Well that didn't age well: The perils of revisiting old movies

And why I still love them

Welcome to Letters from a Muslim Woman!

I share the joys and challenges of being a visibly Muslim woman in a sometimes-unfriendly world.

If you’re new to this newsletter, here are a couple of good posts to give you the vibe of this space:

• Beauty in the Eye of the Hijabi

• Pray Tell? Five Times a Day I Find the Time and Place

During the early days of the pandemic, cocooned in our home in the countryside and left with precious little else to do, my husband and I started introducing our two boys to various movies. First, we watched everything the MCU had to offer, up to Avengers End Game. Then we had to dig a little deeper, into our back catalog of old childhood favourites.

We watched everything age appropriate we could think of: Home Alone, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Back to the Future, Aladdin, Lord of the Rings, Mrs. Doubtfire.

It was a fun project. Curling up together on the L-shaped sectional in our living room, bowls of popcorn and chips before us, gave us a feeling of warmth and togetherness. We weren’t simply vegging, we were introducing the children to culture, history, memory.

My husband and I delighted in watching them explore these remnants of our childhood. We watched them stare in boredom at the long opening credits of films gone by, or cackle at a gag we’d seen a hundred times, or ask questions when confronted with old technology in the form of rotary phones, answering machines and typewriters.

Something we didn’t delight in was the awful realization that so many of our old favourites peddled in racist tropes. It was shocking, really. The first shock would hit as a stereotyped character, dressed head-to-toe in the sartorial equivalent of brownface uttered some awful and offensive line. The second shock would hit as we realized we actually knew this scene, this slap across the face, and that we had blocked it out of our memory, or worse, shrugged it off as the cost of watching a good movie.

First, this happened with Iron Man. We sat down to watch it, excited to introduce the kids to the clever snark of Robert Downey Jr. and then remembered with dread the opening scenes. To this day, I can’t explain the need for Tony Stark to be in Afghanistan, and for random terrorist characters to essentially kidnap him. Sure, the writers came up with a flimsy excuse for the set up, but showing the audience that Stark was brilliant and building the prototype for the Iron Man suit could have been done a hundred other ways.

And so we had to sit the boys down before we could watch, and try to walk the impossible tightrope of a lighthearted and straightforward explanation. Yes, the opening sequence was wrong, but the rest was hilarious and we could still enjoy it for the popcorn movie that it was.

There was a knot in my stomach as I looked at the faces of my little boys, 9 and 6, while they looked back at me with bewilderment. Why was this movie being unfair to us in the first place? And if it was, why were we still watching it, and calling it good?

Kids are kids, and my kids were bored of pandemic life, and eager to watch a movie and shovel chips into their mouths, so they didn’t ask too many questions. We got through the awkward beginning with some discomfort and then moved happily into the quips, the CGI, and the explosions. The boys either forgot about the opening or made peace with the contradictions/ blocked it away, like we had.

With Aladdin, the explanations were peppered through out the movie. There’s the famous line in the opening song that goes, “It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home”. And then there are the ridiculous orientalist sketches, the hyper-sexualized clothes for the only female character, the fact that said character couldn’t inherit or marry without her father’s permission. We kept stopping the movie to say, “this is inaccurate, this isn’t true,” and then singing along moments later to, “you ain’t never had a friend like me”, or, “one jump”.

The whiplash from our constant approval-disapproval swing must have been enough to make their heads spin.

The sad thing is that my husband and I had rewatched some of these movies recently. We had seen the garbage tropes and thought nothing of them. It was only in trying to unpack them, to explain away the problems to our kids, that our cognitive dissonance shone through.

I started to dread the watching of old classics, to worry about the sullying of happy childhood memories. Had I really been so desperate for entertainment? Had I really thought so little of myself that I had accepted the most minimal representation, however pathetic and inaccurate?

Had I been so happy to see any version at all of my people on screen that a twisted version was fine? The crumbs I’d been willing to settle for! Why? What humiliation!

In The Lord of the Rings, one of my all time favourite book series turned movie trilogies, there are constant references to a darkness rising in the East, to the importance of the West uniting against this apocalyptic threat. I felt it as I read Tolkien’s words as a young adult, but shrugged it off and dove back in for more adventure, more friendship, more emotional struggle. It’s harder to ignore in the movies, where the men who fight with Sauron have Middle Eastern complexions and ride mythical elephants into war.

Arab looking villains from Lord of the Rings, and their mythical elephants

Though the not so subtle messages of white = good and dark = bad bothered me, my response was not to abandon the books or the movies. They have remained favourites for over 20 years, so much so that my family’s pet rabbit is named Bilbo. Perhaps I don’t have the stomach to turn my back on these stories, and align my actions with my principles.

Or maybe it’s less simple. Maybe there are just not that many choices out there for a family of Arabs who wants an epic tale, beautifully told and acted. Maybe my reaction stems from the realism that if I avoided every story, movie, and tv show that painted my race and religion as bad, I’d have very little to read and watch.

In Mrs. Doubtfire, the brilliant Robin Williams holds a tea-towel over his face to hide it in a moment of panic, fearing his dual identity will be discovered. And then he says, “No, I’m not a Muslim”. When I mention this to non-Muslim friends, they can’t remember the scene, only how much they laughed as they watched Williams masterfully portray the old nanny. But I do. It stayed with me all these years because it hurt when I saw it. A little jab, unexpected, in the ribs. Enough to make me hold my breath and say to myself, “did that just happen?” And then the scene changed on the screen and I decided not to overreact, so I kept watching, kept telling myself it was no big deal.

In Back to the Future, Marty McFly’s nemesis, Biff, isn’t enough of a villain, so Libyan terrorists make random appearances here and there to threaten our heroes. Of course, their main motivation is revenge for stolen plutonium and bombs, because Arabs are dangerous and unhinged. Get it?

The movie is otherwise hilarious, and who doesn’t want to watch the classics? So we sit through the humiliation and wait for the scenes we can enjoy, as though it is some penance for a crime of which we’ve been found guilty, though we never committed it.

This past Christmas, we watched You’ve Got Mail with the boys, and loved it. Except for that one moment. I don’t remember what happened on screen. What was said or done. I do remember looking over my son’s head at my husband, that familiar wince spreading on both our faces, another indignity. Never mind, never mind, we said.

Two weeks later, trying to prep for this essay, I Googled it, and came up short. “Islamophobic comment, You’ve Got Mail” gives no useful results. Neither does a similar search for Mrs. Doubtfire, by the way. It would seem that the internet’s search engines have no idea what qualifies as hurtful to Muslims, and maybe, just wants us to relax and not be such sticklers. The only way for me to figure out what Nora Ephron said that hurt me is to re-watch the movie. I will, eventually, because even though I’m sad about this, I still love it. I just wish it would love me back.

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Let’s chat in the comments:

1. Do you notice casual racism in movies, books, and tv shows?

2. If you notice it, how do you react? Do you stop watching?

3. Do you think we should all chill out and stop overthinking this stuff?

I am continuing to share resources, links, and information that I have found helpful regarding the crisis in Gaza and the West bank. This week I’m sharing an article from CNN about the impending starvation of the Gazan population. “‘We are dying slowly:’ Palestinians are eating grass and drinking polluted water as famine looms across Gaza.

Please continue to speak out, call your representatives, and call for a ceasefire, and end to the blockade, and an end to the occupation. The situation is absolutely untenable. I know many are fatigued and feeling hopeless, but we cannot turn away.