How foreign movies portray America

However closely Egyptians watched Rice’s visit, many of them were, at the time, crowding into movie theaters to see her in a much more compromised position: belly-dancing. In The Night Baghdad Fell, a farce with surprisingly complicated geo-political and even Freudian overtones, a handful of Egyptian men struggle with feelings of emasculation and paranoia brought on by the American invasion of Iraq, which they fear will soon be repeated in Egypt (the tagline asks, “What If You Were Next?”). The movie, controversial in Egypt, is probably not on its own an especially telling barometer of global, or even Egyptian, popular perceptions of America. But it is part of the vast and diverse history of foreign films that prominently feature the U.S. and its people, one with surprisingly consistent themes and portrayals…

The film’s plot turns are less funny. The schoolteacher, reading about the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, fears his daughter will be raped by U.S. soldiers. When the Americans finally invade Egypt near the movie’s end, one Egyptian who goes to greet them is shot dead. “The problem is not only that Egyptian men are impotent, but that they are feminized: American dominance is translated on the screen into sexual dominance of Arab men (this is not hinted at; it’s quite explicit),” a feminist Arab blogger wrote at the time. “In one key scene in the film, at a moment of frustration and defeat, the main character shows them that now that they have failed in inventing a weapon, they can only go on their knees in front of the invading Americans, raise their hands, and say in English: ‘Please, do not f— me.'”

American dominance is seen as so threatening, so pervasive, and so smothering that it takes on, in The Night Baghdad Fell, am explicitly sexual quality that affects the Egyptian men (not the women, you’ll notice) personally. “The feeling of impotence in regards to the Americans is a common feeling,” an Egyptian columnist told the Post, which noted that similar themes of fear and unease toward the U.S. have been common in post-Iraq-invasion Egyptian popular culture, but also that a number of Egyptians criticize these as “sophomoric” efforts to blame Egyptian problems on outsiders.