ENTERTAINMENT
MUSE MAGAZINE
Being Middle Eastern is weird because a lot of the time, when a character is “Middle Eastern” they’ll simply cast an actor with brown hair and brown eyes and give them an ethnic-sounding name (see: Zosia Mamet in The Flight Attendant), or they’re a hard-working immigrant model minority, or they’re explicitly a terrorist, or an arms dealer, or a warlord, or someone who refuses to conform to the strict laws of the Geneva Conventions. P e o p l e have long lamented the unfortunate stereotypes M i d d l e Easter n people get saddled with in the media. In trying to dismantle this ongoing narrative, a handful of shows and films have gone out of their way to prove that the Middle Eastern characters they portray don’t fit into the prescribed boxes Hollywood and society expects of us: look, I can prove to you that I’m in fact, not a terrorist. But rarely do we see individuals of Middle Eastern descent portrayed outside of
the didactic storylines aimed at demonstrating that the showrunner isn’t racist, rather than seeing these characters navigate problems unencumbered by prejudice. Instead, we’ve become accustomed to seeing characters tackling the traumas of racism. In the few instances where this isn’t the case, where characters’ ethnicity is denoted merely by a non-white sounding name or vague ambiguity achieved by too much spray tan, the actual cultural nuances that would typically govern someone’s behaviour are lost altogether. It isn’t that their culture is an afterthought to the characters’ g r o w i n g problems, but rather that it isn’t a thought at all.
ngt’s mis hi
32
JAN 2021 - APRIL 2021
so m e t
ome s g n i t s
g in
’s mis g n s hi
Yes, I find that many Middle Eastern people and I share similar experiences that transcend cultural specificities, but these similarities aren’t the ones being portrayed on screen. There’s an absence of of truth and understanding, and it doesn’t seem like anyone’s interested in remedying this. I think that this bothered me at a baseline level, nagging gently,
