Rewriting History in Hollywood

I happened to see the movie Argo last night. It was enjoyable, and it purported to tell the story of how six Americans who had worked at the embassy in Teheran were spirited out of Iran after the Iranian government sent mobs to overrun the embassy and take the diplomats hostage. That is something that actually happened. Even the cover story used by the CIA operative to get the people out was factual. Many of the details, however, were dramatized to make for a better movie. That's fine and understandable.

What troubled me, however, was the first few minutes of the movie in which the 1979 uprising against the Shah was explained. If one watched the movie without knowing the facts, one would come away from it thinking that the Islamist takeover in Iran was just a reaction to CIA activity that happened in 1952 and 1953, some 26 years earlier. It was, to say the least, a mistake of history. Even worse, it did two things that Hollywood seems always to do: 1) it made it a story about America, and 2) it made us the heavy. In Teheran in 1979, neither of these was true. In 1979, the Shah had ruled for decades and decades. His rule was autocratic and severe. Opponents were not tolerated. There was no outlet for real dissent or opposition to his policies. The one area which the Shah could not control was religion. The Shah was trying to Westernize Iran, and the conservative Islamic elements in the country were strongly opposed to this. In 1979, all of the opposition coalesced around the core religious opposition. It started a tidal wave of an uprising that washed away the Shah. It had about as much to do with CIA activity 26 years earlier as Obama's recent re-election had to do with the Iran-contra mess of 1986 (also 26 years earlier). America was then demonized for two simple reasons: we had supported the Shah for years, and we were the symbol of the Westernization that the Khomeini forces were trying to prevent.

The sad thing is that there will now be millions of people who get their "facts" from the movie. It makes me wonder if it is worth going to see "Lincoln"; perhaps I will find out that Lincoln was actually a slave owner. After all, it is Hollywood.