In the June 1986 issue of American Film, the late Alexander Cockburn, one of the Anglophone fourth estate’s most reliable challengers of empire, reviewed Tony Scott’s Top Gun.*** He ended his stinging critique of the “high flying” military-industrial romance, by pointing out the irony in the fact that the fighter pilots in the film (Tom Cruise et. al.) were portrayed in such noble and heroic terms only ten years after the end of the United States’ bumbling imperial air-war on the people of Vietnam. A few years later, with the extensive media coverage of George H.W. Bush’s war in the Persian Gulf, the American public could for the first time virtually follow the aerial bombing of Iraq on television and imagine themselves the pilots of their own jets, just like their heroes Maverick and Goose. Fast-forward a year later, and Disney’s Aladdin is in theaters.
In his “The Monstrous Births of ‘Aladdin,’” scholar of Arabic literature, Michael Cooperson, traced the process through which characters and themes were translated into different versions of the famous folk tale.**** Cooperson notes how the producers of the 1992 animated film changed the moral of the story, originally an 1980s-style message of “greed is good,” in order bring it properly into the a post-Cold War American milieu of superpower as enlightened policeman. Thus, the genie in the Disney feature places a limit on the amount of wishes he can grant and Aladdin — whose look, Cooperson notes, animators modeled after Tom Cruise (!) — saves his third and final wish to liberate his friend the genie, literally, from his chains. In the end, the genie, voiced by Robin Williams, decides to remain with Aladdin despite his “freedom.” More than 20 years after the initial war, after a decade of brutal sanctions, and finally the total destruction of its neighboring state of Iraq, Kuwait remains a staunch ally of the United States and an essential staging ground for its imperial maneuvers in the Arab world and beyond. The recent release of Sacha Baron Cohen’s film The Dictator — a latter day Orientalist-minstrel created by a devout Zionist of the so-called liberal stripe — in the aftermath of the western takeover of Libya and in the midst of the United States’ continued assault on the Arab/Islamicate world even as its people rise up in courageous and imaginative revolution, is another instance of an empire rehearsing its role (as leading civilization à la Huntington) on the silver screen.
awesome!
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