Whose Narrative Is it Anyway?

Returning to the idea of the danger of a single story

On Friday evening I watched Argo for the first time. (Yes, I am nearly always late to the party with popular movies for some reason.) Before I continue, I think it was a great film: tense, exciting, well-executed, and not to mention nominated for seven Oscars. But it did get me thinking about the Americanisation of certain narratives. Hollywood is such a globally dominant cultural force which allows the US to paint its own image for everyone to see – all the time. And usually Hollywood movies are about Americans. The situation is improving, but what I've noticed in so many movies is that even the most multi-faceted subject matter is often filtered through the perspective of a white (usually male) protagonist. But what happens when they involve a more international subject matter?

Argo, as its opening sequence outlines, is based on the true story of the extraction of six American embassy workers from anti-American protestors in a post-revolutionary Iran in 1979. This revolution was a result of 25 years of building poverty, destitution and political tension. In 1953, a CIA-orchestrated coup overthrew democratically-elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. This was an oil-wealth-motivated move rooted in Britain and the USA’s greed for control over international oil economies. The CIA restored power to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. The shah ruled as a dictator for 25 years, creating an oil-led boom in inflation and concerns about Iranian democracy, human rights, and economic disparity and inequality. From even a very basic understanding of the events between 1953 and 1979, then, most people can probably understand why the Iranian people demanded change, why anti-American sentiment had built, and why drastic and violent measures were seen as the only feasible way to achieve this change.

Two men protesting. The banner behind them reads: "Long live anti-imperialism and democratic forces".

The trouble with Argo, I thought, is that it had such potential to display a balanced account of the conflict – a conflict where both sides acted violently. But the film, as expected, privileged the Americans and indeed filtered events through its white male protagonist. The only characters with back stories, shown with families, painted in a sympathetic light, even just with names for the most part, were the Americans. They were given their own stories. In contrast, for the majority of the film, Iranians were depicted as an angry, dangerous and threatening mass. I don’t doubt for a second that this was how they made the American characters feel, that the risk to their lives was immediate and terrifying. But where was the depiction of sympathetic Iranian characters with families and backstories, whose lives and livelihoods had continuously been destroyed and threatened by the US-initiated coup and dictatorship? In the film, anti-American sentiment was evil and violent, something directly threatening to sympathetically-portrayed individuals. In reality, though perhaps played out in overly-violent terms, this sentiment is understandable, especially given the country’s suffering at the hands of the US-instigated dictatorship. Once again, America painted itself as the hero of an international conflict that it was responsible for (see also: nearly any Hollywood film involving depictions of the Vietnam War).

This film was ‘based on a true story’, yes. But with events as complex as these, could we not be inclined to believe that there is more than one true story to be had, if not a multitude? Aside from the artistic license that ‘based on’ allows for, the idea of a story is quite subjective in itself. As I discovered as I watched, this was the American story. Could they have created room for the Iranian side of events? Possibly. But this may have had to come at the price of the characterisation of one of the Americans, or even the dignity of the US’s image in general (god forbid!).

Again, I return to the quote I love from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s brilliant TED talk, ‘The Danger of a Single Story’: ‘Stories matter ... Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize’. I have become suspicious, then, of stories that are used to empower the already-empowered, stories which by default dispossess and malign the disempowered. By privileging the American narrative of events, Argo depicts the Iranian people as a dehumanised angry mass, further feeding an already-dominant narrative of xenophobia and Islamophobia. And this is the danger of a single story. When we tell a ‘true story’, whose story are we telling? Whose humanity are we privileging at the expense of another's?

This all got me thinking more generally about the nature of truth, and the nature of stories. When we see that something is a ‘true story’, we often conflate that with it being objective truth. But is there a difference between true stories and the truth? A story, by definition, is a narrative; it is constructed. We are inclined to piece everything we see together as a story; our language and our internal monologue is the narrator of our own life’s story. But our stories, our version of a particular event, might be very different from someone else’s, even if they experienced the same thing at the same time. Are films and filmmakers, consciously or subconsciously, leveraging our tendency to take true stories for granted as objective truth when they display this disclaimer at the start of a movie? ‘Based on a true story’ lays claim to the notions of ‘this is what happened’ and ‘this is fact’. But films have to be spectacular; reality often isn’t. The claim to a true story holds a power that makes people feel awestruck by the events that are then depicted; it exerts an influence over the film's reception from then on, no matter how divorced from reality it might actually be.

Perhaps what should be offered at the start of films such as this is: ‘This film is based on some events that happened, but may have a subjective bias, neglect certain groups’ experience of such events, and has been artistically meddled with to make it more gripping and narrative-driven for a cinematic audience’. But that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.