I really wanted to see Argo when it came out, and I can only say that about .00001% of the movies that Hollywood makes. It had all the elements of the type of movie that interests me. It is historical. It involves our intelligence agencies. In context, its about something still critically important that most Americans know little about. And it’s a nifty little story with an (out-of-context) happy ending. Yet, one crisis and illness after another colluded in the fall to prevent us from making it to the theater to see the film. As a result, I can’t really comment on a lot of Kevin’s Lee’s hostile review of the film.
What I can say, though, is that I totally understand where he is coming from when he complains that the film begins by explaining the CIA’s history in Iran and how it led directly to the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the subsequent hostage crisis, only to turn immediately around and portray the Iranians as a hostile horde of bad guys and the CIA as an All-American All-Star team of heroes.
Still, I wonder if this worry is overwrought. Does it really turn the whole movie into bullshit, as Mr. Lee insists?
The 1953 CIA-sponsored coup that put the Shah back in power in Iran, and the subsequent build-up of SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal internal security force, are certainly black marks in our Cold War history. But it’s not a simple story where we can know that things would have turned out so much better without our meddling. By 1979, Iran had modernized to a remarkable degree, certainly by the standards of the region, and a lot of that was because of American investment. Without submitting to the Hitler-built-good-roads mentality, we can admit that there were many positive consequences for the Iranian people of both the Shah’s reign, and America’s role in sustaining it. One of the tragedies of the Iranian Revolution is that it was taken over by religious fanatics who jettisoned the good along with the bad as far as America’s influence was concerned. On the progressive side, I think there is a constant frustration that the American people are never given the proper context to understand why the Iranian government and (to a degree) the Iranian people are hostile to our country, and especially its foreign policy. The temptation is to overcompensate in the opposite direction, portraying the U.S. as the bad guy and the Iranians as the justifiably aggrieved party.
I understand the impulse, but it can suffer from the same flaws as the official narrative. Neither side has clean hands. Both sides have legitimate grievances. It sounds to me like the movie does present both ways of looking at things, although perhaps it makes the mistake of presenting two flawed views for balance instead of a view that is balanced throughout. How well it achieves all this is impossible for me to say, since I haven’t seen the movie.
What I do know is that the movie is a story about something good and effective that the government and the CIA did during a period in which all the American people saw was relentless failure. If that detracts or distracts from the overall catastrophe, it seems somewhat unavoidable. We can know that our foreign policy elites brought the revolution and hostage crisis on themselves without thinking for a moment that the hostages deserved to be held captive, or doubting for a moment that they should be rescued. We can simultaneously have disgust for the CIA’s record in Iran and be thankful that they could do something right.
The official narratives we tell ourselves (or are taught) are too often skewed in dangerous ways to cast the U.S. as blameless and continually virtuous. But the corrective to that is not create a mirror image that is reversed and just as distorted.