Hollywood studios looking for a new brand of "bad guy" for their films are grappling with the dilemma of portraying Islamic terrorists as "enemy number one" without perpetuating offensive stereotypes.
"The hero and the villain is a black-and-white kind of situation and Hollywood is going to have to go through some acrobatics to try to figure out how to continue to do that and be sensitive," said Leo Braudy, professor of English and film history at the University of Southern California.
Continuing a policy in place since the 1991 Gulf War, "Hollywood will probably stay away from the stereotyping of Muslims for fear of offending pressure groups, because that gives them negative publicity," argued Jonathan Kuntz, a member of the Film and Television faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Fifty years ago, after the attack on Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japan, Americans had little trouble accepting the stereotype of the "Japanese enemy" adopted by Hollywood.
But America's diversity of cultures and ethnicities make such stereotyping anathema to current filmmaking.
Since Washington and New York were attacked Sept. 11 by terrorists thought to be linked to Islamist militant Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, there has been a passionate defense of American Muslims, resisting their metamorphosis into scapegoats for the horrific attacks.
"There might be a film or two with the Taliban as the villains but certainly it is not going to became a regular genre like during World War II when we had Nazis as the bad guys in so many films," opined Kuntz.
And as Hollywood generally refrains from including references to real villains in its productions, "I don't expect we are going to have a lot of films about Osama bin Laden as we didn't have ten years of films about bad people like Saddam Hussein," Kuntz said.
"Partly, because I don't know how colorful or how interesting a villain he can really be cinematically," he added.
Miramax Films, a Walt Disney company, which last July bought the rights to "Crisis Four," a novel by British author Andy McNab chronicling bin Laden's plans to blow up the White House, will tinker with the script to eliminate all references to the Saudi-born militant.
"We are reviewing the material in light of the recent tragedy and ongoing world events and right now the plotline of Osama bin Laden blowing up the White House will not be included in the film," Miramax spokesman Matthew Hiltzik said in a statement.
Upcoming Hollywood blockbusters will no doubt feature "individual megalomaniacs ... not necessarily connected to any particular ethnic group," Braudy said, noting the longtime entertainment industry strategy to avoid offending any potential ticket buyers.
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