The "evil" Arabs of American film are illusions. Much like those perplexing and ambiguous paintings of the celebrated Renaissance artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527 -1593), or those more simplistic drawings that are developed for entertainment and perception analysis in books featuring optical puzzles, the "evil" Arabs are also constructions for entertainment and have implications for the perceptions of the American cinematic audience. Samuel Tolansky has provided us with a useful term when discussing the type of illusions similar to that of the "evil" Arabs: illusions of "oscillating attention." Tolansky notes,

These are cases where the diagram is designed such that attention can alternately be concentrated on one of two possibilities. In some instances the mind seems actually to oscillate between the two possible interpretations in rapid succession, and it is difficult to decide just what is being seen.

While Tolansky cites concentration, attention, and distinguishing between light and dark as the causes of oscillating attention, writers like Patricia Ann Rainey, J. R. Block, and Harold E. Yuker believe that the driving force of what the viewers see first in an illusion of oscillating attention is "perception." Rainey tells her viewers/readers that perception is simply how people see things, or how people look at the world. She adds,

Differences in religion, ideology, political beliefs, and even prejudice can be explained in terms of how people perceive. Thus knowledge of perception will give an understanding of human beings.

Many of the portrayals of Arabs, at first glance, give the impression of cultural and ethnic traits that are inherently inimical to Western civilization. Even so, are not "evil" Arabs actually fictional characters that we have devised and, as such, not at all about the real Arabs and their multidimensional and deeply contoured cultures or ethnicity? Our filmic villains are narrative tools used for self-presentation and self-identity to enhance our own stature, our own meaning, and our own self-esteem in times of our own diffidence. Therefore, are the "evil" Arabs in American film actually oblique depictions of ourselves: the insecure Americans? And while we depict ourselves through them, do we not do so at the expense of the Arab Others?

"Evil" Arabs in American Popular Film is a film study written to encourage the American cinematic audience to look with a more critical eye at the depictions of the "evil" Arabs. It is written to promote a new way of thinking about the "evil" Arabs and to call forth a differentiation between the Arabs as-they-are-portrayed and the Arabs as-they-are. This book encourages its readers, when seeing or hearing of the "evil" Arabs, to scrutinize the characters and to discover our self-interested construction of the visual or the narrative: to see visual tropes that are often made through intertextuality and polarities of good and bad, and to identify narrative structures that adhere interstructurally to meaningful morphological formulae. Block and Yuker state of their illusions of oscillating attention, "Once one sees both pictures, it is impossible to focus on only one without the other 'popping' into your vision from time to time!" Here, I seek to achieve an analogous effect with, however, the more serious implications of cultural prejudice and racism in mind. I ask the reader to reconsider the "evil" Arabs and to think about the way in which the Arabs are devised to produce fear, and at times solace, in an American cinematic audience. With this reconsideration, the illusion will manifest itself, thus making prejudices inculcated through our popular culture more clearly perceptible, more easily isolated, and more likely to be dismantled.

Jack Shaheen is well known for his lectures, written work, and media appearances that challenge the stereotypes of Arabs used in Hollywood film and in Western television. Shaheen's emphasis on stereotypes is essential as a beginning foray into understanding the construction of the "evil" Arabs in film. Fundamentally, he calls our attention to the first image of the illusion. For example, he has identified the "Arab kit," or "instant Ali Baba kit," as a quick and easy assembly of the stereotypical Arab character in Hollywood:

Property masters stock the kits with curved daggers, scimitars, magic lamps, giant feather fans, and nargelihs [sic]. Costumers provide actresses with chadors, hijabs, bellydancers' see-through pantaloons, veils, and jewels for their navels. Robed actors are presented with dark glasses, fake black beards, exaggerated noses, worry beads, and checkered burnooses.

Offering historical perspective, Shaheen reminds us that "when one ethnic, racial, or religious group is vilified, innocent people suffer" and that "cinema's hateful Arab stereotypes are reminiscent of abuses of earlier times" (i.e., cinematic abuses of Asians, Native Americans, blacks, and Jews). He has taken on the difficult task of documenting a plethora of stereotype abuses and entreats the readers of his comprehensive tome of Hollywood films, cleverly titled Reel Bad Arabs, to join him in continuing to expose racism against Arabs in film—what he calls "The New Anti-Semitism"—and to find new ways of solving this problem. Shaheen states of his objective, "To see is to make possible new ways of seeing."

"Evil" Arabs in American Popular Film has been greatly inspired by Shaheen's impressive and important work. I, therefore, accept his challenge and would like to expand upon his work at a new level: essentially, to unveil the other image in the illusion of oscillating attention. To do so, we must consider Shaheen's work as an introduction to the topic of the prejudiced portrayals of the Arabs. Reel Bad Arabs is an indispensable reference tool to find films that abuse Arab characters. But, because of its cumulative nature, Shaheen's book does not reveal what it could about these films. In fact, the book overlooks important and unique "how" and "why" performances and strategies used in the construction of "evil" Arab characters in these films. For example, Shaheen's discussion of The Exorcist, given only two inches of text, is by far too "lite." While the author makes us aware of our obsessive cultural use of "evil" Arabs, and the Foreword to his book elucidates the Arabs as replacement villains for the Soviet Communists, I find my inquisitive appetite unsatisfied with his discussion confronting our cultural needs and desires to enlist these characters. As a result of Shaheen's focus on stereotypes, he, for example, promotes Three Kings in his "Best List" because he sees it as an improvement in stereotyping, even though it still denigrates the Arab character. We must look deeper, beyond the "Arab kit," at how the Arabs' images are misused. Shaheen has provided us significant opportunities to think further and to find the path for deeper self-assessment in our construction of "evil" Arabs. What is now needed is for scholars interested in the topic of cultural prejudice and racism in film to delve into these films, to scrutinize filmic visual tropes and narrative structures, and to investigate possibilities of why we keep using "evil" Arabs for our entertainment.

I enlist the work of Gordon W. Allport, who points out in his famous book The Nature of Prejudice that an attack on stereotypes alone will not eradicate the root of prejudice. The stereotype is but one of the keys on the ring that are needed to open the door holding the understandings of prejudice. Since an approach to prejudice must be a multitheoretical approach, Allport encourages us to delve deeper than the mere thought of the stimulus object (the Arab) and its phenomenology (how the Arab is perceived). One way of understanding the prejudicial act is to look at the character structure of the persons who employ the stereotype. We must discover their socially acquired personalities, attitudes, and beliefs; the structure of the society in which they live; long-standing economic and cultural traditions; and national and historical influences of long duration. This methodology turns the spotlight of the prejudicial act away from the hated object and concentrates on the haters. It can, therefore, help us discern the alternative image in the illusion of an "evil" Arab.

It makes sense, then, to consider those ideologies, and the myths that illustrate them, of the prejudiced persons' world. I borrow from Louis Althusser's notions of ideology as the individuals' imaginary relation to the real relations in which they live. Ideology, as Althusser explains, is an illusion considered as a truthful representation of reality that at the same time makes an allusion to reality. The human being is ideological by nature in that a concrete individual has already been and continually is transformed into a subject within the ideological frameworks at work and within the rituals of ideology. Ideology, the illusion based on allusion, causes the subject to culturally recognize and acknowledge raw occurrences and experiences in such a way that s/he will exclaim, "That's obvious! That's right! That's true!" What also occurs is the formation, through a process of "interpellation" (being hailed/called), of the individual's idealized self-image, or what Henry Krips acknowledges as a Freudian "ideal ego," that constantly rediscovers itself in the application of ideologies. When the individual is hailed/called, s/he should respond, nine times out of ten, to the interpellation as a subject by saying, "That's me. That's who I am." The stories humans tell to illustrate their ideologies, i.e., myths, go further in informing the individual of her/his subjective being, her/his connection to society, and her/his society's connection to the rest of the world and then the cosmos. Myths illustrate to the subject how to live a lively, healthy, and culturally meaningful life. They provide instructions, standards of value, and interpretive frameworks for experience, and, at the same time, power over existence. Myths, therefore, help to interpret and visualize the "truth" set forth in ideology. For example, while the individual may acknowledge her/himself as a subject existing in American capitalism, and American capitalism as the proper economic system at that, the success story of the American entrepreneur is the myth that illustrates the virtues of this capitalist ideology and the rules for the subject to follow.

Kaja Silverman acknowledges ideology as a suturing device in cinematic viewing. She sees that the filmic narrative is laden with ideological stances that interpellate individual viewers and thereby suture them into subjective positions within the film. Ideologies are often challenged in the film, but are also reaffirmed, strengthened, and proven righteous in the end. Susan Mackey-Kallis uses mythic structure as a way of analyzing Hollywood films to unlock the American cinematic audience's psyche and its love of film and thereby explain the successful popular appeal of particular films in our culture. To unlock prejudiced persons' ideologies and the myths through which they have been socialized and from which their society is structured, to see how that society has been formed from long-standing traditions and historical experience, is to properly apply Allport's approach to prejudice and can be enlightening when analyzing the "evil" Arabs in film. Ideologies and myths can inform us of our preconceptions, to which we cling when our vision and mentality confront these Arab characters on film. Or to borrow from Melani McAlister, these ideologies and myths can enlighten us as to how the Arabs and the Middle East come to make "common sense" when geographic and experiential spaces are too wide and, therefore, we must rely upon the medium of culture as surrogate.

Orientalism is one such ideological structure and a basis of the inquiry at hand. Edward Said's seminal book Orientalism looks at the European colonial period's portrayals of the Arabs, their cultures, and their Middle Eastern land as Western discourse. Orientalism dominates the way that we in the West see, anticipate, and react to the Arab world in our past, today, and likely in the future. Said shows how Western portrayals of the Arabs became an issue of disciplining power, a particular Western knowledge of the East that divides the world into a conceptually evolving, modern, and superior Occidental "us" versus a static, backward, and weakened Oriental "them." To use Orientalism as a basis of this inquiry is an appropriate way of understanding our preconceptions of the Arabs in terms of the methodology supported by Allport. It helps in providing a vantage point to see the other image, our Self, in the illusion of an "evil" Arab. After all, as Said has taught us, "Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with 'our' world."

One of the possible roots of prejudice, as noted by Allport, is the prejudiced persons' fears and anxieties, and such a consideration of fears and anxieties can better narrow our own inquiry. When the prejudiced persons can no longer control their fear, chronic anxiety will result. It puts them on alert and predisposes them to see all sorts of stimuli as menacing. While social pressures force them to control and repress their personal anxieties, they tend to project their fear onto Others; and if this phobia is socially allowable, it provides them psychic release, as they are rescued by the "impression of universality."

It becomes evident that discussion of stereotypes alone will not help us here. According to Allport, stereotype offers prejudiced persons a clear-cut structuring of the world, a way of imposing order where there is none, a lifeline to tried and tested habits when new solutions are called for, and an opportunity to "latch onto what is familiar, safe, simple, definite." In essence, then, prejudiced persons utter or consume the stereotype for its functional significance. They do so for consolation, comfort, the pleasure derived from classificatory order, and an adoption of the law of least effort when aspects of the Other seem ambiguous and disrupt "logical" order. Similarly, the Orientalists work within a repertoire of stereotypes. As part of the exercise of power over those foreign peoples and objects that they confront, the Orientalists use language and methods of control to assign Others into classification schemes that protect the Orientalist self. Therefore, to discuss films only in view of their stereotypes or Orientalist tropes would suggest a discussion that looks more at our derivation of comfort from the Arabs. Once the stereotype is effectively articulated, the anxiety is, for the short term, ameliorated. Stereotype is the response to anxiety, not the anxiety itself, and as such it is only a partial view of the illusion. Moreover, I believe, concentration on stereotype alone dangerously encourages us to leave the images of the "evil" Arabs as they are rather than to scrutinize them for our prejudicial roots and risk our own psychic comfort.

To get at a better understanding of the construction and use of "evil" Arabs in film, we must upset the prejudiced persons' project, overturn their applecart, and peel the skin of their personalities in order to see their ideal egos lying underneath. We must find out what makes them squirm to really expose the nerve of their fear—the raw source and the full weight of the prejudiced act. To do so, I propose that we find instances in which their ideological and mythic structures are threatened and placed in jeopardy. This will give these persons no refuge as they flail about, grab anything they can, accept any explanation, and use their ingenuity, and will expose what methods they employ to set their ideologies and myths right again. We must look for instances when the Orientalist project is disrupted or when the Arabs refuse to be disciplined—or at least are perceived as doing so. David D. Gilmore points out that interstitiality, or the flagrant refusal to be categorized or to accept categories, is a cause of human discomfort and fear for the categorizer. Likewise, Robert G. Lee states in his study of Asian Americans in popular culture that objects or people are designated as alien when their "presence disrupts the narrative structure of the community." An approach to our prejudicial portrayals of the Arabs, particularly Arab wickedness, in film requires that we look at our fears, in addition to our comforts, where threatened ideologies and myths are important features.

Such fears have become common and intriguing entertainment themes in our cinematic portrayals of "evil" Arabs from the 1970s on into the present and, as such, have added to our socially allowable phobia toward the Arabs. These films, however, are reflections of our real-life fears of the Arabs in our everyday cultural and political lives. The post-Vietnam decade became an era in which seemingly undisputable truths informed by American ideological and mythic narratives had become destabilized, and, hence, the confidence of the American national self was in peril.

David Frum's cultural study of the 1970s points out that this American decade is notable for our society's loss of trust in our institutions and institutional practices. Whereas after World War II Americans generally trusted their government and military, the bases and advances of Western sciences, the economic structure and practices of the free market system, and the words and guidance of paternal leaders, in the 1970s many of these postwar "givens" had become undermined and an atmosphere of mistrust, skepticism, malaise, and pessimism flourished. As Frum states, "[B]etween 1967 and 1981, the United States sank into a miasma of self-doubt from which it has never fully emerged." Frum does not blame the experiences of the 1970s themselves for this but rather the interpretation of experiences through the lens of overly zealous hopes and dreams, in the 1960s, that a postwar society would be great, just, and caring. This echoes Daniel J. Boorstin's description of American culture made earlier, in 1961. As Boorstin saw it then, Americans expected more than the world could offer. "We are ruled by extravagant expectations: (1) Of what the world holds . . . (2) Of our power to shape the world . . . We tyrannize and frustrate ourselves by expecting more than the world can give us or than we can make of the world." These hopes, dreams, and expectations, galvanized by the confidence of democracy, seemingly proven victorious in great military conflicts, came to a crashing halt in the 1970s. And so, refracted through such myths, the experiences of the 1970s seemed all the more suspicious, trust-breaking, and devastating. Therefore, Watergate, Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, inflation, economic stagnation, unemployment, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) movement, and the rise in crime, to mention but a few of the important experiences of the decade, gained their reputations of notorious cultural importance because they usurped long-standing mythic structures and institutionalized ways of thinking in our American culture and/or dashed the postwar hopes and dreams.

Likewise, the rising power of the Middle East and the perceived threat of the Arabs became another infamous theme of the 1970s. The Middle East loomed as an evolving "global imaginary," to borrow from Christina Klein, that became a region often contextualized in an adversarial relationship with America, and, in turn, the Arabs were reduced to an ethnic imaginary that earned our prejudicial anger. For example, the Middle East became a nemesis in American foreign policy, and foreign policy, according to Melani McAlister, is a meaning-making activity that helps "to frame our ideas of nationhood and national interest," i.e., our ideologies. McAlister argues in her book Epic Encounters that in order to understand our cultural perceptions of the Middle East, we must consider our encounters through the nexus of foreign policy. From this vantage point, we can also see how our cultural perceptions make conventional wisdom of this policy. In particular, McAlister highlights the policies of "liberal developmentalism" before World War II, the "benevolent supremacy" theme of the 1950s, and the Nixon Doctrine of the 1970s. Liberal developmentalism promotes the economic influence of U.S. capitalism as an alternative to military conquest. In connection with Manifest Destiny egoism and self-interested commercial gains, the United States prior to World War II envisaged that all nations could and should replicate the U.S. model of economic, political, and cultural development. As McAlister describes it,

by making mass products (sewing machines, condensed milk, cameras) available cheaply, [Americans] would help increase living standards in Latin America, Asia, or Africa, while also improving the U.S. strategic position and making money for American businesses.

Benevolent supremacy is the ideology that calls for American international power, policy, and diplomacy to be used to promote democracy and the liberty of all nations as a morally preferable approach in comparison to slavery, referred to as being more like Soviet Communism, and arrogance, referred to as being more like European colonialism. The Nixon Doctrine sought to fund and arm friendly governments, which would then serve as proxies for the protection of American interests. The Middle East as global imaginary, in the 1970s, came to challenge these very ideologies and political policies through the discourses of oil, wealth, and violence. While the Middle East has been by no means exempt from ill-spirited American portrayals in the past, in the 1970s the reputation of the Arabs was assigned a new level of popular American contempt in light of these policies.

According to Frum, oil lay in wait for half a billion years until humans could imagine a use for it, and then, through the mysterious processes of mass hysteria, they "terrif[ied] themselves that they were running out of it." Daniel Yergin points out in his authoritative study of oil that the industrial nations' rising standard of living, the growing manufacture and consumption of newer and bigger products, the cheap cost of oil, and the high levels of oil production and supply drove a worldwide surge in oil consumption. In 1971, the Middle East was supplying the industrial nations with much of the oil necessary to fuel their growing industrial economies. Time magazine reported that 85 percent of Europe's, 91 percent of Japan's, and 18 percent of the United States's oil came mainly from the wells in the Middle East. Whereas oil-producing countries of the Third World could at one time be diplomatically played off of one another for Western benefit, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was now seen as aggressively uniting in its effort to defend oil prices, demanding more of a share of the price per barrel, and becoming increasingly unhappy about Western support for Israel. The West saw oil revenues as reward for Western ingenuity finding a use for the viscous liquid. At the other end of the spectrum, OPEC viewed oil as an indigenous resource driving the economic destinies of the producing nations. Therefore, these producing nations believed that oil should be under their own conservatorship and not under the control of the executives of Western oil companies. Weeks later, Time began reporting that the Shah of Iran, an emergent leader of the Middle East nations, was now calling for OPEC-like consortiums for producing nations of other commodities, such as coffee, tin, and rubber, in order to wield power over consumer countries. The Middle East seemed to be calling forth the Third World to take on the Western nations. The OPEC countries were also demanding more control in the ownership of Western companies that were pumping oil in their nations, as if, in the American view, price increases were not enough to satisfy "their relentless search for new reserves of green." In response, American political policy began to group these nations into spheres of "oil arrogance," with Libya and Iraq being radical, and Iran and Nigeria being considered more moderate, and henceforth the Arab Middle East was being considered an area that was politically unstable for the West.

In the meantime, the rising wealth of the Arab oil nations was becoming increasingly more disconcerting in the American view. For an American culture that saw itself as economically fortunate from and morally deserving of the postwar economic boom, Arab wealth was a windfall of riches into the immature and irresponsible hands of Third Worlders. Arab wealth became an object of American jealousy, rivalry, and fear. For example, the $2.4 billion of Libya's annual oil income was depicted as coming in faster than the extremist Gaddafi could spend it on his Pan-Arabism dreams, the de-Westernization/Christianization of his nation, and its replacement with Islamicization. The oil reserves of the Middle East and the energy shortages of the West created an imbalance that, as it was believed, "may very well lead to significant redistribution of the world's monetary wealth." Some imagined the future of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as being not "run by the suave, dark-suited Americans and Europeans, but by white-robed sheiks from the Middle East." Expectations were that America would increasingly rely on the Middle East in the future (up to 50 percent of its oil imports coming from the Arab nations). Americans would be spending more just to keep their lifestyles, while the Middle East nations would gather funds almost twice as fast as they could spend them. There was a fear that the Arabs were likely to be irresponsible and untrustworthy with this new monetary wealth, maybe even using blackmail against America, and, thus, it was feared that America was funding its own demise. In the meantime, as a State Department spokesman stated, "With the possible exception of Croesus, the world will never have seen anything like the wealth which is flowing and will continue to flow into the Persian Gulf."

Before the outbreak of the October War and the Arab oil embargo of 1973, Arabs were seen as purveyors of violence that threatened the balances of power in the world. The Arab-Israeli conflict became an imbroglio that threatened to bring the United States and the USSR into an arena where the two superpowers could clash, and almost did in 1973. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was seen as recklessly courting the Russians to break the standoff between his country and Israel. The increase of arms flowing from the USSR and the United States to Arabs and Israelis at the same time Sadat was declaring 1971 the "Year of Decision" was "like stockpiling gasoline around an open fire." And with his frustration over Israeli intransigence, Sadat made his move toward a new Pan-Arabism through a federation composed of Egypt, Libya, and Syria in 1971 and began to call for war against Israel. An ensuing joint Arab surprise attack on Israel during its period of holy observance in 1973 was designed to catch the Israelis when they were least prepared.

Meanwhile, factions of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)—the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Black September Organization, in particular—were committing skyjackings and acts of terror in airports, embassies, and trains. In an effort to draw the most attention to the Palestinian plight, Palestinian terrorist groups more frequently attacked specific, large, and valuable enemy targets, took advantage of shock value to make bold political statements via the broadcast airwaves, and used international travel to recruit international supporters and to export the conflict to countries outside of the Middle East. On September 5, 1972, Black September gunmen stormed into the Israeli athletic dormitory at the Olympics in Munich. The images and news coverage of this terrorist event riveted a worldwide audience, created shock and grief with the killing of eleven Israeli team members, and brought global condemnation of Palestinian terror tactics. Ironically, it was a great publicity coup for the Palestinian cause, as it used violence to bring the presence and grievances of the Palestinians into worldwide consciousness and showed that their militance was a force that had to be reckoned with and that could no longer be denied. Time reported that "eight young Palestinians managed to expose every weakness in the forces of law and in the helpless governments involved in the crisis." The PLO proved violence as a successful method, which others wanted to copy to gain worldwide attention for their causes. Moreover, the attack showed that the violence of the Middle East was no longer containable within the region, but that it had been exported to the rest of the world—"first to Western Europe, and maybe eventually even to the U.S."

Israelis and Palestinians continued their fighting on European soil. The War of Attrition, a term used to describe the deadly standoff between Egyptians and Israelis with military strikes on Israeli positions in the Sinai and attacks on Egyptians deep into Egypt itself, was now being used to describe Arab-Israeli violence that had spilled over into Europe. There were kidnappings, more skyjackings, hostage takings, and letter bombs. Assassination hits on Israelis and Arabs became commonplace in what Time called a "Deadly Battle of the Spooks," an underground warfare conducted anytime, anywhere, facelessly, and without warning, that scared the Western public and created a fear that the conflict would begin to find fertile ground in the United States. As one PLO spokesman was quoted as saying, "We don't have to occupy Tel Aviv to make our point. . . . We should fight the enemy anywhere in the world because every country bears the guilt of Palestine." Moreover, approximately six months later, reports were coming in that innocent people were getting in the way and, in at least one case, being killed. When Israeli commandos killed three PLO leaders in Beirut in early 1973, the PLO blamed U.S. intelligence for helping the Israelis. The PLO called on Arabs "to strike everywhere at American interests and embassies and kill and assassinate everyone who is American." Arabs had now been reported to be threatening the American public with terrorist violence. As Frum notes of these terrorist events, "The United States was no longer able to protect its citizens from international anarchy. And through the 1970s, international anarchy obtruded itself ever more terrifyingly into American consciousness."

By 1973, Arab governments began to demand of the Americans that they change U.S. foreign policy toward Israel. Americans came to learn that not meeting Arab demands would lead to Arab oil-producing nations enacting an oil embargo against the United States and ultimately exacting even further pressure on Washington through embargoes on Western Europe and Japan. Americans viewed this as oil blackmail. Libya's Gaddafi reportedly announced in May of that year, when he demanded 100 percent control over oil companies in his nation, that "the day will come when oil will be used as a weapon by the Arabs in self-defense." In a period of economic vulnerability, when inflation was on the rise and the dollar was falling in relation to foreign currency, a shortage of oil and a rise in oil prices were predicted to be surely devastating to an already ailing American economy, and Russian involvement with the Arabs in such a plan was already being feared. In fact, Stephen Paul Miller states in his cultural analysis of the 1970s that the Arab-enacted oil embargo was an economic equivalent of Vietnam. While Vietnam created a credibility gap, a breaking down of public belief in official reality, "[t]he embargo changed many people's sense of America's self-reliance, and the threat of another embargo would hang over America for the rest of the seventies."

The dreaded embargo did begin with the outbreak of hostilities between Egypt and Israel in the October War. The Arab leaders rallied to the support of Sadat's surprise attack on the Jewish nation and, by October 29, it was reported that all oil shipments to the United States from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Libya, and Algeria had been cut off. In early November, reports intimated that Moscow might be the real winner in the oil embargo. Americans were told that the USSR was encouraging other Arab nations to fight Israel, America's ally. Concurrently with the embargo weakening America, the Soviet Union was broadening and developing its influence with the oil-rich nations.

As the 1973 -1974 winter approached, and America, north and south, was depicted as entering the cold, dark season, it was the images and stories of American lifestyles under Arab siege that stirred ever more anger and fear of the rising "New Arab." Take, for example, the introductory paragraphs of the Time article "The Arabs' New Oil Squeeze: Dimouts, Slowdowns, Chills," which deserve to be quoted here at length:

Rushing to work last week, John Doe, American, swung his car onto the freeway—only to discover that the posted speed limit had been reduced from 60 m.p.h. to 50 m.p.h. When he stopped at a gas station for a refill, he learned that overnight the price had gone up 2¢ per gal. At his office he felt unusually cool because the thermostats had been pushed down a couple of degrees, to a brisk 68∫. Later, when he finished work and was driving home, he noticed that the lights on outdoor advertising signs had been doused. In his living room he was greeted by his children, who gleefully reported that their school would be closed for a month this winter—in order to save oil.

In the backward but wakening desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia, there was plenty of oil, and the wealth that it brought was beginning to show. Building cranes stuck their necks up everywhere in the few cities; Ferraris and Mercedes glistened in the showrooms, and the markets bulged with imported consumer goods. The national treasury was overflowing with foreign exchange, and there was talk of starting new industries to be fueled and financed by oil: petrochemicals, aluminum, steel. Indeed, Saudi Arabia was strong enough that it could afford to cut back oil production in order to make the rest of the world pay a higher price for it—in more ways than one.

Although the story is a fictionalized account that juxtaposes a deteriorating, average American life and the ostentatious, ill-deserved lifeways of the Arab desert, it presents the relationship between the United States and the Arab world as a global imaginary of an Orientalist bipolar relationship; albeit this time it gives the Arabs the upper hand and the Americans the subordinate position. It is an account that was constructed to inspire fear and ire in Americans and to cultivate the roots of an "evil" Arab character. Later images and stories of America described a man having to resort to making gasoline from wood, leaves, brush, and garbage; Christmas lights being fewer and dimmer; carillon bells at churches cut off; gasoline ration cards imagined to be in the works; town meetings being conducted by candlelight; a professor teaching class in a raccoon coat; women buying long johns; people resorting to attending shelters for heated living; children going to school in the darkness of morning, due to the alteration of time itself under the daylight savings program, and shivering at their desks; motorists waiting and fighting amongst themselves in endless lines for gasoline; an American fighter jet taking off, with the caption stating, "Will they have enough to fly?"; and graphs and maps depicting paltry oil reserves of nations dwarfed by bulging reserves of the Middle East. The Arabs, in contrast, were shown as laughing, gloating, unified, plotting, and powerful enough to push America backwards in the modern industrial period that it worked so hard to achieve. A kind of siege mentality was taking hold of America. Old routines of work, play, celebration, and joys of travel, along with the stamina to sustain new patriotic reductions in energy consumption, were in jeopardy. Western Europe and Japan were seen as faring far worse with oil and standard products manufactured with oil energy technology: Sunday driving bans were spread across the Continent; Italy put curfews on stores, restaurants, theaters, and even television stations; and a woman was reportedly trampled to death in a toilet paper stampede in Osaka. European unity with and support for the United States were shown to be faltering as nations fought to get Arab oil, a worldwide depression was forecast as possible, poor nations of the Third World allegedly could no longer continue their industrialization projects, and the Arabs reportedly contended most coldly, "Price concessions to the poor nations would amount to a kind of foreign aid—and foreign aid is the business of the [Western] industrialized world." Saudi Arabia's Prime Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani was noted as wielding "greater influence over the lives of consumers in the U.S., Europe, and Japan than some of their own elected officials." Meanwhile, the Arab nations were shown to make their own bilateral pacts with other nations, to play states against one another, to create a new sense of geopolitical order that meant Israel would have to be dismantled, to establish an international censorship of news agencies that chose to speak ill of Arab leaders, and to take advantage of international disarray for their own benefit.

The Arab reawakening, a discourse of powerful and vicious Arab resurgence based on oil production, obscene wealth, heinous acts of surprise attacks and brutal violence, and world economic dominance with the use of oil embargoes, seemed to flout the certainty and feel-good American self-image of liberal democratization, benevolent supremacy, and the Nixonian doctrine of the postwar decade that McAlister has explained for us. As noted by Newsweek, "A people once maligned as 'wogs' and nations long dismissed as backward deserts are now treated by the rest of the world with deadly seriousness." One letter to the editor of Time said, "Hail to the rulers of the world—the Arab oil kings." And the mayor of Rensselaer, Indiana, was quoted in his defense of turning off the town's 425 lights for patriotic reasons, "People thought I was a son of a b. for dousing the lights, but what do I care? If everyone in the country would make this kind of effort, we could tell the Arabs to go to hell." The political events of the early 1970s gave the American popular consciousness a new nemesis, villain, and culprit that deserved to be defeated. McAlister points out that Americans lived vicariously through the tough-guy image of the Israeli soldier who courageously stood up to counteract the Arab threat during the 1976 Entebbe rescue. The discourse of this swift, decisive, and victorious use of military force thereby became a positive answer to the Vietnam syndrome and an example to the American nation. The role of the "evil" Arabs wreaking havoc on America and the struggle to vanquish them were now poised as a plausible plot for popular film.

Throughout this decade, America felt ill at ease about the Middle East. American fears and feelings of impotence brought about sweeping generalizations that easily engulfed many non-Arab countries (Iran in particular) within a threatening global imaginary and thereby lumped vast populations, cultures, economies, landscapes, political events, and Islamic practices erroneously into an amorphous Otherness that was often symbolized by the image of the oil-rich, Islamic terrorist Arab. By the summer of 1979, another oil shock hit the world. The American policy of unending support for the Shah of Iran, our deputized policeman in the Middle East, had failed. The Shah was losing control of his economy, his modernization program, his brutal secret police (the National Organization of Information and Security, known as SAVAK), his corrupt underlings, and, ultimately, his people and his legitimacy. The Ayatollah Khomeini, living in exile in France, called for his overthrow, a turn away from secularism, and a reorientation toward Islam. Massive riots rocked Iran, and its oil fields were closed down by striking workers, who opposed the Shah and supported Khomeini. Meanwhile, OPEC members no longer restricted the price of oil among themselves: any price that could be gained by any producing nation was fair game—a practice Yergin refers to as "leapfrogging" or a "free-for-all." Price hikes were higher than the Carter administration considered reasonable. In America's time of despair, the Arabs seemingly celebrated and later even blamed us for our overuse of energy and our poor economic performance. A scramble for the available supply among purchasers ensued because the price on any given day would be worse on the morrow. Despite Saudi Arabia's disavowal of such pricing tactics, Americans once again viewed OPEC (popularly synonymous with the Arabs) as taking advantage of a bad situation. By mid-1979, President Jimmy Carter and the leaders of the industrialized nations called new price increases "unwarranted" and the situation looked as if OPEC had "the industrial world over a barrel." America, it was predicted, would have the sourest Fourth of July ever, and gas lines, frustrations, and riots would bring Americans to fisticuffs among themselves. And by October 1979, the prediction became that "consuming countries can do little but swallow further price increases and almost nothing at all to ward off the possibility of future shortages."

In the meantime, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor, announced a new cognitive map for America: "The Crescent of Crisis." This crescent of crisis was envisaged as those states that stretched along the shores of the Indian Ocean—from Turkey all the way to India—and, more frighteningly, were either close to or shared borders with the USSR. It was an area in which Moscow could make headway against Washington, and in which the Soviets had designs for the oil they would need in the future. Iran, the citadel of U.S. military and economic strength in the Middle East, was centered at the borderline of the spheres of the two world powers. Here, a new Kiplingesque "great game" was at hand: now between the United States and the USSR, and the new big prize was oil. "I'd have to be blind or Pollyannish not to recognize that there are dark clouds on the horizon," stated Brzezinski. The eventual loss of Iran was considered a great blow to the United States. It was another failure, weakness, and inability of an unsophisticated American policy to protect national interests. Time magazine brought together seven policy experts to discuss U.S. policy in the crescent of crisis, and the tone of their discussion conveyed that "the U.S. has long since lost its power to do almost anything it wanted around the world, the kind of overwhelming role it enjoyed in the aftermath of World War II." The Carter administration's attempts at brokering peace between Egypt and Israel were seen as preoccupations that squandered opportunities to foresee the fall of the Shah, and, at the same time, only united many Arab states in their drive to destroy such a peace.

Then, the American hostage crisis in Tehran of November 1979 came as a new low in the American self-image in relation to the Middle East. Although Iran is not an Arab country, the hostage crisis created another, albeit erroneous, global imaginary for Americans. This map, according to McAlister, trumped oil wealth as a symbol and lumped Arabs and Iranians into a total realm of terrorism, wherein Islam became the new signifier of the region, and an inimical "Islamic World" seemed to be the new categorical label of the Middle East that even threatened the Middle East itself. Facing this new Islamic World, America, "the mightiest power on earth[,] found itself engaged in a test of will with an unruly gang of Iranian students and an ailing zealot of 79 [Khomeini]." At issue was America's decision to grant the Shah, ill with cancer, a temporary visa for medical treatment in the United States. The new Iranian government saw this as political asylum and demanded the Shah's return to Iran for trial. If the Shah was not returned, the fifty-two captured Americans would be put on trial for espionage, with possible death sentences threatened. America, as it viewed itself, was being blackmailed for a decision looked upon as a humanitarian exercise of sovereignty. Moreover, it was a decision that upheld our ideological view that America is a haven for refugees. Under a new siege, "the most serious international crisis for the U.S. since Viet Nam," emanating from the Middle East, and lasting over 444 days, America could not seem to achieve its former experiences of triumph. During this time, American embassies in the Islamic world were attacked, leading to a reduction in personnel for reasons of security, and travel to eleven Muslim countries was discouraged. Muslims were thought to hate Americans. Americans had to endure televised pictures of Middle Easterners burning the U.S. flag and their president in effigy, blindfolding and binding their compatriots, causing emotional pain to families of the hostages, and chanting death calls and threats to their nation. With the failure in April 1980 of a rescue attempt known as Operation Eagle Claw, the president of the United States "was forced to live out his term against a televised backdrop of unending captivity and humiliation that seemed to highlight American impotence." The impotence Americans felt with respect to this global imaginary and in the face of this humiliation gave rise to a powerful desire to take revenge on the Middle East and, I might add, the "evil" Arab image, which had become convincing to them through their discourse on foreign policies.

Against this backdrop, my inquiry begins into the prejudicial portrayals of "evil" Arabs in American film. It begins with this new image of the "evil" Arabs and the Middle East of the 1970s, according to which they, along with the realizations resulting from Vietnam, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and the other notorious events of the decade, upset the place, policies, limitlessness, and strength that America had envisioned for itself in the postwar world. Our perception of their ransacking our self-confidence was an overturning of our American mythic structure as it related to our ideologies of politics, economics, and security. I shall look at those instances in which popular films, in step with this way of perceiving the Arabs in "real life," find ways to plausibly portray them wreaking such havoc through the narratives and images of the stories these films present. And unlike many films wherein good overrules evil in the end, in films of Orientalist fear the lines of victory are not so certain (The Exorcist, Rollover, and Black Sunday).

In the 1980s and 1990s, America declared a struggle against terrorism and retaliated against the global imaginaries of the Middle East, which further emphasized the ethnic imaginary of the "evil" Arabs. America under Ronald Reagan professed to stand firm on terrorism. However, with the killing of 241 U.S. Marines in a bomb attack in Beirut in 1983, it pulled out of Lebanon as a professed peacekeeping force. Furthermore, with the hijacking of TWA 847 in 1985, it, too, found itself unable to end the standoff with a decisive victory. American response to the hijacking of the Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists was different. When the hijackers surrendered the ship in exchange for safe passage, the Reagan administration used American fighter jets to force the Egyptian airliner carrying the terrorists to land in Sicily. Italian authorities took the Palestinian terrorists into custody.

In reaction to the bombing of a Berlin nightclub frequented by American soldiers, the Reagan administration bombed Libya in the name of self-defense against Libya's state-sponsored terrorism against the West. "I warned that there should be no place on Earth where terrorists can rest and train and practice their deadly skills. I meant it," Reagan told Americans in an address to the nation on April 14, 1986, to explain the attacks on Libya. However, Washington's secret deals with Iran in the Iran-Contra affair blurred the administration's hard-line, blanket approach to states that sponsored terrorism. Violence in the Middle East continued to fill U.S. news programs and newspapers throughout the 1980s and early 1990s: Beirut was now at the center of a civil war and became a battleground of destruction; Iraq and Iran were fighting a costly war and causing oil prices to soar again; and Israelis and Palestinians were clashing in the popular uprising of the Intifada. The bombing of Pan Am 103 close to the Christmas holiday of 1988 once again shattered America's sense of civilian immunity from Arab terrorism, thereby emphasizing the continuing and close threat of the "evil" Arabs.

Ultimately, the first war with Iraq (1991) during the Bush administration would convince many that America had finally kicked the Vietnam syndrome, and, according to McAlister, at the same time vanquished the experience of Tehran even if only through an intertextual use of media coverage practices. The benevolent myth that the United States stood up against tyranny over the helpless was employed in a narrative of the arrogant Arab despot (Saddam Hussein) waging war against his Arab neighbors. The administration painted a picture in which the United States had to stand up to this despot to save the Middle East and the world of nations along with the principles of honor, freedom, democracy, justice, and peace. For many, the victory in the Gulf War only proved that Vietnam and Tehran had been incidents in which America could have won if only American leadership had allowed America to win. America could now engage the worst of the world's dictators, in this case an "evil" Arab dictator, whenever and wherever, swiftly, in league with allies, and with the lowest number of casualties on its side. And yet, the "evil" Arabs continued to wreak havoc in popular films. The "evil" Arabs now undermined America in ways that were less overtly inimical, but rather made Americans question themselves in this newfound self-esteem, and lines drawn between good and evil continued to be ambiguous because the methodologies of our triumphs remained in question. The Vietnam period still haunted us, postmodernism undermined our certainty, and multiculturalism broke down metanarratives (Three Kings and Rules of Engagement).

The new, improved, and coordinated terrorist attacks of al-Qaeda on American targets at home and overseas during the Clinton period, and its sublime attacks of September 11, 2001, begat a new era of fear of the "evil" Arabs that broadened this fear to Muslims everywhere. The fears of the 1970s of Middle East violence coming to America had finally been realized: the "evil" Arabs have arrived; they live among us and are funded with the wealth of the oil economy; and they meticulously plan against us and wait patiently to commit the most heinous of crimes. Steven Emerson's exemplary description of an Islamic terrorist convention, which called for the destruction of Israel and the United States and took place in (of all places) Kansas City, aims at convincing us that the violence of the Middle East has taken root within our borders. In the United States, according to Emerson, these Arabs use our principles of democracy and liberties to plot against us. But to assure the American public that America is strong, the administration of George W. Bush has embarked on a campaign that recaptures and wields American ideologies and myths of heroism and righteousness to show that the "evil" Arabs have not won and cannot win. In the new era of "evil" Arabs, the most bizarre, yet real, images of destruction are made rational in the contextualization of narratives in which the Arabs threaten our ideological and mythic structures, but ultimately these structures must prove to be too strong for total annihilation. Through this conventional method we confront and understand the horrific events and perpetrators of September 11th (America Remembers). Despite our military retaliations, once again the clear victor, the righteousness of the American or the wickedness of the "evil" Arabs, remains to be determined.

As we can see from the above recollections of American popular political discourse since the 1970s, Americans have experienced an atmosphere of fear in their real lives pertaining to the Arabs and the Middle East. The Arabs and the Middle East did not and do not always respond to our desires as we expect them to in our political designs and schemes, i.e., our ideologies and myths. Put another way, this ambivalence of the "evil" Arabs upsets the entire binary system of our Orientalist project, thus creating a sense of Orientalist fear. And yet, this very cause of fear is why stereotype is not a good enough anchor for the prejudicial act. Homi Bhabha's work on the colonizer's use of stereotype shows that the stereotype never successfully fixes the colonized as the colonizer hopes. Stereotyping is a continual attempt to fix the Others because we sense a "lack" within ourselves of our own stable identities. It redirects attention away from us and onto them; hence we rely on the "evil" Arabs to be as they are (outside Others) because their fixed being is what we are not (our identifiable Self, our ideal ego). And so the issue at hand might not be that the Arabs are not conforming to our expectations, but rather that we ourselves are not upholding standards or are unable to achieve expectations dictated by our ideologies and myths (as per the discussion above of the 1970s, the effectiveness and righteousness of our political policies). Our self-reliant confidence, our independence from the Other, and our self-mastery are in jeopardy.

Likewise, I suggest that the films to be analyzed in the following chapters demonstrate that we are not as stable in our ideological and mythic structures as we might profess to be, and, consequently, these films frighteningly and sadomasochistically entertain us. These structures are highly fragile, easily contested, fraught with instability and contradictions, and sometimes impossibly demanding of the world. After all, as Althusser has made us aware, they are illusions of our relations to reality that are only built on allusions to reality. The "evil" Arabs, as plausible dramatis personae of outside Others, bring this to light for us. This creates for us a relationship of reliance upon the Arabs and brings them ever so dangerously inside the identity of our Self. Since, as noted by Shaheen, filmmakers stereotype the Arabs as "evil," with anxious repetition for fixation and, following Bhabha, as a cover for our own lack, this explains why we are more likely to see the first image of the illusion of the "evil" Arab rather than accept the second image. And once the second image of our lacking Self is discernible—a source of anxiety—the perceptual slide, or the oscillating attention, between the two images is very slippery, making a fixation on the first image an ameliorative device for acknowledgment of the second.

Jack Shaheen has shown us an array of films that produce anti-Arab stereotypes, which emphasize Hollywood's racist tendencies toward the Arabs. Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar have coordinated the identification of Orientalist films as a genre to emphasize Western fascination with the East. Furthermore, Kaja Silverman has informed us that film's narrative can lure us in through ideology and make us take subjective stances. The ideology may be challenged, but many times the ideological structure is revalidated in the end. Continuing this line of reasoning, I suggest that we look deeply at specific films' visual tropes and narrative structures and see a hybrid genre of Orientalist fear. In the chapters to follow, I will discuss only six films. We can find cinematographic attempts to depict the ethnic imaginary of Arabs and the global imaginary of the Middle East in Orientalist binary tropes and stereotypes, but in these films the Arabs and their landscapes are written about and depicted in ways so as to refuse such discipline. Instead, the Arabs go on the offensive to attack not only Orientalist structures but also other American ideological and mythic structures of national Self. The heroes' victories over the Arabs are as ambiguous as the Arabs' adherence to the Orientalist binary binds. The ideological and mythic structures are threatened and placed in jeopardy, and in the end they never fully recover their previously perceived assuredness. In the meantime, the American viewing audience senses exposure of its cultural truths and self-sufficiency and is left with feelings of anxiety, but also it experiences a sadomasochistically entertaining visual and narrative ride. Like the 1980s genre of slasher films, in which the perpetrator disappears after his showdown with the hero/heroine, allowing the villain to lurk on the fringes and providing a period for him to regain his strength to come again in a sequel, the films of Orientalist fear provide no clear defeat of the Arabs, or at least no clear victory for the Americans, and keep the "evil" Arabs as recurring characters and continual objects of the prejudicial act. The absence of a decisive resolution most likely produces a shared fear in an American audience, and thereby supports prejudicial perceptions of the "evil" Arabs with an impression of universality—in our depictions of them and acceptance of such depictions.

While not all audience members may read these films in the same way, it should be acknowledged that the ideological and mythic structures are known and shared among Americans through cultural inculcation. Therefore, I agree with Francesco Casetti's belief that films prefigure and presuppose their audiences. Through their narratives and visual tropes we can discern ideologies and myths at work and, therefore, an implied viewer or the one to be interpellated. Films rely on the audience to be an interlocutor, or one with a competence of intertextual application and a repertoire of knowledge that can weave symbols and narratives to restore the richness underlying production and reception. The audience participates in the film by recognizing itself therein, or, as Althusser points out, by answering to being "hailed." The structural usages of Orientalism and other American ideologies and myths in this hybrid genre interpellate an audience, which I shall call an "Orientalist audience."

The Orientalist audience that I define in this book is an American audience, and oftentimes I refer to this audience with "our," "we," or "us." This requires two points of clarification regarding inclusion. First of all, I include in this audience all American viewers of these films that have been culturally wired with, or interpellated through, the discourses of American politics, ideologies, myths, Orientalism, and popular culture—and this even includes those of us scholarly trained in Near East Studies. I do not intend to outwardly call us "racist" by this means, but rather wish to enlighten all of us to our human proclivities, weaknesses, and frailties in making sense of the world and of Others. As human beings we are all susceptible to and capable of committing the prejudicial act: discriminating against, scapegoating, or hating Others. When watching these films, particular audience members may discern and reject the prejudicial act put forth on the screen, I hope more often than not. This may momentarily dismiss them from inclusion, making them Althusser's one out of ten not answering to the hail. Nevertheless, we all have been inculcated through our cultural ways of seeing, and so we are susceptible to lapses of clinging to these realms of "truth" for meaningful order when we do not understand or cannot comprehend the world. The chaotic and emotional experiences of September 11, 2001, may have been such a time. Therefore, I mean to encourage a self-assessment of our thoughts and actions when seeing and representing Others and to bring forth the continual self-evaluating questions of "Am I being prejudiced? Was that racist?" whenever we make or are confronted by our representations of the Middle East, the Arabs, and their cultures. To see and acknowledge our Orientalist fear and to analyze these films in this way can be instructive. Not only does such analysis provide an opportunity to flesh out the second image of the illusion, but it can make us more sophisticated in our viewing and understanding of a variety of cultural performances that profess to represent the Arabs for us. It should make us more aware of the prejudicial act as it pertains to our representations of Arabs and help in ending this pernicious habit.

Second, by defining an American Orientalist audience I do not exclude my readers of other national identities. I believe that this book can help these readers understand American films, some of our ideological and mythic structures, and our thought processes better. In the meantime, I encourage them to apply similar methodologies to their own representations of Others and to create their own self-assessments.

My methodology is clear in the following chapters. First, I choose a limited number of films so that I may devote each chapter to the scrutiny and discussion of one film. Readers should be aware that my choice of films is not based on the "quality" of the film as reflected through critical acclaim, box office success, the film studio's reputation, budget, or the celebrity of its stars, producers, and directors. I choose films that were made, released, and viewed in the period between the 1970s and the millennium years, that use Arab characters as villains, and that provide excellent examples of "evil" Arabs attacking American ideologies and myths. Second, I introduce each chapter by selecting and describing a scene that I feel captures the essence of Orientalist fear in the film. Third, I identify those ideologies and myths that the film narrative concentrates on and that the "evil" Arabs will jeopardize. From there, I tackle the film, analyzing the narrative and visual tropes with appropriate scholarly theories that help make sense of the film as a narrative of threat and exposing the prejudicial act. Readers will note that my analyses refrain from stars' and directors' experiences, behind-the-scenes events, and in-depth celebrity interviews. While I acknowledge that these sources may have their place in other film studies discussions, I choose to bring Orientalist fear to light through analyses of narratives and images as seen on the screen and contextualized with scholarly theories rather than through entertainment trivia and gossip.

Additionally, I use two approaches when discussing ideologies and myths in the chapters. Both approaches cite scholars' research into ideologies and myths and follow their summarizations of the structure, but they do differ. The first approach includes scholars who create a narrative of the myths taken from the similarities that all retellings share. Most of these scholars simply summarize the myths for their readers, describing the myths in paragraph form, and cite examples of retellings as they go along in their analyses. The second approach includes scholars who create a narrative through the Proppian method: enumerating lists of functions and sorting out paradigmatic structure from syntagmatic structure. This latter approach is useful when comparing a number of retellings of a story, when trying to pinpoint exact points of deviance from the structure, when discussing a number of dramatis personae in relation to the mythic structure, and when readers are unacquainted with narrative studies. Although this Proppian approach can be instructive in the beginning chapters (Chapters 1 and 2), I do find that it can be cumbersome for readers who must slog through and remember long lists of functions for every chapter. Even the most attentive of readers are likely to fatigue. Therefore, in Chapter 3 and the following chapters, I revert to the first approach: the paragraphed summarization of a myth. However, my discussions are still structured on narrative syntagma and character paradigms, and I expect that readers will keep these ideas in mind.

I wish to further add that not all films in this book are Hollywood productions intended first for cinematic viewing. CNN's America Remembers, discussed in Chapter 6, is a case in point. Projection lives in the theaters are getting shorter, and many productions extend their viewing lives through television programming and play-on-demand technology. The age of VHS and DVD, the marketing of home theater, and the production and distribution capability of media powerhouses have blurred the lines of film being consumed first or only in the movie houses. On the other hand, news compilations and documentaries have come to mimic film art. They now can incorporate and exploit the pictorial, the dramatic, the narrative, and the moods of music just like film. They, too, have made their way into the popular display cases and libraries along with other films, can mask and market themselves as blockbuster movies with scenes more real than those boasting Hollywood special effects, and as such are edited and consumed as popular film. America Remembers's narrative employs the structures similar to and some of the same visual tropes as Hollywood film in order to make sense to and to match and titillate the aesthetic expectations of the Orientalist audience. Thus, the real events of September 11, 2001, have been reinvented to play like Hollywood film. Therefore, I choose to include America Remembers among my analyses of American popular film.

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The creation of the "evil" Arabs in American popular film relies on their characteristic confrontations with our ideologies and myths, and so the Arabs, as such a set of Others, are imagined only to exist and act in relation to our ideologies and myths. We have, in a sense, distorted the Arab image with a veneer of our own concerns and self-interests. Consequently, I declare, and am certain that my readers will come to see, that when it comes to "evil" Arabs in American popular film, we have indeed crafted our very own version of Ichthyoid Man.