Egyptian makes it any more believable. Western audiences can see themselves a million times over as strong and good, as clever and kind; MENA viewers don’t get to see themselves at all, and if they do, they are portrayed as terrorists, cowards, liars or props. If we want to see accurate, nuanced depictions of ourselves on screen, the onus falls on us to tell those stories and claw our way to get them shown. But it shouldn’t. Allowing Arab voices to be heard shouldn’t be a one-sided battle, but a collective effort. Just as the choice has been made time and again to turn us into villains, it must be consciously unmade so that harmful caricatures can finally be replaced by real people.
Senior Arts Editor Mina Tobya can be reached at mtobya@umich.edu.