Ben Affleck’s Argo is, in a great Hollywood tradition,
a movie about movies more than what it is ostensibly about, which
is a based-on-fact story of international intrigue and derring-do.
Mr. Affleck directs and also plays the CIA agent Tony Mendez who
was given the job of exfiltrating six American diplomats hiding out
in the Canadian ambassador’s residence in Tehran after the invasion
of the U.S. embassy by an Iranian mob and the taking hostage of 52
of their colleagues. The better-known hostage story, which dragged
on for 14 months and ended with the inauguration of President
Reagan in January of 1981, offers little for a movie dramatization
to bid with for an American movie audience’s cheers, but those who
were sheltered for three months by the Canadians presented a more
promising scenario — not only did they put one over on the
Iranians, but they did it with a wacky stratagem worthy of
screwball comedy.
When Mr. Mendez turned up in Tehran, it was with a cover story
in which the Canadians’ “houseguests” were said to be part of a
Canadian film crew scouting locations for a science fiction
B-picture — presumably the Iranians would not have known that, as
such, its budget was unlikely to have run to foreign location
shooting — to be called Argo. The CIA had got the guy who
did the prosthetics for Planet of the Apes, John Chambers
(John Goodman), on board to form a front company, and the movie
version adds a delightfully profane Alan Arkin as the fictional
producer Lester Siegel who, as a fake himself, becomes the
spokesman for Hollywood fakery. His is the best line in the picture
when he explains to Mr. Affleck’s Tony Mendez why he was such a bad
husband and father. “It’s a bull***t business, like coal mining;
you come home to your wife and kids, and you can’t wash it
off.”
As history, Argo (the real, not the fictional movie)
makes a good thriller. Politically correct Hollywood finds it
obligatory to insert a voiceover framing device explaining that,
after thousands of years of monarchy, the Iranians found a people’s
champion named Mossadegh who was to have taken back Iran’s oil
wealth (from exploitative multinational oil companies, as we will
understand) and returned it to the Iranians until he was overthrown
by an Anglo-American sponsored coup in 1953, which installed the
corrupt Shah, Reza Pahlavi, in his stead. The Shah is then said to
have lived in opulence and luxury while — following the tyrant’s
script — “the people starved.” Thus, when we see immediately
following scenes of Iranian revolutionaries breaking into the U.S.
embassy and taking our diplomats hostage — a mixture of
dramatization and archive footage — we are well prepared to
believe the State Department official who says, “We did it to them
first.”
Nonsense. This is a familiar left-wing history which is informed
by Leninist dogma about the exploitation by Western “imperialism”
of less developed countries, updated to include the racial
dimension to the process hypothesized by the late Edward Said. Thus
when Mr. Affleck’s character approaches a Turkish official with his
account of the fake movie and the fake location scouting in the
Near and Middle East, the latter says to him with palpable contempt
in his voice, “Ah, the exotic Orient: snake charmers, magic
carpets.” To me, that line is way too obviously dragged in by the
ears from Said’s “progressive” classic, Orientalism, first
published only a year earlier and read mainly in Western academic
circles, to ring true in this context. Besides, the childish
mythology being peddled by Argo has nothing to do with the
Arabian Nights but is obviously stamped, like everything else about
the fictional as about the real movie, “Made in America.”
There is a certain irony about the fact that the movie’s
simplistic left-wing politics is part of a more general effort on
the part of the film to portray Americans as simplistic right-wing
ignoramuses, naive and bumbling in their interactions with the
Third World — which is not to say that some of us weren’t. Another
part of the historical context that Argo wants to show us
comes in snippets of contemporary TV interviews with ordinary
Americans that look as if they’re genuine and express robust and
bloodthirsty views as to what they would like to do to Khomeini. We
are also given a clip from a period interview of the Ayatollah
himself by Mike Wallace in which the latter, almost as innocent as
TV’s amateur gunboat diplomatists, asks the imam (with an
elaborately polite “forgive me: his words, not mine”) what he
thinks of Anwar Sadat’s having described him as “a lunatic.” The
lunatic’s reply is not recorded.
One of the everyman TV interviewees compares himself to the man
in Network (he remembers the name of the movie but not the
actor or his character) who says he’s “mad as hell” and “not going
to take it anymore.” I imagine that this is to remind us of the
extent to which the movies have always provided us with a context
for our diplomatic interactions with the rest of the world. At one
point Mr. Arkin’s Lester Siegel says of the hostage crisis: “John
Wayne’s in the ground six months and this is what’s left of
America.” One supposes that he is meant to be speaking only half in
jest. At any rate, he provides us with a reminder of the older kind
of Hollywood portrait of American power, and the more up-to-date
filmmakers may even be indulging themselves in a note of genuine
regret at its passing — in reality well in advance of John
Wayne’s.
But the naïveté there is Hollywood’s and not America’s. It’s
hard to escape the impression that this is in order to make the
point that in 1979 Americans had not yet realized the extent to
which they had lost standing in the world. They are living in a
dream world, but one not all that different from the real world of
1953, when the global reach and prestige of American power was such
as to swat away troublesome foreigners the way Mossadegh was
swatted away. That, the decline of American power in the world in
the quarter century between the overthrow of Mossadegh and the
Iranian Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah is the real
context — and subtext — of the film, and not the left-wing
caricature.
The authority we once exercised over and the discipline we could
once impose on other countries — for their own good as much as
ours — was gone by the late 1970s, which is why the hostage-takers
were emboldened to do what they did. Moreover, it was at least as
much respect for Ronald Reagan’s promise to re-assert American
might in the world as it was the revolutionaries’ animus against
Jimmy Carter that made them release their hostages when they did.
That’s what makes putting the real-life Jimmy, taking credit for
the rescue, into the movie in voiceover at the very end strike such
a false note. Having established the tragi-comical nature of the
whole affair for the previous two hours, it is a little late for
Mr. Affleck and his good friend Mr. Carter to try to strike the
heroic pose at this point. Those of us who lived through the period
will remember which view of the miserable business is the more
true-to-life.
One scene is crucial to our understanding not just of the film
but to what it stands for in the history of American relations with
the rest of the world. In real life, the operation seems to have
remained undetected by the Iranians, but Mr. Affleck, working from
a script by Chris Terrio, interposes various fictional obstacles to
its success in order to create some suspense. One involves a
confrontation between the six would-be escapers (plus their CIA
escort) and a suspicious paramilitary guard at the airport who
delays their departure by raising questions about the fake film,
though he doesn’t know it’s a fake. At this point, the
Farsi-speaking diplomat who had seemed to be the most frightened
and pessimistic of the Americans — and the most skeptical about
the whole improbable CIA cover story — whips out the cartoon
storyboards of the fictional Argo and enthusiastically
relates its preposterous story, complete with the sort of sound
effects a ten-year-old might supply, to the rapt revolutionary.
It’s not unwarranted for the movie business to think that
American popular culture has conquered the world where American
military and diplomatic power has failed, but I wonder what the
world will think of its bargain on this showing? The scene in which
Lester Siegel and John Chambers go through a pile of scripts
looking for one just bad enough to seem plausible is reminiscent of
the comparable scene in The Producers where Zero Mostel
and Gene Wilder as the eponymous producers, Max Bialystock and
Leopold Bloom, do the same with equally fraudulent intentions. As
in that film, we are meant to sympathize with the fraud. The
difference is that The Producers depended on the
(mistaken) expectation of the audience’s good taste in rejecting
the awful Springtime for Hitler, whereas now we believe
that the artistic nullity of this extraterrestrial fantasy is
exactly what the international audience wants and can’t get enough
of. I wonder if they’ll appreciate being treated as just like
American teenagers any more than they did being seen by those
old-timey Yanks as exotic orientals?
All this is not to say that the tale Argo has to tell
is not exciting and gripping stuff, and even patriotic in an
old-fashioned way. For all the hedging about our allegedly imperial
past (and present), there is never any suggestion that we should
not root for our guys to pull off their ruse and escape from the
ruthless and bloodthirsty foreigners. In this way the real
Argo is also a tribute to the fictional Argo.
Looking at the world in simplistic, black-and-white terms is what
Hollywood does and, therefore, it is what the success of America’s
popular culture is built on. This makes America’s diplomatic
history, as well as the left-wing reaction to it which the film
dutifully records, more understandable. Yet another framing device
has Tony Mendez estranged at the beginning from his wife and son —
the boy’s enthusiasm for Planet of the Apes is what gives
him the idea for the subterfuge — and reunited with them at the
end. Why? I think because the belated emphasis on home and its
reassuring comforts helps point the contrast with the big scary
world in which the U.S., as many of us first realized in 1979-80,
cannot throw its weight around as it once did. Even Ben Affleck can
be at least a little sorry about that.
