The film Argo won an Oscar in this year’s US Academy Awards and
it was no coincidence that the US president’s wife, Michelle Obama, announced
it as the best picture winner. Below is a review of the film which comes from A
World to Win News Service, 14 January 2012.
The story is about six members of the American embassy crew in Tehran
who manage to escape out the embassy back door as the students overrun it. They
end up taking shelter in the Canadian ambassador's residence. The rest of the
film is about the plan to get them safely out of the country, cooked up and
carried out by the CIA agent Tony Mendez (played by Ben Affleck), an expert in
what he calls "exfiltration".
After rejecting his superiors' conventional and fatally flawed ideas for
smuggling them out clandestinely, and watching the film Battle for the
Planet of the Apes with his son, Mendez finally comes up with a stratagem.
The six will be given false Canadian passports and leave Iran via the Tehran
airport with a cover story that might work just because it's too insane to seem
invented. They are to pose as film makers now leaving after having come to Iran
just a few days earlier to look for locations to shoot a (fake) science fiction
film called Argo. The US State Department gives the go-ahead.
The drama begins to peak when they try to go through passport control at
the airport. After passing through two checkpoints, at the final one they come
across a Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guard) who doubts their story and goes so far
as to call the fake studio in California to verify it. Then things get really
rough.
Argo claims to be "based on a true declassified story". However,
as many commentators have pointed out, referring to the real-life Mendez's book
about what happened, some key scenes, especially those that add excitement,
never really took place.
Instead, the film seems to deliberately use the added details to rewrite
the whole history of the event. Let's put it this way: this film tries to
rewrite history according to the way the CIA would like everyone to see it.
The film fails to give a real picture of the feeling and mood of the
masses of Iranian people after the 1979 revolution when the fleeing Shah was
granted refuge by the U.S.
A British-US coup against elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in
August 1953 installed the Shah as a client of US imperialism. It caused a
tremendous amount of misery and suffering for the Iranian people. The US kept
the brutal regime of the Shah in power for another 25 years.
The November 1979 embassy siege that followed the Shah’s ousting is a
complicated issue. The people were outraged by what the US had done to Iran.
Under the Shah and his torturers, the economy and society were increasingly
reorganized in the interests of American and other imperialist capital. They
were right to be angry at the US and its nest of spies and operatives at the
embassy that played a key role in America's grip on the country.
The Islamic regime that took the control of the Iranian people’s revolution
was never the symbol of the Iranian revolution but on the contrary the symbol
of betrayal of the revolution. The decades since have seen repeated outbreaks
of struggle against the regime. Argo treats the regime and the people as
indistinguishable. The people's anger at the US is portrayed as religious
fanaticism or just following the regime.
In fact the film was loaded with artificial and unreal scenes, not only
in its dramatic situations but even worse when it comes to dealing with
Iranians. The problem arises from what the film implicitly says about the
Iranian people. Their blind fanaticism is both the main plot device and, in a
way, the film's message.
At one point in the film when Mendez is told that the whole operation is
cancelled so as not to interfere with a military operation to rescue the
hostages, he forces his superiors to regain the authorization for the mission.
Some refer to this point to show that the position of the film generally is one
of opposition to military solutions. And some argue that this is why Affleck
and Clooney, who opposed the invasion of Iraq, made this film: to put forward a
"soft power" non-violent solution to the conflict between the Islamic
Republic and the US. The film could be understood as saying the CIA was heavy-handed
when it overthrew Mossadegh, with bad long term results for the U.S., and
clever with good results in getting the six embassy staffers out.
Most of all, the film reverses right and wrong. The Islamic Republic is
a reactionary regime that needs to be overthrown by the Iranian people, but the
US's opposition to that regime is based on the same economic and political
interests behind engineering the overthrow of Mossadegh and its decades-long
support for the Shah, not to mention the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and
countless other outrages before and since.
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