And the Oscar for the Best Propaganda Film Goes to – Argo!

That Hollywood is swayed by the CIA was confirmed once again on the Oscars night when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave a number of awards including best picture to Argo.

A number of critics have raised questions on the CIA-Hollywood liaision and “embedded” film-making that it implies. “Argo” and “Zero Dark Thirty” are only latest among the movies in which CIA has worked closely with Hollywood.

With First Lady Michelle Obama presenting the best film award, one could imagine how close Hollywood is to the US government. This closeness not only penetrates Hollywood, through which it infiltrates millions of minds, but also acts as a shield to protect the CIA against any possible scrutiny. The winner of the best picture -- “Argo” -- shows that America can spend millions of dollars to feed into the culture of self-congratulation that it is so obsessed with.

Though apparently serving American jingoism was the main agenda on the night of the Oscars, it was not the only one. The host for the night, Seth MacFarlane, made sure that the “white man's gaze” was also given its due credit. He opened the night with a song titled “We Saw Your Boobs” -- a song (packaged with sexual appeal and humour) meant to shame and dehumanize women in Hollywood (or at workplace.)

In “Seth MacFarlane and the Oscars' hostile, ugly, sexist night” for The New Yorker, Amy Davidson wrote the following:

“We Saw Your Boobs” was as a song-and-dance routine in which MacFarlane and some grinning guys named actresses in the audience and the movies in which their breasts were visible. That’s about it. What made it worse was that most of the movies mentioned, if not all (“Gia”), were pretty great—“Silkwood,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Monster’s Ball,” “Monster,” “The Accused,” “Iris”—and not exactly teen-exploitation pictures. The women were not showing their bodies to amuse Seth MacFarlane but, rather, to do their job. Or did they just think they were doing serious work? You girls think you’re making art, the Academy, through MacFarlane, seemed to say, but all we—and the “we” was resolutely male—really see is that we got you to undress. The joke’s on you.

Margaret Lyons in “Why Seth MacFarlane's Misogyny Matters” for vulture.com said --

“Seth MacFarlane made a whole bunch of sexist, reductive jokes at the Oscars last night. It's frustrating enough to know that 77 percent of Academy voters are male. Or to watch 30 men and 9 women collect awards last night. But MacFarlane's boob song, the needless sexualization of a little girl, and the relentless commentary about how women look reinforced, over and over, that women somehow don't belong. They matter only insofar as they are beautiful or naked, or preferably both. This wasn't an awards ceremony so much as a black-tie celebration of the straight white male gaze.”

The Oscar-winning “Argo,” directed by the well-known actor Ben Affleck, is loosely based on the rescue mission in which the CIA set up a fake movie production to rescue six American diplomats stranded in Iran as a result of Iranian revolutionaries seizing the US embassy in 1979. The plan involved having the six diplomats play a part of the fake movie crew in order to escape Iran. The makers of the film still might not be over their Oscar win hangover, but the legitimacy of the story the movie tells has been questioned by several critics.

“If nothing else, "Argo" is an exercise in American exceptionalism - perhaps the most dangerous fiction that permeates our entire society and sense of identity.  It reinvents history in order to mine a tale of triumph from an unmitigated defeat.  The hostage crisis, which lasted 444 days and destroyed an American presidency, was a failure and an embarrassment for Americans.  The United States government and media has spent the last three decades tirelessly exacting revenge on Iran for what happened.

Kevin B. Lees says,

“Perhaps my disgust wouldn’t be as intense if it weren’t for the potentially great film suggested by Argo’s opening sequence: a history of pre-revolutionary Iran told through eye-catching storyboards. The sequence gives a compelling (if sensationalized) account of how the CIA’s meddling with Iran's government over three decades led to a corrupt and oppressive regime, eventually inciting the 1979 revolution. The sequence even humanizes the Iranian people as victims of these abuses. This opening may very well be the reason why critics have given the film credit for being insightful and progressive—because nothing that follows comes close, and the rest of the movie actually undoes what this opening achieves.”

Robert Scheer for Huffingtonpost.com wrote:,

“This is the movie season to consider the CIA as a benign force, occasionally stumbling but in the end, driven by good intentions. The example of Iran, where the Argo caper is set, is instructive of the absurdity of that view. Iran for the past half century has been ravaged precisely by such CIA antics. To its credit, Argo acknowledges, in its opening minutes, that the U.S. government overthrew the last secular democratic leader of Iran and brought the despotic shah to power, and in his aftermath, the religious madness of the ayatollahs. But it is a point soon forgotten, as the film goes on to reveal an Iran populated by inhabitants so universally deranged that their dialogues in Farsi are not even worthy of subtitle translation.”

Jimmy Carter, the US president during the Iran hostage crisis, had given the major credit of the success of the rescue mission to the Canadian embassy and in particular, to the then Canadian Ambassador to Iran, Ken Taylor. “Argo” has underrated Canada's involvement in the rescue mission, and overstated the role of Tony Mendez (the CIA agent played by Ben Affleck). Though the Canadian ambassador's role is underrated in the movie, he is portrayed as somebody willing to stick his neck out to save the six Americans. Yet another instance of American narcissism.

The nail-biting and raising-your-pulse-rate scenes in the end of the movie involving the attacks on the Americans at the Tehran's Grand Market, last-minute cancellation and un-cancellation of the group's tickets, interrogation of the Americans at the airport and the chase on the Mehrabad Airport runway never happened in reality.

What one can conclude from the factual errors in the movie is that it is not an innocent use of poetic licence on the part of the screenplay writer, but a deliberate attempt to change history by the filmmakers. The narrow escapes and 'incredible' moments that have made it a blockbuster is far from reality. If anything, it is real propaganda. The film claims to be free from ideological biases, but what it insinuates is a mix of crowd-pleasing orientalism and jingoism.

By picking “Argo” over “Zero,” the liberal wing of the Academy seemed to be signaling that it had zero tolerance for torture, and preferred the kinder, gentler CIA depicted in “Argo” than the Agency that had journeyed over to the Bush/Cheney dark side of cruel and unusual punishment in “Zero.” -(Ed Rampell for The Progressive).

Based on a modicum of facts Argo creates an American fable for an audience that embraces the orient only when they are depicted as poor, suppressed peoples of the world.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author's personal views, and do not necessarily represent the views of Newsclick