Hollywood’s Representation of Iran

Abstract

Dissimilarities among the reality and what is represented in media caused to efforts to explain how-ness and why-ness of what is called media representation of the world. Therefore, media representation has been on board in Cultural and Media Studies. Cultural Study presupposes that what should one focus on in exploring media texts are the underneath ideological and social elements, and their influence on the audience’s views. Hollywood, among other media productions, enjoys a distinguished, unique status in representing the world. The present study reviews “a discourse-within-a-discourse”. In the other words, Iran’s representation would be explored as a part of representing Orient (or Islam) in the western media. Here, Hollywood –as a media-within-mass-media- represents American Media in general. Reviewing movies produced in Hollywood within which Iran is represented, she is represented as the “subaltern other”. Thus, it could be said that Hollywood generally works in the “neo-racist” theoretical framework. In this study, 3 theoretical traditions; namely the Cultural Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, and Film Theory have been applied. The central “representation” concept in the present study is a combined derivation of Michel Foucault and Stewart Hall’s theories. Then, Edward Said’s ideas in Post-Colonial Studies would be explored. And finally, Film Theory would help to apply the concept of representation besides the Post-Colonial Studies in Film Studies.

Keywords

• Critical Discourse Analysis
• Film Theory
• Naturalizing
• Neo-Racism
• Post-Colonial Studies
• Representation
• Semiology
• Stereotyping