The recent release of Denis Villeneuve’s American science fiction picture Dune: Part One (2021) has resurrected the thorny issue of Hollywood’s misrepresentation of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam. Film reviewers, particularly those from the Arab and Muslim worlds, are enraged and reverting to their old hobby of pointing out how Hollywood misrepresents them.
It’s time to face facts and accept that “Hollywood” as an abstraction is in the business of misleading everyone. It has no regard for the truth. It has built a profitable business out of deceiving the rest of the world. Native Americans, African-Americans, Arabs, Asians, Latinx, Muslims, and Africans – everyone on the planet is misrepresented for the simple reason that at the heart of Hollywood as an industry stands a factual, virtual, or fictive white narrator proclaiming himself to be the measure of truth and wisdom, joy and entertainment.
Dune is now misrepresenting itself with the most up-to-date visual panache and cutting-edge digital bravura and virtuosity. It is based on American author Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel of the same name, set in the far future amid an intergalactic dystopia. To the dismay of reviewers, David Lynch adapted the story into a film in 1984. However, virtually everyone has praised Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 adaption, with the exception of certain Arab and Muslim film reviewers who believe it misrepresents them and has a white saviour narrative at its centre.
We’re dealing with a giant machine in Hollywood that continues revolving around itself, pumping out higher dosages of fiction to maintain the idea that it’s the centre of the universe alive. It will eat Sydney Poitier or Denzel Washington and yet spew up the same foolish ideas. So, if you want to resist the machine, you must alter your interlocutor – choose a storyteller who is the furthest apart from Hollywood. In Hollywood, a single image of a Kiarostami or Ozu will melt mountains of snowfall. Cosmetic creampuffs do not help the lying. You use truth to adjust the lens.
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