Open Collections

Christensen, Alexander C.

University of British Columbia

Kamistan, Qurac, and Abuddin mark just three of the innumerable fictional Middle Eastern countries that proliferate American media works, but why exactly have these nonexistent places become such inexplicable fixtures in Hollywood cinema, television, comic books, and video games? This thesis explores three of these fictitious nations—Aladdin’s (1992) Kingdom of Agrabah; Dune’s (2021) desert planet Arrakis, scenes for which were filmed in Jordan; and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s (2019) Urzikstan—to begin to account for this phenomenon. These case studies represent three prevalent mediums and styles for imagining the Middle East: the magical ancient Middle East in animation; desert planets that proliferate science fiction; and the contemporary war-torn Middle East in military-themed video games. Each setting has been constructed from the “standardized molds” Edward Said details in Orientalism (26), bestowing each with familiar archetypes, stereotypes, and references that Western spectators identify. This mold, in turn, serves as a shorthand that assists with the spectators’ reading or understanding the milieux. Because the role that imagination and virtuality play in constructing these fictional Middle Easts, the thesis reads each of the case studies as Baudrillardian simulacra, copies without originals, each representing single installments in longer series of similar representations (the antiquated Middle East with genies, treasure, and magic carpets; the Middle East as the Cold War’s Third World, home to powerful resources and caught between competing empires; the Middle East as a site of instability and conflict). Plausibility and pleasure function as two throughlines that guide the paper. Plausibility relates to how the texts construct their milieux, operating within the standardized molds and drawing on familiar signs to plausibly convey their Middle Easternness to spectators. These milieux construct both shared and unique pleasures, paramount of which is a sense of Western authority over these virtual Middle Easts, which are created by, influenced by, and ultimately controlled by Western protagonists. Through these spaces, Western institutions create their own virtual Middle Easts to explore, manage, and liberate, unburdened by real-world contexts and contradictions.

Text

2022-08-09

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/82307

Cinema and Media Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/