TV/Movies Megathread

[garbon]

Is Homeland racist? Someone mentioned "the racism of Homeland", and I got curious if it actually is racist or not (I have never seen the show and likely never will).

I think one could reasonably make the argument given how white people in the show are generally the CIA and then brown people are either terrorists or unwitting dupes of the CIA.

Thanks!

To be clear, I'm not advancing that argument but I could see how it might have some legs.

[garbon]

I was reminded there was a black guy who was a boss in early seasons but then that character is disposed of. Really thinking about it, generally no one comes out looking well on that show. Israelis? Nope. Americans? Nope. Germans? Nope.

[Habbaku]

I've only watched the first four seasons, but I'm not sure how anyone could conclude the show is racist. As garbon said, no one in the show is getting covered in glory--every organization is compromised in some fashion.

[Grey Fox]

For some reason, AMC is on free preview. I watched the mid season return of TWD. I've been a walking dead quitter for a couple of season now.

I regret the 1h30 it took. I want my time back.

[The Brain]

@garb & Hab: Roger. Thank you.

[crazy canuck]

For some reason, AMC is on free preview. I watched the mid season return of TWD. I've been a walking dead quitter for a couple of season now.

I regret the 1h30 it took. I want my time back.

Yeah, they lost the thread somewhere.

[Josquius]

Is Homeland racist? Someone mentioned "the racism of Homeland", and I got curious if it actually is racist or not (I have never seen the show and likely never will).

Wasn't there some Arabic  graffiti they'd had painted for one scene that said Homeland is racist?

[The Brain]

Is Homeland racist? Someone mentioned "the racism of Homeland", and I got curious if it actually is racist or not (I have never seen the show and likely never will).

Wasn't there some Arabic  graffiti they'd had painted for one scene that said Homeland is racist?

IIRC yes.

[Berkut]

Meh, that is the same kind of claim of racism that says that someone who talks about Islamic terrorism must be a racist. It isn't worthy of much in the way of actual debate, it is just leftwing identity politics run amok.

[garbon]

Spoilers, of course, in the below.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/10/02/homeland-is-the-most-bigoted-show-on-television/?utm_term=.2f6d2acf308b

'Homeland' is the most bigoted show on television

A blonde, white Red Riding Hood lost in a forest of faceless Muslim wolves: This is how "Homeland's" creators have chosen to represent their show as it begins its fourth season, which sees CIA officer Carrie Mathison stationed in Pakistan. It is also the perfect encapsulation of everything that's wrong with this show.

Since its first episode, "Homeland," which returns Sunday, has churned out Islamophobic stereotypes as if its writers were getting paid by the cliché. Yet the show, created by "24" veterans Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa and former Israeli paratrooper Gideon Raff, continues to rack up awards, critical praise and millions of viewers.

For starters, the show is riddled with basic errors about Islam and the Middle East. Laila Al Arian points out some of the more obvious ones: You don't need to bury the Koran after someone's dropped it on the ground; Issa, the son of terrorist leader Abu Nazir, has his name mispronounced by everyone on the show; Roya Hammad — there to remind us that even a Westernized, business-suit-wearing Arab is not to be trusted — is supposedly Palestinian but has a Persian first name.

More broadly, "Homeland" carelessly traffics in absurd and damaging stereotypes. The show hit peak idiocy, for instance, at the beginning of season two, when Beirut's posh Hamra Street was depicted as a grubby generic videogame universe of Scary Muslims in which Mathison must disguise herself to avoid detection. The real Hamra Street is a cosmopolitan, expat-filled area near the American University, where Western chains like Starbucks and Gloria Jean's compete for customers and no one would look twice at a blonde, blue-eyed white woman with uncovered hair. Islam itself is presented as sinister and suspicious: Brody secretly prays in his garage to foreboding music, and an imam who's outraged that worshippers were shot during a police operation at his mosque turns out to be hiding information about Brody's fellow POW-turned-terrorist Tom Walker.

These errors all add up to something important: The entire structure of "Homeland" is built on mashing together every manifestation of political Islam, Arabs, Muslims and the whole Middle East into a Frankenstein-monster global terrorist threat that simply doesn't exist.

The arch villain of season one is Abu Nazir, a member of al-Qaeda (and obvious bin Laden stand-in) who's plotting an attack on the United States with the possible help of Marine-turned-terrorist Nicholas Brody. At the beginning of season two, we see Abu Nazir meeting with a Hezbollah leader (who's also a wife-beater, naturally) in Beirut. And in season three we learn that a deadly bomb attack on CIA headquarters was in fact financed by the Iranian government, and that terrorism suspect Brody is being hidden in rogue state Venezuela.

In just a few steps, the show has neatly stitched together all the current bogeymen of U.S. foreign policy. (The ISIS tie-in is presumably coming in season five.)

There's just one small problem: Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah don't actually like each other. Hezbollah is currently fighting the al-Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. Iran and al-Qaeda were on opposite side of the sectarian war in Iraq in the mid-2000s. And at the moment, the United States  is de facto cooperating with Iran to prop up the Shia central government of Iraq against the Sunni forces of ISIS.

But all of this is way too nuanced for "Homeland," in which Muslims can play one of exactly two roles: terrorists or willing collaborators with U.S. intelligence forces. (This latter role is repeatedly filled by women on the show, who of course need the CIA's protection from their violent Muslim husbands, epitomized by the murderous Majid Javadi in season three.) When Brody's wife discovers he's a Secret Muslim and waves the Koran at him, shouting, "These are the people who tortured you!" she's not just being melodramatic. She's expressing the show's core philosophy. Muslims — be they Arab, Iranian or Pakistani — are brutal terrorists who can't be trusted, and they're all out to get us.

It's easy to argue that "Homeland" is just a TV show, a thriller that naturally demands diabolical villains and high stakes. But these same stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims are used politically to justify actions in the real world — U.S. wars, covert operations and drone strikes; CIA detention and torture; racist policing, domestic surveillance and militarized borders. In this context, "Homeland" is not just mindless entertainment, but a device that perpetuates racist ideas that have real consequences for ordinary people's lives.

[The Brain]

They talk a lot about Islam and Muslims, netiher of which is a race. How are (say) Christian Arabs depicted in the show?

[Josephus]

Spoilers, of course, in the below.

3 year old spoilers, but yeah.

[Josephus]

To be fair, it's not anymore racist than 24 was.

[Maladict]

John Cleese's new sitcom is awful 

[HVC]

John Cleese's new sitcom is awful 

He's got to pay his ex-wives off somehow.