(Mint Press) – The runaway Hollywood hit Argo brought in $206 million in ticket sales worldwide and $129 million from the U.S., winning the Oscar for Best Picture and two other awards Sunday. The popular film depicting the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis garnered a bevy of positive press in 2012, at a time when U.S. Iranian relations sank to a low point amid economic sanctions and staunch U.S. opposition to any Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Argo shows the clever plot to give six U.S. embassy workers forged Canadian identities in order to sneak them out of the country during the Iranian hostage crisis. The U.S. embassy in Tehran was seized by the Revolutionary Guard and radical student groups during the early stages of the revolution.
The U.S. drew the ire of Iranian protesters because of Washington’s historical support for despots, like the Shah, and because of subversive CIA plots aimed at displacing any Iranian leader unfriendly to U.S. interests.
Mohammad Mossadeq, the democratically-elected Iranian prime minister, was overthrown in a 1953 coup orchestrated by the CIA and British MI6 after the leader threatened to nationalize the vast oil reserves in Iran.
For many Iranians, Argo offers a jingoistic, inaccurate narrative that portrays the Iranian people as uniformly belligerent, hostile and even barbaric.
“Did you like Iranians when you watched that movie? What kind of image do you have? They didn’t make this movie to show the truth. They wanted to give a negative image of Iranians. When I saw it, I became angry,” said Miranda Kadzhodayan, an Iranian American, in an interview with Mint Press News.
“They had some good original footage, but the other images from the bazaar — the way they were looking at them, the bulging eyes, people banging on windows, it was unbelievable. It reminded me of the movie 300,” added Kadzhodayan, a Minneapolis, Minn. resident who immigrated to the U.S. in 1997.
Like many Iranians, Kadzhodayan lived through the 1979 revolution and remembers the events leading to the overthrow of the Shah.
“Why, when they make movies, can’t they be honest? Why can’t they separate people from the government? It’s like someone coming to the U.S. and basing the opinion of Americans on George W. Bush,” added Kadzhodayan.
Such images are problematic when bellicose rhetoric escalates the possibility of war between the U.S. and Iran.
President Obama views any Iranian nuclear program as a threat to regional security. He has expressed opposition publicly, including at a speech in September 2012 at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
A nuclear armed Iran “is not a challenge that can be contained,” Obama said. He added that the Iranian nuclear program “threatens the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations and the stability of the global economy.”
“Iranians are so friendly, they don’t do these things. There was one message behind the film, ‘hate Iranians.’ If we bomb Iran, they can justify it by saying that Iranians are terrorists that can tear the U.S. apart. This is wrong,” Kadzhodayan said.