After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East

One time when the crowd chanted “Marg bar Amrika” (Death to America), Seyyed Mostafa—a clerical student visiting from Qom who wears his mustard-colored robes and a white turban, indicating his descent from the Prophet—turns to me and says, “You know when we yell that, we’re not talking about the American people. We LOVE the American people. We’re only talking about the government. That’s the difference between Iran and the Arab countries. The Arab countries…their leaders love the American government, but I think the people hate the American people. We’re the opposite.”

WHEN A SEPARATION, directed by Asghar Farhadi, won the Best Foreign-Language Film Award at the 2012 Academy Awards, it was cause for widespread celebration in Tehran. Despite a vibrant debate about the controversial social drama prior to the awards ceremony, the response to Farhadi’s Hollywood victory briefly bridged the divide between his film’s former opponents and its champions in Iran.¹ A year later, when Ben Affleck’s political suspense film Argo took home the 2013 Oscar for Best Picture, the reaction in Iran once again crossed social and political boundaries, but this time rather than exuberance there was general dismay—particularly about the film’s representations of Iranians and recent history. The Islamic Republic promised to fund a remake, the Iranian government retained a French lawyer to sue Affleck in international court, and two academic conferences held in Tehran about Hollywood’s “Iranophobia” garnered international press coverage.²

In both cases, cinema took center stage in the public discussions of relations between the two nations. In Iran, Argo stood for more than itself, as did A Separation in the United States. Political relations remained fraught through this period because of a stand-off in discussions of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, unresolved tensions over the way Iran suppressed protests of the 2009 presidential election, and Iranian perceptions that the U.S. government, military, and entertainment industries were colluding to overthrow or suppress the elected Iranian government. Argo, set in 1979 during the hostage crisis, dredged up memories of older hostilities between the two nations and renewed American anxieties about Iranian perfidy and vice versa. A Separation, by contrast, not only was an individual triumph for its director but also represented the celebrated body of postrevolutionary Iranian “new wave” cinema—proving that great art is being produced in the Islamic Republic of Iran. As such, A Separation benefited from two decades of Western fascination with new Iranian cinema by film critics, scholars, and art cinema audiences and helped to popularize that interest to a broader American public.

The way both films were circumscribed and overwhelmed by international politics, however, demonstrates the limits to how cultural products can communicate to audiences in ways that might defy those politics. Both Argo and A Separation were apparently against the kind of polarization that appeared in the media discussion of their films in Iran and the United States. Argo opened with a left-leaning prologue in which American audiences were told that the United States had “engineered a coup d’état” that deposed democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, “a secular democrat,” and in his place “installed” Reza Pahlavi as shah, initiating an “era of torture and fear.”³ Despite some errors about Pahlavi (he was already shah when the U.S. coup was staged, and “Reza” is the name of his father; he is properly called “Mohammad Reza”), Argo thus provided the version of the painful events of 1953 that Iranians had long claimed but that the United States did not officially acknowledge until 2000.⁴ For its part, A Separation, set in the present, revolves in part around an Iranian woman’s desire to leave Iran because she feels that remaining there will limit her daughter’s future. In this chapter, I give fuller readings of the films, arguing that Argo’s liberal opening prologue is undercut by Ben Affleck’s recuperation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the substitution of the heroic American male for a silenced Iranian female and showing how Farhadi’s film allows for a more nuanced understanding of domestic Iran that emphasizes the ties and obligations that bind Iranians to their country and each other.

But to appreciate the meanings of cinema in Iran in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is not enough to look closely at the content and artistry of these particular films. In the long-standing U.S.–Iranian standoff, cinema plays a key and crucial role. What I call here the curious logics of circulation alter our understanding not only of the meaning of individual films but also more broadly of the way that cultural products function politically in the digital age. To put it simply, one cannot understand the meaning of Iranian films without attending to their circulation—what sorts of debates they occasion at home and how the international reception of them affects their meanings in Iran.

Some of the most interesting discussions of postrevolution Iranian cinema have encouraged us to consider the circulation of Iranian cinema abroad as part of the greater discussion of it, from Hamid Naficy’s four-volume work A Social History of Iranian Cinema to Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad’s slim but excellent book The Politics of Iranian Cinema and from Hamid Dabashi’s many writings on Iranian cinema both scholarly and journalistic to Negar Mottahedeh’s monograph Displaced Allegories, which addresses the gendering of Iranian art cinema as women’s cinema as a result of censorship restrictions.⁵ Iranian cinema is so diverse, and there is so much of it, of course, that the films that do circulate internationally should be considered a limited subset, even if a particularly prominent part of the fuller picture. Hamid Naficy takes great care to categorize multiple genres and traditions within “Iranian cinema,” including social dramas, art cinema, war films, documentaries, and films by women, most of which are not what Western audiences know or think they know about films from Iran.

In this chapter on Iranian cinema, I for the most part focus on what is often called “art cinema” precisely because it is the cinema that circulates internationally. In so doing, I am engaging an impressive body of scholarship and trying to bring Iranian cinema in as a key case for my larger argument. Discussions of Iranian cinema—a distinguished field unto itself—have had little or no role in American studies or comparative literary studies generally. Insofar as any readers of this chapter may be interested in Iranian film studies more broadly, I should point out that what I am doing differently here from some of the aforementioned works is engaging both American and Iranian films as they move through the United States and Iran and as they are taken up in both contexts. I agree with a key argument Zeydabadi-Nejad makes about the circulation of Iranian film: “the problematic of reception starts much earlier” than the moment that the film is viewed by an audience. He is interested in the relationship between filmmakers and state control and makes a key intervention when he argues that we should not see that relationship as fixed or binary; he insists that “negotiations of power and meaning [occur] at the level of filmmaking” itself.⁶ In other words, Iranian filmmakers know (or think they know) what they can get away with and are particularly aware of the Iranian audience—including the censor—as they construct their films. This negotiation of course goes beyond the filmmakers, I argue, and includes a wide range of individuals involved with film, including those who comment on it, those who pirate films, and those involved in dubbing them. Scholars who have focused on Iranian cinema have been particularly attuned to the complex relationship of text to context, circulation to “meaning,” and the multiple contingent meanings that Iranian cinema always engages. Indeed, these things are often points of contention and are perhaps impossible to escape.

In bringing a discussion of Iranian cinema into this book, however, I am addressing a larger audience than those focused on Iranian film. In comparative literature and in the transnational strand of American literary studies, those who argue that the meaning of the text can be identified by reading it closely clash with those who argue that whatever the apparent meaning might be, it is a distraction from the more important question of what the text does, how it circulates, and what form it takes. (I have suggested that cultural diplomacy is invested in these debates as well, though with significantly less theoretical nuance.) So there are those—most famously Franco Moretti, who has argued for a “distant reading” of literary texts—who would attend only to the circulation of the text and others, including Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli, who would go yet further and focus only on the “circulatory matrix” within which a cultural product operates, explicitly denying what they call the “virtuoso reading” of the cultural object.⁷ To this debate, I bring my discussion of Iranian films to how we might look closely at the way they negotiate complex publics without refusing a close reading of the text itself. Indeed, I argue that the close reading of the film and its engagement with its public is a way into a richer sense of how circulation implicates the text for a global comparative literary studies.

This chapter therefore challenges those in both academic and diplomatic realms who argue that cultural products such as film, literature, music, and art communicate simply in the past two or three decades, if they ever did before, and therefore are a useful barometer of the society from which they come or a means by which to convince foreign audiences to appreciate these products’ cultures of origin. By “simply,” I do not mean that such diplomats and critics consider films or literary works “simple” or “uncomplicated” but rather that they imply that there is a legible meaning; this meaning may require a critic to elaborate it for readers, but it is ultimately a single meaning rather than multiple, possibly contradictory meanings as the text is entextualized.

I take a circuitous path in presenting my argument, first examining Argo and A Separation and the discussion of them on both sides of the divide and then venturing through the film worlds of Tehran, including the digital piracy of Hollywood films, the way the long fascination with American cinema takes on its own meanings through exuberant dubbing, and the different meanings attributed to Iran’s greatest auteur in the contemporary period, Abbas Kiarostami. My goal is to show how circulation explains Iranian cinema and, by the same token, how Iranian cinema explains circulation.

The stakes are important for comparative literary studies, American studies, and film studies on the level of methodology. My argument is that it is not enough to read a film closely on its own because its meaning shifts when we take its circulation into new publics into account. But here, as with the Egyptian fictions of the digital age, the misreading of the role of social networking software in the Arab uprisings, and our understanding of the Moroccan exception, a dimension of this argument goes beyond academic pursuits and exceeds the question of how to read the text in the contemporary period. So I hope to show at the same time what the “curious logics of circulation” mean to understanding cultural diplomacy in the digital age. Here, in the ongoing U.S. conflict with Iran that has affected the period during which this book was researched and written, the question of circulation is political as well as critical.

A month before the 2013 Academy Awards, the following story appeared inside the front section of the New York Times: “Film to Present Iran’s View of ‘Argo’ Events.”⁸ Written by the Times Tehran Bureau chief, Thomas Erdbrink, the piece reported on—but at the same time subtly mocked—the proposition that there might be an Iranian version of the story told in Ben Affleck’s blockbuster, which had recently been nominated for best picture.⁹ “Not much is known about the proposed movie,” the Times reported. “But it is a sure bet that it will center on the official Iranian view of the 1979 hostage crisis.” From the start, Affleck’s film was posited as superior to the imagined Iranian film, not because of its artistry but because it supposedly offered an unofficial view—one outside of government politics presented by an individual artist working free of state-imposed constraints. An Iranian film version of the “Argo” rescue could only be compromised and ridiculous by this logic; by giving the official Iranian view, the imagined film would necessarily politicize the story. In contrast, Affleck’s work is value free, not tied to the “official” U.S. view. How could a film made by a Hollywood celebrity be official, anyway?

The short article did eventually, almost grudgingly, admit that there may be more to the story. A few paragraphs down, Erdbrink wrote: “Iranian films…have attracted foreign acclaim.” But as if recognizing the trap into which he had written himself, the Times writer stressed that the Iranian films celebrated in the West are independent, not official. The implication was that readers should not be distracted into thinking that an Iranian version of Argo might be any good. That may be true—films commissioned by governments are rarely works of lasting power (consider the films commissioned by the U.S. government during World War II). But what is important here is how the awareness of Iranian art cinema made its way into this article about Argo, which was after all an article about the conflict between the United States and Iran. The Times writer brought these disparate elements together—How could he not?—and made explicit the ways in which the discussion of film in Iran and American films about Iran have always also been about U.S.–Iranian politics since 1979 (or since 1953) until today.

Here, the Times bureau chief picked up something from the larger discussion of Iranian art cinema in the West: the way numerous American critics who celebrate Iranian films have posited that their originality emerges from the fraught relationship between film directors and the state. It doesn’t matter how much Iranian cinema Erdbrink had seen. What does matter is that a logic from discussions of that cinema had made its way into his article.¹⁰ According to that logic, state censorship creates a situation within which the genius of the Iranian film director can flourish even though by definition censorship limits the work of the Iranian auteur. If in the West the auteur director is generally understood to work against the prerogatives of capital and in tension with the industrial aspects of film production, in Iran the auteur is understood to work against the state.¹¹ In a later section of this chapter, I discuss how this logic works in discussions of Abbas Kiarostami, the most celebrated Iranian film auteur. But here note how in the Times article Ben Affleck’s absolute independence is assumed and the invisibility of the marketplace and of Hollywood film formulas is left unremarked. Iranians, in contrast, would not and did not see Affleck as free from pressures placed on Hollywood by the state or as working outside American ideology, but that this position might have any credibility is unimaginable in the article printed in the New York Times.

In January 2013, when this article appeared, the idea that six weeks later the Oscar would be presented to the producers of Argo from the White House itself—with uniformed soldiers surrounding the First Lady—was also unimaginable to the Tehran bureau chief of the New York Times. And though for many Iranians the image of Michelle Obama naming Argo as recipient of the Academy Award for best picture confirmed precisely the collusion of the U.S. government and the powerful film industry, I will venture to say that it had little effect on American audiences. Did it really corrupt anything for them when the camera made that surprising and unprecedented shift from the stage of Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre to somewhere within the White House? Would it have been any different if an Iranian film was awarded a top prize by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad surrounded by the Revolutionary Guard? Yet the official imprimatur on Argo was acceptable precisely because any connection between Hollywood and the state is not in danger of being perceived. Perceived in the United States, that is. In Iran, it was definitely noted.

Argo was released on October 4, 2012—the same week that the Iranian rial dropped 40 percent in value, an enormous economic crisis that spurred significant protests in Tehran.¹² The relationship between domestic crises in Iran and international posturing is rarely noted in U.S. media, but we must recall that there is an economic context for the debate about the cinematic representation of Iranian–U.S. relations.¹³ By rewriting the Iranian individual as an anonymous, mostly violent enemy of the United States, Argo unwittingly underwrote the continued sanctions against the Iranian state, which have had the gravest consequences on middle- and lower-class Iranians. By committing this representational violence against the individuality and subjectivity of the Iranian, therefore, Argo had and still has a very real effect on the lives of ordinary Iranians: it undergirds a context in which people in the United States are able to forget the pain of economic sanctions and the anxiety produced by continual threats of war. Further, by offering a heroic story of the “creative” and “nonviolent” work of a now good CIA, the film allowed an American audience to forget briefly the contemporary controversies over the use of torture by U.S. intelligence communities and to excuse retroactively the CIA’s involvement in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh.

The film—part espionage thriller, part comedy—tells a lesser-known story about the famous hostage crisis. Based on actual events—though quite loose in their adaptation—the film depicts the rescue of six American consular workers who escaped during the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy by Iranian students. These six Americans fled to the residence of the Canadian ambassador Kenneth Taylor (as well as to the residence of John Sheardown, a Canadian immigration officer, though this detail is not included in the film), from which they were eventually retrieved by a CIA officer, who smuggled them out of the country using fake Canadian passports. The title of the film refers to the cover story used by the CIA to justify the presence of the six men and women in Iran: they were film artists scouting locations for a science fiction picture to be called Argo. A fictitious production company was set up in Hollywood in case anyone in Iran was looking. (They weren’t.) Remarkably, this elaborate cover story is where Argo comes closest to historical reality.

Where it diverges most from the record is in its account of the role played by Tony Mendez, the CIA operative sent to “exfiltrate” the Americans, and nearly everything that happens once he arrives in Tehran, from a fabricated tour through the Grand Bazaar to an imagined scene at Mehrabad Airport in which Iranian police and passport agents detain the Americans, then release them, and finally chase them down the airport runway with guns drawn in a scene reminiscent of 1970s television (for me, the Dukes of Hazard came to mind). These scenes are what most Iranians objected to, for they portray Iranians variously as hapless and foolish (the government workers) or violent and faceless (regular Iranians). As one observer pointed out in the Palestine Chronicle, “‘Argo’ ultimately reinforces the binary opposition of a civilized West and a savage Iran. We hear a lot of Farsi in the movie, but only when Farsi is spoken by a Western character is the dialogue given subtitles. Farsi spoken by Iranian characters in the film is merely incomprehensible noise. Here the film accurately mirrors our contemporary reality, in which we inflict our discourse on Iranians, but are incapable of listening to theirs.”¹⁴ Although this description is a bit of an overstatement—two crucial scenes involving the Iranian housemaid provide subtitles to translate Farsi speech by Iranians—the general point is defensible.

The silencing of the Iranian subject is the crucial flaw of Argo. Iranian voices are not heard, or when they are heard, it is as “noise” (figure 3.1). Iranian subjects are pure sound, the beating of fists upon a car (in one particularly horrific scene, when Tony Mendez drives the six Americans through the streets of Tehran toward the bazaar, a complete fabrication from the historical record), or they are represented by angry rhetoric on news media. Gone from the film is the debate within Iran about the taking of American hostages; gone are the ideas and discussions of the radical students behind the takeover; gone is the debate in the region over whether to support the students or not; missing is the very real frustration of individual Iranians outside the activists’ political actions; and missing are the frustration and fear among Iranian exiles in the United States.

How can a critical approach committed to circulation respond to this silencing? Here I propose two tacks: one we might associate with postcolonial studies, which here means focusing on an Iranian character silenced by the film; and one that in the edited collection Globalizing American Studies I have called a multisited, comparative method,¹⁵ which here means following Affleck and his film to Tehran.

One Iranian character in the main arc of the film allows us a way out, the only Iranian character with a name who carries the burden of the silenced Iranian: Sahar—she has no last name in film or credits—played by Sheila Vand, an Iranian American actress (figure 3.2).¹⁶ Sahar is the housekeeper at the residence of the Canadian ambassador. At great and obvious personal risk, she helps maintain the dangerous fiction that the Americans hiding there are in fact Canadian “houseguests.” Sahar is featured in three brief but key scenes. In the first, the ambassador’s wife, Dr. Patricia Taylor (played by Page Leong), has a brief conversation in Persian with Sahar during which the latter indirectly reveals she is aware of the fiction. In the second, Sahar silently witnesses the execution by authorities of an Iranian living next door, suggesting the personal risk she is taking. In the third, an Iranian officer questions Sahar through the gate to the ambassador’s house, and she tells a lie that enables the fiction to continue. These scenes are by all accounts fictional,¹⁷ as is the character of Sahar,¹⁸ and therefore the final image we have of Sahar as she escapes Iran by entering Iraq on foot across the border provides an unremarked upon but tangible sense that she is the remainder of the film. In other words, she is that which is left over, that which does not fit into the film’s arc, that which is indivisible. The risk Sahar takes is thus noted but forgotten, and her fate is left to the imagination as she enters a country that will be a war zone for the next decade, arguably the last hot conflict of the Cold War (the Iran–Iraq War took place mostly in Iraq, especially on the border lands, from September 1980 until August 1988 and should be considered in the context of the overarching U.S.–Soviet conflict). ¹⁹ Sahar talks in this film, but using the distinction made famous by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, she is a subject who cannot speak—her language does not register. Her words are heard but only as they advance the plot for the American characters. Otherwise she is silenced, and like the erasure of Persian/Farsi language when it is not spoken by Westerners or when it does not advance their story line, Sahar remains only a trace.

It would seem to me reasonable to counter my argument by saying that Affleck gives us the minor character precisely to offer a critique of how the United States takes advantage of Sahar (or some aspect of Iran that she represents). And yet the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming: the film consistently puts history, Iranians, and even the Canadian allies themselves under erasure but tells its viewers that what they are seeing is historical reality, even while it uses familiar Hollywood formulas to advance the action and enhance the drama. If Sahar appears in the film, in other words, Affleck distracts the film’s audience from lingering on her or considering her fate. Instead, the film overwhelms its audience with carefully reconstructed sets, location shooting—the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul stands in for that of Tehran—comedic relief, action segments, and dramatic tension not between any of the Americans and Sahar, but between two American men: Tony Mendez (Affleck) and escapee Joe Stafford (played by Scoot McNairy).

Given the amount of fabrication in Argo, it is striking that the film emphasizes its own “absolute authenticity.” It does so with such insistence, so much repetition, that Affleck reveals something like anxiety. Again and again he takes recourse in multiple ways to what I call “photographic realism” to circumscribe the critique of Argo in advance. He does so, first, by expending extensive effort to cast actors who look like the Western individuals they are meant to represent. Given that all the historical figures represented in the film are unknown to contemporary audiences, this is a strange choice. But the final credits include photographs of the real hostages, the Canadian ambassador and his wife, the original John Chambers (played here by John Goodman), and of course Tony Mendez—the only historical character whom the actor playing him does not resemble. Second, Affleck’s exuberance with actual events of the so-called Canadian Caper is counterbalanced by his inclusion (again in the final credits) of historical photos from 1979 Iran that have been re-created in particular scenes in Argo. Third, as the Canadian press (but not the U.S. press) reported, Affleck rewrote the ending postscript after Ambassador Taylor complained about its inaccuracies, although the changes were limited to text that appears on screen at the film’s end and does little to address the larger critique.²⁰ And finally, on the BluRay release of the film, which was moved up to the week prior to the Academy Awards while the film was still in American theaters (a marketing novelty), numerous extra features attempt to emphasize the film’s historical veracity while downplaying its fictions, including interviews with historical figures such as Jimmy Carter and Kenneth Taylor (both edited not to appear critical of the historical inventions within the film) in a special feature documentary titled “Argo: Absolute Authenticity.”²¹

Argo thus vacillated between this photorealistic idea of historical accuracy and pure invention. Shifting between comedy and action formulas (John Goodman and Alan Arkin’s scenes in the former case and the airport scenes in the latter), the narrative arc takes over where the historical arc leaves off. Nonetheless, Thomas Erdbrink’s article in January 2013 quoted none other than Kenneth Taylor, the former Canadian ambassador to Iran who is depicted in the film, to suggest that an Iranian approach would be “amusing.” Taylor was elsewhere quoted as saying he was dismayed by Affleck’s film, and the Canadian press was up in arms about the film, but the Times used him to belittle the argument against the film. ²² And rather than take up any of the notable controversies or the political dimensions of the story, the Times framed its piece around the provincial Hollywood dimensions: “A tough week for Ben Affleck just got tougher.” ²³ The reference was to the apparent dismay in Hollywood circles that Affleck had been passed over by the Academy for a nomination in the best director award category even though his film itself had been nominated for best picture, which received much more attention in the U.S. press than anything else.

The Times article was simply repeating a common approach for reporting on matters of Iranian popular culture: foreclosing the possibility of an alternative view of the U.S.–Iranian relationship even while reporting on it.²⁴ In other words, it reported on the very subject it went on to mock; it raised the topic and then withdrew it, not unlike the way in which Argo itself raises the idea of Sahar’s subjectivity and then distracts viewers from considering it further. Furthermore, Erdbrink’s lead—“a tough week for Ben Affleck just got tougher”—summoned up a second familiar pattern in U.S. media accounts of Iran: recasting the account of a transnational audience for an American cultural product in terms of its implications for a Hollywood star. (David Hasselhoff’s notoriously awkward comments in the late 1990s trumpeting the alleged popular success of Baywatch in Iran is perhaps the most famous prior example: for Hasselhoff, in one of the more ridiculous comments of the decade, Baywatch represented “a cultural revolution.”) ²⁵ What is striking is that Argo operates in a similar fashion: its opening provides a potentially disruptive view of the Iran hostage crisis, but then the film pulls back from the alternative account to deliver a conservative version of the episode—the heroic act of a single individual, the CIA agent Tony Mendez, played here by the director Ben Affleck himself.

What allowed Argo to be so successful among major critics and academy voters in the United States was the suggestion of a liberal corrective—its opening—replaced with the reinscription of a palatable conservative story (the heroic act of a single individual, Mendez). At the same time, the exaggerated account of Tony Mendez emerging from the shadows of history merged with the Hollywood story of Ben Affleck leaving behind the shadow of his own prior history—the narrative that without his former collaborator Matt Damon, he was a lightweight—to emerge victorious in the land of motion pictures. As such, Argo and the media accounts about it continued a long tradition of Hollywood Orientalism wherein the heroic, lone individual takes on a corrupted world and recalled Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942).

But what about the provocative, left-leaning opening? Argo opens with a capsule history of the events leading up to the hostage crisis that was sure to rankle both Republicans and many in the Iranian diaspora in southern California’s “Tehrangeles”: U.S. support for the shah’s decadent and oppressive regime, overthrow of the democratically elected Mosaddegh, and the like. By 2012, though, this history was hardly revisionist. In March 2000, the Clinton administration had acknowledged the CIA role in the overthrow of Mosaddegh: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright apologized for events that took place during the Eisenhower administration. The next month the New York Times had published declassified records from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act.²⁶ Stephen Kinzer’s book All the Shah’s Men, which recounts the story in gripping detail, was a national best seller.²⁷ Still, given the limits of public discourse in the United States, where Barack Obama’s rumored Muslim lineage made talking tough to Iran a prere quisite to political candidacy, Affleck’s segment on U.S.–Iran relations can still be seen as surprising or refreshing (and the reach of his film far exceeded that of even a national best seller, a presidential apology, or the circulation of the New York Times). The film, however, would substitute this attempt at setting the record straight with its own historical slight of hand.

Indeed by authorizing itself as historically reliable and Affleck himself as committed to “absolute authenticity,” Argo could go on to take remarkable liberties with the record—especially the major role that the Canadian government played in rescuing the Americans.²⁸ The film makes comedy out of the idea of its own fabrication. The director of the fictional film within the film, played by Alan Arkin, doesn’t know much about it. At a first reading put on to hoodwink the Hollywood press, a “real” journalist asks Arkin—playing the producer Lester Siegel, a composite character Arkin based on Jack Warner²⁹—what the title Argo refers to. “I don’t know,” he says. “Argo fuck yourself.” This pun on “Oh, go fuck yourself” becomes the film’s tag line, which the three principle conspirators on the Hollywood end repeat to each other as joke and as code that they are in on the hoax that the fake film represents. But this tagline is as surely a message to the Iranian hostage takers as well and arguably to Iran as a whole—as well as to those, such as myself, who might critique the film!

In 2013 in the United States, Argo’s promise of a liberal alternative to a more militarized version of U.S.–Middle Eastern history was the key to its success at the Academy Awards. The film that might have won, Zero Dark Thirty, was sunk in the weeks leading up to the awards ceremony by a public debate about its depiction of torture and whether director Kathryn Bigelow unwittingly expressed sympathy for the Bush administration’s justification for torture. The uncomfortable feelings occasioned by Bigelow’s film cathected onto the emerging discomfort on the American left for the Obama administration’s increasing use of drones in the Middle East, the uncomfortable remainder of the president’s victory in his November reelection.³⁰ As Argo emerged as the front-runner and then the winner for best picture, it seized upon a logic of creative nonviolent solutions to the problems of the U.S.–Iranian conflict. Screenwriter Chris Terrio delivered the summary of this position in his acceptance speech for the Oscar for best adapted screenplay: “Thirty-three years ago, Tony [Mendez], using nothing but his creativity and his intelligence, got six people out of a very bad situation. And so I want to dedicate this [award] to him, and the Taylors and the Sheardowns, and people all over the world, in the U.S., in Canada, in Iran, who use creativity and intelligence to solve problems nonviolently.”³¹ As the camera panned the audience at the Dolby Theatre, Hollywood celebrities nodded in agreement, apparently confident that they were helping to solve global problems with their own intelligence.³²

In Iran, by contrast, Argo was seen quite differently. Two conferences, “Hollywoodism” (February 3–6, 2013) and “The Hoax of Hollywood” (March 11, 2013) were sponsored or supported by the Iranian government and included speakers from the United States, Europe, and Iran (figure 3.3). (“Hollywoodism” is an annual conference held to coincide with the annual Fajr Film Festival; this was its third installment.)³³ Speakers at these conferences addressed what participant Mike Gravel, former U.S. senator from Alaska (Democrat, 1969–1981), called “the cultural excesses of the motion picture and communication industry.”³⁴ As can be gleaned from the abstracts published on the conference website and from press reports, the presentations at the 2013 “Hollywoodism” event ranged from reasoned critique to conspiracy theory (many of the speakers from United States, Europe, and Iran were political figures rather than academics). But rather than write off these conferences as mere counterpropaganda, as they were in Western media, or, worse, as anti-Semitic (the Anti-Defamation League called the speakers “a rogue’s gallery of conspiratorial anti-Semites and anti-Zionists”),³⁵ we should use these conferences to listen to the ways in which Iranians respond to American films. In unofficial media, including Persian-language blogs, which do not generally tote the government line, Argo was no less criticized. For example, one blogger wrote about Argo:

Argo is not the first and certainly not the only anti-Iranian film. In recent years, Hollywood has made many films against us, and despite all the advertising controversy, none could communicate with internal [i.e., Iranian] audiences. The reason is clear. The social atmosphere of the films are so far alien to the Iranian audience that they cannot be received by them. Even if someone has a problem with the government and political system, as an Iranian one cannot defend the positions created by these movies. Iranians in these movies are pictured so evil, dark, and false that every viewer realizes the depth of enmity and hatred toward Iran in them.³⁶

The official Iranian position was that Argo demonstrated the Zionism of Hollywood, but those on the Iranian cultural left did not defend the film either. Argo was immediately available on the streets of Iran through pirated copies, but the commercial interest in the film did not mean that there wasn’t a strong Iranian critique of it. As an Iranian film critic commented to me when I asked him if there might be an unofficial reading of the film less concerned with historical errors, “How can you sympathize with the action when you see yourself as the bad guy or the evil?” In an interview produced by BBC Persian (the Persian-language TV station based in London and much criticized by officials in Iran), Ali Alizadeh commented that “we are not its typical audience. We are viewing it as Iranians, and the pictures from the time of revolution are very sensitive to us.” Later in the same interview, Alizadeh said: “What is absent from this film is the lack of Iranian people’s suffering; it’s only given as mere factual data in the first two minutes of the movie.”³⁷

Nevertheless, Iranian voices writing in Persian also defended the film. Tahmineh Milani, who has made films with feminist themes and was imprisoned briefly in 2001 for the theme of one of her films, claimed that Argo may not have been a particularly outstanding film, but it was “not anti-Iranian.” Milani went so far as to suggest that Argo was “made to normalize the suspended Iran–US relations” and, despite a few excesses, depicted the “restless” days of the hostage crisis with calm. Milani discouraged her compatriots from politicizing its success at the Academy Awards. Hollywood “has the technical might” to make a truly anti-Iranian film “if it wants.”³⁸

Filmmaker Asghar Farhadi himself had an interesting perspective on the film. As a recent winner of an Oscar, he was invited to the 2013 Academy Awards ceremony, but he did not attend. Farhadi did not find Argo a worthy winner of the Oscar, calling it “a mediocre film cinematically [that] will be forgotten soon. But the image that it creates about the Iranians will stay with its audience and this is unfortunately very bitter.” But he was also eager to dispel some Iranian conspiracy theories about the Academy Awards: “The academy members are not one body working under a horrifying controlled room aiming to damage other religions and cultures and foster one way of thought and life. This is part of the illusion that has been with us for long.” He remarked that there might be “a few of the members who judge films through their ideological biases, political tendencies, or associational benefits,” but he dismissed the conspiracy theory. He remarked that among the nominees for best picture that year, several were films about politics, specifying Lincoln (Steven Spielberg), Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, and Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino). Farhadi explained the nomination of Argo on commercial grounds; its great success at the box office, he believed, forced a nomination and then the advertising campaign that ensued helped it along. “Why it was lucrative is obvious: constructing a heroic narrative, employing threaded clichés, use of superficial suspense, offering a limited, shadowy, one-dimensional image of its anti-heroes made it accessible to a public who is not expected to think through a film but be entertained by it.”³⁹ Farhadi, as we will see in the next section, is a director who has given thought to what makes a film successful commercially as well as an art film director attuned to cinematic concerns.

This understanding of the social context for the Hollywood film is more sophisticated than simply saying that Hollywood narratives are interested only in box office receipts or that Washington and Hollywood conspire outwardly. Farhadi is recognizing that after the American century the vestiges of Cold War logics about Iran and the role of the heroic American in the world remain. But now because of the circuits of communication opened up by the digital age, it is no longer enough to be stuck in those logics. To move beyond them, critics working in American studies after the American century must follow texts where they travel to hear those voices whose commentary is now mostly excluded and who can help us disrupt the logics of the American century itself.

In Iran, the film was heralded as a masterpiece, though not without some controversy. Its success in the West was cause for celebration but also concern, as is often the case for Iranian art cinema. After being awarded the top prize for A Separation at the Berlin Film Festival (February 10–21, 2011) a year before receiving the Oscar, Farhadi was interviewed by Massoud Mehrabi in the Tehran film quarterly Film International. Farhadi was sophisticated and thoughtful about the success of the film at this important festival (it also took top honors for best actor and best actress), and the long interview begins with an extended discussion of the Western reception of his work. Though it was his second time presenting a film at Berlin, Farhadi noted his own surprise that the new film resonated with a foreign audience to such an extent; he had expected it to be too local to translate outside of Iran. He explained: “Some aspects of the story cannot be understood unless you know Persian and, therefore, I did not expect anything important would happen in Berlin.” But it was precisely this attention to detail, Farhadi explained, that resonated with foreign audiences: “They said that they believed the film through details and told me that although those details were mostly local, it did not prevent them from understanding [the]…totality of the film.” That said, Farhadi expressed to the Iranian interviewer his frustration that “every reporter was sure to ask a question about the situation in Iran and filmmaking conditions in addition to questions they asked about the film.” Though it does not come up in the interview with Farhadi, it is notable that director Jafar Panahi has also been honored at Berlin; Panahi had been sentenced to a six-year jail term and twenty-year ban on filmmaking just two months earlier. Farhadi might not be expected to protest the censorship of Panahi in an Iranian publication, but he did go to lengths to point out the ways in which his own work is not meant to propose social reform: “I am a filmmaker who tells a story and poses question for which he has no answers. When I don’t have the answers, how could I be a reformist? I think that this attitude to artists is outdated.”⁴¹

A few months later Farhadi was subjected to a number of interviews in U.S. media and was no less expert at resisting American reporters’ attempts to pigeonhole his work or his relationship to Iran itself. Most famously, in his much lauded acceptance speech at the 2012 Academy Awards, he said: “At this time, many Iranians all over the world are watching us, and I imagine them to be very happy. At the time when talk of war, intimidation, and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country, Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics.” Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of his victory, Facebook lit up with Iranians based in Iran celebrating the director and proclaiming their pride in his success. Farhadi dedicated his Oscar to “the people of my country, the people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment.”⁴² The first Iranian to win the Oscar for best foreign-language picture, Farhadi was the beneficiary of a long fascination with Iranian art cinema among American film critics. This fascination revolves around the relationship of individual creativity to the regime of censorship within which Iranian filmmakers work. In this respect, Farhadi played well both in interviews—where he skirted the boundary between the two opposing cultural regimes—and in his award-winning film itself, where the question of whether contemporary Iran limits the future of its youth and its citizens in general is raised and then dissected.

The film, whose original title is Jodaei-ye Nader az Simin (Separation of Nader from Simin), is a powerful exploration of marriage, divorce, parenting, Alzheimer’s, class conflict, and gender relations in contemporary Tehran, and it is not difficult to feel that the academy might have chosen it as best foreign-language film on its own, irrespective of its Iranian origins. Yet the film is so deeply about its setting (using the distinction I clarified in chapter 2) that not to consider its Iranian origin would be disingenuous. To be sure, the critical discussion of it in American media could not ignore the way it bucks against Western stereotypes of Iran and Iranians. So to ignore the fact that this first Iranian film to win the Oscar carries with it the burden (and the benefit) of being Iranian would be critically irresponsible. As art films such as A Separation circulate in American theaters, they seem at first the antithesis of Iranian politics—philosophically rich, elusive, ambiguous. But then American critics discuss them in terms of the very politics they seem to evade or avoid, and the films are compared to and harnessed to the political conflict between the United States and Iran. As they circulate in media, then, the films are unable to escape politics. Farhadi is, it would seem, aware of this paradox, and without coding it into his film directly, he indexes it, which makes his film yet more appealing and rich.

A Separation puts the question of circulation itself in the foreground, where it means variously the ability or inability to leave Iran, the so-called brain drain of Iranian doctors and engineers, the strictures of class, the perils of age and senility, and, most of all, the ways in which marriage in general and marriage with children in particular limit the ability to act as a free and unfettered agent. The film begins with its two protagonists, Simin and Nader, a middle-class Iranian couple in their forties, facing an unseen judge who sits in the position where the camera is placed. Simin, played by actress Leila Hatami—who had become famous in Iran for her depiction of the title character in Dariush Mehrjui’s great film Leila (1997), another movie about marital difficulties—is confident and cosmopolitan. Her husband, Nader, played by Payman Maadi (better known in Iran as a screen writer until he appeared in Farhadi’s previous film, Darbare-ye Eli [About Elly, 2009]), also appears modern in both appearance and attitudes, though he is stubborn and arrogant as well. In this opening, Farhadi silently invokes Abbas Kiarostami’s film Namay-e nazdik (Close-up, 1990) or at least recalls it; in both films, a judge is asked to arbitrate a central question (in Kiarostami’s film whether Sabzian is crazy, in Farhadi’s whether Simin is being reasonable). In A Separation, the film places the viewer in the judge’s position from the start—the couple faces the camera directly as they present their problem to him/us (figure 3.4). This is different from Kiarostami’s film, where the judge is viewed from across the room, an object among objects. The character of the judge or examining magistrate (played by Babak Karimi) returns later in A Separation and allows the film to take seriously the idea that truth—the various truths in circulation in the film, whether they are Simin and Nader’s or other characters’ later—is constantly viewed from a perspective.⁴³ What makes this idea important given the film’s own circulation through the world is the contrast between Farhadi’s portrayal of Iran and Affleck’s. Farhadi’s Iran is one in which differing positions are considered, interrogated, and weighed. Affleck’s model of engagement with Iran is one of tricking Iran, slipping one past Iran; that is what circulation means to him. Farhadi shows us how listening to the particularities of a situation, hearing it and considering it, gives a more nuanced judgment.

Simin wants a divorce from Nader because he will not leave Iran with her, despite their prolonged successful effort to obtain visas. Nader will agree to the divorce, but he will not allow his wife to take their daughter, Termeh, with her out of the country (under Iranian family law his permission is required). Nader’s father, suffering with advanced Alzheimer’s, needs him, he says. It is a simple but intractable problem. After she explains the situation to the judge, Simin turns to address Nader:

With this exchange, much more is unsaid than is said. Simin’s downward glance, played subtly by Hatami, seems to suggest that the judge has pushed her to a dead end in the conversation. There is no way she can answer this question honestly, either as a character in this scene or as an actress in Farhadi’s film. This is, of course, a fictional scene in front of a fictional judge, but it indexes a real system in crisis. The conversational dead end suggests an afterlife for the film: Will this exchange jump from fiction to real life? In other words, will it bring political trouble for Farhadi? (Jafar Panahi explores this case in In film nist [This is not a film, 2011], in which Panahi plays with the legal restrictions imposed on his ability to make a film and makes a film about the film he is restricted from making.)⁴⁵ Unlike Ben Affleck’s Argo, A Separation makes no pretense to be “based on a true story,” but it is the deep resonance of what Simin refers to as “circumstances” that alerts us to danger.

The film’s indexical relationship to contemporary Iranian society was picked up in Iran, where viewers commented that A Separation has a powerful immediacy. One Iranian blogger who named herself Aram wrote a piece she called “Who Represents What in A Separation?” She found each of the characters of the film to represent aspects of life in contemporary Tehran:

The film remains close to the primary couple, their strife, and the way it affects their daughter, Termeh (played by Farhadi’s own daughter, Sarina Farhadi). With this main story line, the director intertwines a dramatic story about the poor, traditional young woman who is hired to take care of Nader’s father when Simin moves out.

For those who had seen Farhadi’s earlier work, it is clear how A Separation picks up and builds on his acclaimed film Chaharshanbeh souri (Fireworks Wednesday, 2006), another powerful exploration of marital strife, children, and class conflict. In its own way, Fireworks Wednesday is also about circulation. Traffic, marital stasis, and class immobility are associated with one another, and the notorious difficulty of moving through downtown Tehran in an automobile at rush hour is a key plot device. In this earlier film, a young woman from a lower social class is brought in to work as a temporary housemaid for a middle-class married couple and serves as witness to her employers’ foibles. Roohi, the housemaid (played by Taraneh Alidoosti) is preparing for her own marriage when she is hired to clean up a household on the verge of collapse. Her employer, Mozhde (played by Hedye Tehrani), suspects her husband, Morteza, of having an affair with a neighbor and enlists Roohi to help her gain evidence. But Mozhde is so obsessive and anxious and the evidence against an affair seems increasingly convincing that the audience comes to side with the husband and to believe that Mozhde’s suspicions are unfounded. (The fact that Mozhde is correct about Morteza comes as a shock, which the film withholds masterfully.) And as in A Separation, there is the turning over and over of bits of evidence, amateur interrogations of people in a household that seem to hold the truth of domestic disputes.

In A Separation, a lower-class domestic worker is again at the center of the action. Here, the worker, Razieh (played by Sareh Bayat), is already married and has a young daughter, whom she brings along to work with her. We learn that she is pregnant with a second child. When the job of caring for Nader’s father, who is suffering with Alzheimer’s, proves more difficult than she expected, and when it requires her to bathe him, Razieh decides to give up the job so as not to break any Islamic moral codes. But she attempts to pass the job along to her own husband, Hojjat (Shahab Hosseini), somehow without Hojjat finding out that his wife has taken a job (or bathed an old man) without his knowledge or permission. Before Hojjat can assume the job, however, Razieh works one last day, during which she leaves the grandfather alone in order to see a doctor about the baby she is carrying. She is not back in time for the return of her employers, who find the old man tied to a bed (so that he does not wander off), tangled and on the floor, having rolled off the bed. A dispute ensues, and Razieh falls or is pushed by Nader (a key distinction in the film). She subsequently has a miscarriage, and the action of the film turns from the conflict between Nader and Simin over leaving Iran to the conflict between Nader, Razieh, and Hojjat about whether Nader is responsible for Razieh’s miscarriage and the conflict between Nader and Simin about the way Nader is handling the conflict with Razieh and Hojjat. Fueled by Shahab Hosseini’s electric performance in the role of Hojjat, the tension escalates to a seeming breaking point.

In the opening scene with the judge, the suggestion that Simin and Nader had gone through the steps to leave the country or circulate outside of Iran would have local meanings—I mean here national or Iranian—and simultaneously index or double the global circulation of the film itself. For Iranians living in diaspora in the West, an important part of the chain of circulation, both local and global resonances would be noticeable. (We see a similarly complex set of references to the local Iranian context and the global circulation of a film in the film Kasi az gorbe-haye irani khabar nadareh [No one knows about Persian cats, 2009], directed by Bahman Ghobadi, a film about Iranian indy rockers trying to get out of Iran while making a film that can only pose difficulties to their future, which I come back to later.) So what is local is the urgency Simin feels in attempting to resolve her dispute with Nader before their visas expire and how the impossibility of stating in a film that she wants to emigrate translates into the way she drops her eyes when questioned by the judge about the “circumstances” of contemporary Iran. What is global is the suggestion of a circulation beyond these local circumstances.

Thus, the film’s ending poses a mysterious, allegorical challenge. The final scene of the film brings Nader and Simin’s daughter, Termeh, back into the judge’s chambers. With the conflict between her parents and Razieh and Hojjat resolved, Termeh is given the opportunity to choose which parent she will live with. Their separation is no longer temporary; divorce is now certain. The judge asks her if she has made a decision. “Baleh,” she replies in the affirmative in a soft voice. “Do I have to say it now?” she asks, with tears streaming down her cheeks. Nader and Simin are asked to leave so that she can speak to the judge alone.

It is this mobility of meaning that makes much Iranian art cinema intriguing to viewers in the West. As indicated in the following sections, this openness has led some critics to fill in the blanks with political stereotypes—in other words, Orientalism. But doing so is an error, and I want to insist that circulation itself is the rubric through which we will best understand Iranian art cinema.

Jean-Luc Nancy picks up on this point in his writing on Abbas Kiarostami, in which he remarks that mobility is a key characteristic of this filmmaker’s work.⁴⁷ I explore Kiarostami’s work further later, but for now let me state that when critics and philosophers have embraced Iranian art films for a certain mobility, they tend to mean the indeterminacy of the text itself. If there is a tendency to read Iranian art cinema in relationship to poststructuralism, this tendency is delimited by the way that politics surrounds the discussion of Iranian cinema. Farhadi’s attempt to evade politics or to deconstruct the politics invoked in the opening scene of the film is undercut by the way the film is entextualized in an American context. (Thus, Farhadi’s statement at the 2012 Academy Awards about the Iranian people was picked up and repeated by Western media.) And in the same light but from a completely different perspective, Iranian reception of the film was never far from the question of how the film was faring internationally. Debates in Tehran about whether A Separation should be the Iranian nominee for the Academy Awards were less about its quality and more about precisely what it was that was circulating abroad. Some defenders of the film pointed to its humane treatment of the grandfather with Alzheimer’s and argued that Farhadi presented Iranian values and “an Islamic philosophy [that] is ethical, religious, and divine” to its audience, as Ezatolah Zarghami wrote in Hozeh News; others could only see in A Separation a film “standing for [Western] values, and they are mocking us…. [It is a film] in line with the animosity of these countries toward us,” as pro-Khamenei director Jamal Shourjeh commented in Tehran Today.⁴⁸

Now of course, circulation and the contingency of meaning are a condition of film itself, inscribed within it, if only we learn to take that engagement of a public, of multiple publics, into account. We recognize that directors such as Farhadi and Kiarostami know from the start that they are addressing multiple publics at once: Iranians in Iran, the global Iranian diaspora, those who attend international film festivals or frequent art houses and commercial cinemas and so engage with the various media associated with all these different venues. Ben Affleck, in this light, is addressing a more limited public, even if that public includes many millions more than those who will see works by Kiarostami or Farhadi. But Affleck is not really considering the Iranian (or even the Canadian) response. His is a more local film with a huge global audience.

The larger project of this book—or one of them—is to inspire research methodologies for texts and cultural forms in circulation. Research methods are personal, to an extent, and any good anthropologist knows that you make up a lot of them as you go along. But for Americanists, there is little impetus to leave the United States, especially for Americanist literature and film critics writing about texts from the United States. The next section provides an account of what happened when I set out to track down Kiarostami in Tehran and instead came across a figure I least expected to find.

Nahal and I are sitting in a café off Haft-e Tir Square.⁴⁹ She is smart and dynamic, a graduate student and freelance journalist who is quick to criticize the U.S. government and the perfidy of CNN. When I mention that a few days earlier I had overheard Friday prayers and was taken aback by the chanting of the phrase “Marg bar Amrika!” (Death to America), she retorts: “But you call us the Axis of Evil!”

Our conversation turns to the movie Shrek (Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, 2001). Nahal loves Shrek so much that she has seen the first installment of the DreamWorks trilogy “at least thirty-six or thirty-seven times.” Together we have been shopping for copies of the various Farsi-dubbed versions, in particular the elusive “illegal” versions. In downtown supermarkets, in small DVD stalls on Kargar Street or Enqalab Square, in shopping malls in elite north Tehran, and in the markets of grimy south Tehran, we inquire and follow various pathways, many of them dead ends.

It is I who have insisted on tracking down dubbed versions of Shrek, though I didn’t return to Iran planning to do so. I came here interested in figuring out what Iranians really think and say about Abbas Kiarostami, but as I engaged in what I thought of as fieldwork in transnational film studies, I was struck by how ubiquitous pirated versions of Shrek and other CGI Hollywood films are in Iran. Not that anyone said so, and many in Iran resisted my interpretation, although the evidence seemed overwhelming to me. The image of Shrek is, it seems, everywhere in Tehran: painted on the walls of DVD and electronics shops, featured in an elaborate mural in the children’s play area of the food court at the Jam-e Jam Mall (figure 3.5). While in a car I once passed a five-foot-tall Shrek mannequin on the sidewalk; like his fellow pedestrians, he wore a surgical face mask to protect him from the smog.

Nahal explains, “You know, it’s not really the original Shrek that we love so much here. It’s really the dubbing. It’s really more the Iranian Shrek that interests us.”

The Iranian film industry has a long and illustrious tradition of high-quality dubbings.⁵⁰ In the postrevolution era and with the ensuing rise of censorship, dubbing has evolved to become a form of underground art as well as a metacommentary on Iranians’ attempt to adapt and in some way lay claim to the products of Western culture. A single American film such as Shrek inspires multiple dubbed versions—some illegal by local standards, some not—causing Iranians to discuss and debate which of the many Farsi Shreks is superior. In some unauthorized versions (which are more difficult to find), various regional and ethnic dialects are paired with the diverse characters of Shrek, the stereotypes associated with each accent adding an additional layer of humor for Iranians. In the more risqué bootlegs, obscene or off-topic conversations are transposed over Shrek’s fairy-tale shenanigans.

Despite knowing all this, I still ask Nahal, “Why Shrek of all things?” Or why, more generally, are Iranians so taken with American CGI films coming out of studios such as DreamWorks and Pixar? Is it the racially coded weirdness of Shrek’s cast of characters that somehow speaks to Iranians? Does Shrek himself symbolize the repressed id of people living in a sexually censorious society? Or are Iranians simply attracted to the impossible lushness and the tactile pleasures of American CGI technology itself?

But Nahal finds my questions beside the point. Our Shrek, she tells me, isn’t an American film at all.

Perhaps I should have been asking instead, What does it mean that Americans and Iranians make such different things of each other’s cinemas? I had come back to Tehran to try to make more sense of these cultural readings and misreadings and in particular to try to better understand the debate in Iran over Iranian directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, who are lionized in the United States but not (so I thought) generally admired in Iran. Kiarostami is the reason why Iranian cinema is upheld—in France, the United States, and elsewhere—as the greatest since the French New Wave brought us Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Eric Rohmer. His success in the United States paved the way for Asghar Farhadi.

And yet to many people within his own country, Kiarostami, as one Iranian film critic said to me, is considered “a crime against the cinema of the world.” How could such disparate truths coexist?

I arrived in Tehran at an auspicious time for filmgoers—February marks the beginning of the annual Fajr Film Festival, which includes multiple competitions (the national and international competitions as well as those for documentaries, shorts, Asian cinema, and “spiritual films”) as well as retrospectives and screenings of classic films. But more importantly, the festival is the only time the censors allow all new Iranian films to be screened; only after the premieres will they determine which of these new films can be shown in wider release. The festival is thus a precious ten-day window of unrestricted viewing.

As we walk through the grime of downtown Tehran, Mahmoud talks of his other film critic friends who have been sent to jail. “The authorities accuse the critics of advertising Western values with their reviews,” says Mahmoud. “These films have sex in them. They tell us, ‘You are advertising sex.’”

We finally arrive at Ali’s apartment. He invites us inside what seems less a home than a storage space—posters stacked against the wall of a cramped sitting room, lobby cards piled in a cluttered kitchen, bags and bags of film canisters arranged haphazardly in the hallway. Ali’s bedroom is a crumbling crawlspace lined with metal shelves. Most of his bathroom is given over to film canisters, with only a tiny bit of real estate allowed to the toilet and the curtainless shower.

The following day Mahmoud introduces me to Kamran, a critic who, Mahmoud claims, knows Iranian cinema better than anyone.

Such skepticism is hardly unfounded. When Deborah Solomon interviewed Kiarostami in 2007 for her weekly page in the New York Times Magazine, eleven of the sixteen questions published were explicitly about politics, Islam, violence, and repression; two were implicitly political; only the final three left politics behind, but they were flippant and short (“Do you always wear sunglasses?”). What is yet more striking is that Solomon herself pointed out that Kiarostami’s filmmaking is hardly political: “It’s odd that your films would be viewed as subversive, when they’re more philosophical than political and abound with picturesque views of the countryside.” And yet she or her editors apparently couldn’t restrain themselves from a political interview.⁵¹

Few people I spoke to in Iran think of Kiarostami as subversive or as anything but an art film director. Most think he is overly feted in the West to the neglect of other Iranian directors. And that of course makes him, unwittingly, a political director. Alas.

Consider how this logic runs through even sophisticated discussions of Kiarostami in the West. Joan Copjec, a distinguished psychoanalytic film critic of a Lacanian bent, has written at length about Kiarostami. She positions her critique in the context of assumptions about the fundamental difference of Iranian cinema: “Iranian cinema is an exotic experience for audiences accustomed to Hollywood-dominated cinema. Not just for obvious reasons but because the obvious—the foreign locations and people, everything we actually see on screen—is produced by a different distribution of the visible and the invisible and an alien logic of the look.”⁵²

Copjec’s take on Kiarostami crystallizes just how his films are seen in such a deeply political light in the West—and also how this vision is so alluring. These alien people with their alien logic have, she writes, “a different distribution of the visible and the invisible.” This claim worries me because what Copjec does not see—“the hejab covering women that obscures them from the sight of men to whom they are not related” (11)—leads to a celebration of an “alien logic of the look.” Despite her intention to champion Kiarostami’s work, her gesture is an unwittingly exoticizing one. Thus, Kiarostami’s becomes a cinema that anyone with Orientalist urges—from the browsers of Anthropologie clothing catalogs to the addicts of the New York Times Sunday travel section to the fedayeen of Samuel Huntington’s book Clash of Civilizations (1996)—can cherish.

Thus, when Copjec goes on to posit Kiarostami’s subtle “cinema of respectful reserve and restraint” and the way his camera seems to “separate itself from the action by inserting a distance between itself and the scene and refusing to venture forward into the private space of the characters,” it is in the service of her argument that Iran is an “all-exterior world” (29). Her Kiarostami is “uniquely interesting” (29) because he finds an original way to reinsert interiority and privacy into a “world” that cannot have any or cannot be depicted as having any because of the all-encompassing hijab she sees covering it. And this allows her to forward Kiarostami’s vision of Iranian culture against the manifold misreadings of Muslim societies by the U.S. government (from the horrors at Abu Ghraib to the post–September 11 wiretappings), all of which, Copjec suggests, are based on a misreading of Islamic society as based in a culture of “shame.” But she collapses far too much, and the burden is too heavy on the artist. What she calls the “Islamic system of modesty” (12) is hardly the same across all parts of the Middle East, across Arab and Iranian, with regional and sectarian particularities and differences enveloped in a phrase. To be sure, the Bush administration’s reliance on Raphael Patai’s intellectually corrupt book The Arab Mind (1973)—with its shaky distinction between “guilt cultures” and “shame cultures,” where the former is associated with “advanced” societies and the latter with “primitive” Arab ones—led to some of the worst American excesses after September 11.

Yet here is where Copjec’s act of politicizing a nonpolitical filmmaker starts to become not only problematic but also misleading. To claim that “woman must be secluded from the sight or touch of unrelated men” is a bit exaggerated when it comes to Iran, or at least what I have experienced in Tehran. Needless to say, there are many women—and men, too—in Tehran who believe in modesty, which is a precept of Islam. But it is not unusual to see, as I did one evening in a restaurant on Valiasr Avenue, an Iranian woman wearing a form-fitting white-leather jacket—covering her arms and her hips, as Islamic code dictates—but also white leggings, tall boots, and a scarf that looped up and over blond, highlighted hair and perfect makeup. The outfit or the elaborate hairdo was hardly unique, and the Iranian fascination with plastic surgery bespeaks a notable immodesty. And when I was invited to a party in North Tehran, I watched as the proper Islamic dress that female guests wore on their way to the party was shed at the door to reveal miniskirts and backless tops on braless young women, and the festivities included illegal music, contraband alcohol, as well as heavy flirting, contact between the sexes, and dirty dancing. Even among the nonelite and working class, female friends and students of mine often made a point of shaking my hand (against convention), lifting their head scarves to reveal their hair, and even showing me cell phone photos of themselves uncovered. Let me just say this: Joan Copjec describes an Iran that I have read about but that I only “saw” before I got to Iran. And although my experiences in Tehran are surely limited—my travel elsewhere in the country has been restricted to only three or four cities—the alien logic of the look on which Copjec bases her essay is belied by the profound cosmopolitanism of Tehran in the digital age. Whether it is the unofficial but authentic Gap store on Gandhi Street (with merchandise smuggled in from Dubai and the United Arab Emirates) or the Internet-fueled familiarity with visual and aural culture from Hollywood, New York, and Tehrangeles, global Tehran is hardly as Copjec imagines.

Read Copjec’s essay out of context, in other words, and you may get the wrong idea about Iran and its cinema: “the look of desire around which Hollywood-dominated cinema is plotted had to be forsaken, along with the well-established system of relaying that look through an alternating pattern of shots and counter-shots and the telling insertion of psychologically motivated close-ups” (12). There is a sophisticated psychoanalytic argument about shame in Copjec’s essay, and Hollywood-style representations of desire were indeed rejected in the first phase of Iranian cinema immediately after the revolution.⁵³ But one does not get a sense of historical contingency in her argument; all postrevolutionary cinematic representations collapse together. The postrevolutionary period in Copjec’s essay is as timeless as it is in Azar Nafisi’s account of it in Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003). Copjec’s account doesn’t square with what one sees in mainstream Iranian films that don’t make it to the festival circuit or in daily life in Iran.

Back in the basement café at Jam-e Jam Mall, Kamran refers to a witty critique made by Khosro Dehghan, an Iranian film critic and screenwriter, to explain what is wrong with Kiarostami: “Remember the gun made out of soap in Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run? That’s what Kiarostami’s films are like. Eventually it will rain, and the gun will melt away.”

As films such as Shrek and Taste of Cherry make their way across the ocean to new interpretive communities, they not only accrue different political meanings but also become different things. The Iranian Shrek and the American Kiarostami do not represent in their new homes what they represent in the worlds where they originated. In fact, the American Kiarostami is just as American as the Farsi-dubbed Shrek is Iranian. In each location, they become convenient foreign elements against which domestic film production can more clearly distinguish itself as domestic. This process runs counter to the logics by which both Copjec and fearful Iranian clerics—and indeed champions of U.S. cultural diplomacy—operate.

When U.S. State Department officials imagine that the export of Hollywood film and American pop music can be simple weapons in the battle for the “hearts and minds” of other societies, as many champions of “cultural diplomacy” have argued during the past decade and a half—just put them out there, and they will detonate—they suffer from a Cold War hangover. When Iranian clerics wring their hands that Hollywood movies will corrupt Iranian youth just by their captivating presence and so attempt to squeeze them out of circulation, they are only looking at the flashy posters and not at the more subtle ways in which films make their way in the world. Neither group of officials is seeing how these foreign products signify within a much richer cultural context and resonate in ways that their producers could hardly have predicted. This is what is unseen to those who fail to recognize what anyone who watches a movie beyond the DVD case or reads a book beyond the cover knows implicitly: the film or the book becomes your own. The Iranian Shrek is, after all, Iranian.

If you have read this far, you know that I have used the phrase “ends of circulation” in multiple ways. In my discussion of Magdy El Shafee in the previous chapter, I discussed the ways cultural forms such as the comic book “jump publics” to places where they are no longer legible. There, an “end of circulation” is a rejoinder to those who think of transnational circulation as the infinite circular return of images, texts, and so on in some heroic understanding of the pleasures and positive aspects of globalization.

What is clear to me, however, based on the time I have spent in Iran, is that a much simpler version of the “end of circulation” is in play. It is, quite simply, the inability to go back to Iran for many Iranians who have left it, whether of their own volition or under duress.

Hamid Naficy, the great critic and historian of Iranian film, has made of his own exile a brilliant theory of diasporic longing in An Accented Cinema, and the long, fifty-page preface to his magisterial four-volume work A Social History of Iranian Cinema is a memoir of time in a long-lost Iran, filled with nostalgia, out of which a reading of Iranian cinema emerges. Hamid Dabashi has done similar things in his own writings on Iran, such as relating the poignant memories of his childhood in Abadan in the preface to Iran: A People Interrupted.⁵⁶ When Dabashi connects this nostalgia to his work as an academic in New York at Columbia University—as he does in the same book when he recounts the story of an Iranian woman living in upstate New York who writes him to recommend a Persian poem for an upcoming wedding—again a way of reading Iran as a people and as a history interrupted emerges.

The anthropologist Michael Fisher has identified the peculiar terms by which much exile from Iran, experienced as an interruption, operates. Fisher notes that much is not forbidden but also is not permitted in Iran. Discussing a film that came out in 2004—the controversial satire Marmoulak (The lizard; Kamal Tabrizi)—as he was finishing his own book, he explains: “The film was shown on the big screens only briefly and was then withdrawn. It was not banned, nor was it released, but was available on the street in VCD [video CD] format. Neither banned nor not banned, said one of my new acquaintances, just like everything else in Iran.”⁵⁷

Contemporary Iranian filmmakers in exile and those preparing to leave Iran have played on precisely this paradox in their works. Jafar Panahi works it into In film nist (This is not a film), the first film he made (or didn’t make) after his notorious blanket censorship by the Iranian government. In December 2010, Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison and a twenty-year ban on making films, writing scripts, traveling abroad, or giving media interviews in punishment for “colluding in gathering and making propaganda against the regime.”⁵⁸ He lost his appeal in October 2011. In the meantime and in apparent flagrant violation of the ban, he made This Is Not a Film with Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, which is part documentary and part extended interview with the feeling of a reality show. The product was smuggled out of Iran on a USB memory stick hidden in a cake, whereupon the film premiered at Cannes. Mirtahmasb, who operated the camera and who briefly appears in the film, was himself later arrested as well.⁵⁹ When This Is Not a Film was released, the question of whether Panahi had broken the ban was of course pushed. This Is Not a Film plays continually on the question of the film’s eventual circulation, which activates everything we are seeing. Is sitting around Panahi’s apartment a crime, we wonder? Not until it is filmed. What if Panahi picks up an iPhone and makes a video? What if the camera is set down on the kitchen table? A young man working in Panahi’s apartment building knocks on the door and comes across Mirtahmasb filming Panahi; he is excited to appear in the “film,” and Panahi follows him into the elevator as he does his rounds, picking up garbage from each floor in the building. We wonder: Is the young man aware of Panahi’s sentence and the implications of allowing himself to be filmed?

What is at play here is Panahi’s inability to make films, of course. But to put it a different way, This Is Not a Film is a complex consideration of the individual’s inability to circulate in contemporary Iran. Jafar Panahi laughs at himself when he realize his impulse is to say “cut” after finishing a statement—in other words, to direct the film in which he is appearing. From off camera, Mirtahmasb tells him that he can’t say “cut.” He has been prohibited from directing films or writing screenplays but not (necessarily) from acting or from talking about a screenplay he has written. As a result, we get an intriguing film that ultimately revolves around the discussion of a film that Panahi cannot make. He describes the film; using tape on an Oriental carpet in his apartment, he marks out the small room in which his protagonist would live. He shows us a photo of the two women he was going to cast.

Despite speaking in support of Panahi after his arrest, Hamid Dabashi has called This Is Not a Film and Panahi’s subsequent work Parde (Closed curtain, 2013) “self-indulgent vagaries farthest removed from [his earlier] masterpieces.” Dabashi offers these two films by Panahi as examples of the impasse of contemporary Iranian cinema, which he feels has reached a “tragic ending,” the assessment of a critic who was one of its chief celebrators. Dabashi praises Kiarostami for the wisdom of “skirt[ing] politics” and “thus safeguard[ing] his cinema”: “one hundred years from now, the best of Kiarostami’s cinema will still mesmerize, baffle, and reward, when many other politically potent filmmakers will scarce be remembered.” Dabashi criticizes Panahi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Bahman Ghobadi, all of them celebrated internationally, and sends off a warning shot for others, such as Bahram Beizai, director of Bashu, gharibeh-ye kuchak (Bashu, the little stranger, 1986), who left Iran and moved to Los Angeles. Or, as Dabashi—who lives and works in New York—puts it, Beizai moved to “the heart of the infested environment of the most useless and pestiferous Iranian community, to which the ugly faces of the Shahs of Sunset [an American reality-TV program] does perfect justice.” ⁶⁰

The Irish director and film commentator Mark Cousins has suggested—in a documentary interview by young Iranian filmmaker Ehsan Khoshbakht entitled A Journey Through Iranian Cinema with Mark Cousins (2012)—that the youngest generation of Iranian filmmakers are turning away from the work of the great directors from Iran that captivated the world cinema scene. Speaking with Khoshbakht about Iranian cinema of the past decade, Cousins says:

Just like France in the sixties, just like Germany in the eighties, the younger filmmakers are so desperate to react against what they think is the old fashioned way, the cinema du papa, the orthodox way of doing it, so many filmmakers say “we cannot stand the films of Abbas Kiarostami, we want to do Tarentino, or something different. We want more speed, speed, speed.” That’s fine within the context of Iran. Because of course if you’re rebellious at all, if you’re innovative at all, you don’t want to do the same as the people who came before. There’s just a danger is that because they’re so close to the great approach of Iranian cinema, they forget that no one else is doing it. They don’t notice how distinctive those great Iranian films were in the nineties…. Rebellious young Iranian filmmakers, yes be rebellious but don’t underestimate the greatness of Iranian cinema that came before you.⁶¹

If Cousins and Dabashi are correct, what I am calling ends of circulation might mean that a certain period in Iranian “art” cinema—of the Kiarostami, Farhadi, and Samira Makhmalbaf tradition—is ending or has ended even as we describe it. If so, it is not only or not necessarily for the reason Dabashi claims—getting too caught up in political critique or protest—but rather because the peculiar conditions within which it thrived have now ceded to a different set of relations. The politics is still relatively the same, but the technologies and the new publics they have helped call into being can no longer hold that engagement in the same way. What will follow this “end” of Iranian cinema is not for me, here, to predict.

Abbas Kiarostami has depicted the encounter of the individual with film in this way: “Originally, I thought that the lights went out in a movie theatre so that we could see the images on the screen better. Then I looked a little closer at the audience settling comfortably into the seats and saw that there was a much more important reason: the darkness allowed the members of the audience to isolate themselves from others and to be alone. They were both with others and distant from them.”⁶² It is a gorgeous quote that captures the scene of film not only as social but also as private. Today, however, we must also consider that films are passed on pirated DVDs and VCDs, downloaded both legally and not, consumed on laptops in apartments on moving airplanes or on iPads and smart phones. Films, even those seen in the increasingly rare circumstances of a darkened room filled with stadium seats, travel in ways that affect their meanings.

The curious logics of circulation of film in Iran and of Iranian film in the United States must account for these multiple pathways and temporalities. What happens when those pathways and temporalities are thematized in film itself?

Mehrnaz Saeedvafa is an Iranian filmmaker who lives and works in Chicago, where she teaches and writes about film. Saeedvafa’s forty-minute documentary Jerry & Me (2012) treats her youth in Iran, when as a teenager she fell in love with Hollywood movies in the years before the Islamic Revolution. As the filmmaker describes it, her fascination with Hollywood was part of a longing for a place she didn’t know. For her, the films of Jerry Lewis, dubbed into Persian, were especially irresistible: “[When I was] a child, Jerry’s films inscribed a seductive image of America in me. The America that Jerry showed me was modern, fun, and colorful.” But Hollywood, Lewis’s films in particular, also touched a dissatisfaction or discomfort she felt with her own identity. Backed by a scene from Lewis’s movie The Nutty Professor (1963, a parody of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Saeedvafa’s voice-over shifts gears: “[In America] everything was possible, including changing your identity—a hidden wish that I had as a teenager: to drink a potion and turn into a happy white woman.” ⁶³ Now, after decades in Chicago and after having made several of her own films, Saeedvafa explores her nostalgia for that lost relationship—innocent and even naive—to American film.

What Saeedvafa’s film contributes to the larger discussion of this chapter and why I want to conclude with it have to do not simply with how it shows that Jerry Lewis could mean something different to a teenage Iranian girl than to Americans. That art means different things to different audiences across space and time is a truth of the way cultural production circulates. Rather, I am struck by the way Jerry & Me intertwines Saeedvafa’s changing perceptions of Jerry Lewis and other Hollywood film icons together with an exploration of the specificity of Persian-language dubbing and the process of viewing these Hollywood films in Iran. The conditions of circulation of American cinema in Iran supplemented the films themselves and Saeedvafa’s subjective experience of them and made them something quite different from what they were when they began. In other words, both the films themselves—as texts—and the way the conditions and contexts of viewing them combined made these American movies what they were for young Mehrnaz.

Saeedvafa explains in the voice-over narration: “I grew up watching a lot of Hollywood films, all dubbed in Persian. In movie theaters that had Western names like Empire, Radio City, Golden City, Niagara, Paramount.” Archival photos and footage of glitzy cinema houses with Farsi and English names bright in neon show us an image of a Tehran under the shah that might be New York or Las Vegas of the same period. But if the cinema houses resembled and sometimes replicated urban American spaces, the experience of watching the films inside was decidedly Iranian. Saeedvafa gathers numerous clips from the films of the era and brings us into the Tehran cinema houses to discuss how they seemed to her then: “The first time I saw people kissing was in the movies…. I’d close my eyes out of shame or hide under the seat until the scene was over. The quiet intimate kissing scenes were the noisiest in Tehran. The deprived working-class male audience would whistle and shout and blurt mocking words like ‘Leave her alone…you’re killing her…velesh kon, khafash kardi’ [Let her go! You are suffocating her!], turning them into funny scenes.” To illustrate such a kiss in her film, Saeedvafa includes a scene from Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959): a kiss between John Wayne and Angie Dickinson. The dialogue of the scene is dubbed into Persian (Saeedvafa has added English subtitles to translate the Persian dubbing back to English for her audience). Wayne is playing Sheriff John T. Chance, and Dickinson the woman referred to as “Feathers.” (Wayne’s dialogue is dubbed by Iraj Doostdar, Wayne’s regular voice in Iran.)⁶⁴ The scene quoted here begins with a kiss between Wayne and Dickinson, which in the original takes Wayne’s character by surprise—Dickinson kisses him again, and he finally responds. After this exchange, Dickinson tells Wayne that he should go back to his work. Wayne starts to leave the room, then turns back to Dickinson to say something. He is still flustered by the kiss, apparently, and in the original scene as directed by Howard Hawks he shrugs his shoulders—momentarily speechless—and utters a meaningless sound before bolting out the door.

In the Persian dubbing, however, Wayne is given words where in the original he is grasping for them. John T. Chance turns back and says to Feathers: “La ilaha illa allah” (There is no god but God). Saeedvafa explains: “Funny words…were inserted during the dubbing.” She leaves it at that, but we can say a little more. “La ilaha illa allah” is, of course, one of the most important statements in Arabic (or Persian). It is Arabic language, the centerpiece of the proclamation of Islamic belief (the shahada) that any Muslim knows and that is part of the call to prayer announced by the muezzin/moazzin (Arabic, muʾadhdhin; Persian, mo’azzen). As Iranian filmmaker and critic Ehsan Khoshbakht describes this use of the Arabic words in an Iranian context in this scene, “We use that expression in overwhelming situations (with a touch of humor).” ⁶⁵ In any case, given that this sentence is inserted in the dubbing where the original has no words at all, we can call this an example of exuberant dubbing, which brings the otherwise foreign settings and relationships of Rio Bravo into an Iranian idiom. In this way, the inserted dialogue functions in the way the twenty-first-century dubbings of Shrek add locally inflected phrases or referents. In the context of those noisy theaters, the extra words and Iranized dialogue work against the escapism of the Hollywood picture. In both the original and the dubbing, John T. Chance is unusually flustered, to the point where he doesn’t know what to say. In one case, he says nothing; in the other, he recites the profession of faith, sardonically perhaps. The meaning is the same. The meaning is completely different.

For Saeedvafa, after her obsession with American movies and upon moving to the United States, the real America could only be a disappointment. Khoshbakht has compared Saeedvafa’s documentary to other cinematic memoir films by Iranian exiles nostalgic for the film culture of prerevolutionary Iran, which offer a “subjective history of film culture in Iran.” Khoshbakht finds value in these reminiscences but also considers them marked by a disabling melancholy: “Such melancholic documentations of the past echo the feelings of a generation lost, misplaced and confused after the revolution; people who are utterly unable to resituate themselves in the new post-Revolutionary nation and after the trauma of an eight year war.” ⁶⁶ Indeed, Saeedvafa’s film is painful to watch. Just as she searches her past for clues into her vexed relationship to Iran after the revolution, she searches her self as she confronts her love for Jerry Lewis. She goes so far as to teach a course on “the art of Lewis” to provide a Middle Eastern perspective on his work.

In a final scene, these two worlds come together. Jerry Lewis himself comes to Columbia College in Chicago in 1996, where she teaches. The grand actor, the icon she had cherished for decades, is right there on stage, being interviewed by one of her colleagues. Lewis is charming and takes on and sheds his screen persona. What’s more, he explains his own humor as connected to personal suffering, both as a Jew and on behalf of the suffering of Jews. Saeedvafa can identify; the resonances for her are deep.

She can identify, that is, until Lewis makes a surprising comment. In the process of telling a story, he makes an anti-Arab remark. He is talking about the poor reception Hollywood writers gave him after his initial success writing, directing, and starring in his own films. Lewis says that at a party he went to at the time, a group of writers looked at him like a bunch of Arabs who “knew what he was” (i.e., a Jew). He thinks the repetition of a negative stereotype about Arabs is safe in this audience, or perhaps he doesn’t think at all. There are scattered laughs, but the joke falls flat. What’s worse in terms of Jerry & Me, which till now has at times felt like a love letter, Saeedvafa feels alienated, even betrayed. She explains her own reaction: “When Jerry made that comment about the Arabs, he broke the image of himself as an outsider that he portrayed in his films, an image that I always identified with. That’s probably why I couldn’t talk to him.”

In the aftermath of the on-stage interview, a turn opens things up to a different future. One member of the audience, who identifies himself as “an Arab,” stands to address Lewis during the Q&A: “My name is Hakim…. I’m probably the only Arab in the bunch. [Big laughs and applause.] Yeah, and I was actually enjoying everything you were saying up until the joke. [Laughter.] I thought, OK, we all have our dark side. [Applause].” Jerry was reflective, Saeedvafa says, though she doesn’t tell us if he replied substantively to Hakim’s comment. But the frame is broken; Lewis is no longer an icon who stands for her desire to be someone other than herself or with whom she can share a humorous response to common suffering. The icon with whom she had betrayed her homeland ends up betraying her. Still, she continues to ponder the effect of his films and years later develops a course on his art.

But Hakim’s comment, as I hear it at the end of Saeedvafa’s documentary, offers a different potentiality that is not otherwise explicit in her film: an unpredicted future personified in the young Arab addressing the old American icon who has just disparaged Arabs. This is the excess that exuberant dubbing and noisy theaters promise, which is the overarching theme of this chapter. The comment captured in Saeedvafa’s film, as it turns out, was uttered by a young man who would a decade later turn out to be an important film director himself. As I watch Jerry & Me on my laptop, I recognize the voice of Hakim Belabbes, the Moroccan director who appeared in chapter 1 of this book (it was he who asked me in the Rabat classroom about Innocence of Muslims).⁶⁷ His comment to Jerry Lewis was made seven years before his first feature Threads (2003), which I discuss briefly in chapter 4. Belabbes earned his master’s in film at Columbia College in 1993, and when Lewis visited in 1996, he was in his midthirties. Here in an Iranian woman’s film, Belabbes, the Moroccan filmmaker who had moved to Chicago, encounters Jerry Lewis, whom Saeedvafa, the Iranian filmmaker who had moved to Chicago years earlier, could not yet exorcise. Belabbes’s generosity—“OK, everyone has his dark side”—is a different response to the same betrayal that could bring Saeedvafa and Belabbes together at that moment, along with the many others in the room who applauded his remark. And that sense of betrayal can lead out to the vastly different kinds of works that these two directors from different backgrounds would end up doing.