Against Liberal Orientalism: Preliminary Suggestions

A group of contemporary liberal movies that are critical of Western engagements in and with the Middle East construct an Orient that is incomprehensible and profoundly different from the West. The Orient in these movies is a place unsuited for Westerners. In Jarhead the possible results for Westerners are traumas and death.

The movies Babel, Jarhead, and Rendition

- create Oriental "others"

- take a microperspective on the world that avoids looking at big power structures in contemporary geopolitics. The perspective is mostly that of an individual American who is presented as powerless. He (sic) is a soldier in Jarhead, a tourist stuck in a desert town in Babel, a CIA officer forced (sic) to torture a prisoner in Rendition.

- bypass the question of Western responsibility for human suffering and chaos in the Middle East. Since the Middle East is a place that cannot be understood, no proper assessment of nuclear programmes or potentials for democracy could have been made. The very title of the movie Babel is symptomatic of this.

- attribute the plot position "victim" not to Middle Easterners but to Americans.

- campaign for military and political disengagement in Iraq ASAP.

- are uncritically welcomed in Europe because they cater to anti-American sentiments on the European Left.

Nevertheless, what is at stake in these movies (and goes unnoticed in Europe) is American interest. The manifestly different Orient of these movies campaigns for an easy way out of an increasingly traumatic, deadly, and expensive war. Hence the function of the Orient here is not so different from that of "conservative" Orientalist movies, like True Lies. It serves a Western interest - in the United States but also in Europe.