Foes on film: The evolution of Hollywood portrayals of Soviets and Middle Easterners, 1980--2001

The major argument of this dissertation, a study primarily of audience reception relying upon top money earners, is that portrayals of Russians/Soviets and Middle Easterners in American popular film of the 1980s and 1990s altered in response to changes in U.S. diplomatic policies. Previous scholarship has suggested this link in Hollywood depictions of the Soviet Union; but both scholarship and popular commentary have long proposed that Middle Easterners became foils in American popular film only in response to the Cold War's end. Such is clearly not the case.; For decades, Soviets, rendered in primarily political terms, served as convenient Hollywood villains---though the film industry's depictions of Soviets changed dramatically depending upon the intensity of Cold War tensions at any given moment. Filmmakers portrayed Middle Easterners from the earliest days of motion pictures, when the film industry adopted what was to be a long-term practice of rendering the Middle East in exotic ethnic terms. Only in the 1960s did movies regularly begin to show the Middle East in story lines with a political bent; and even then, images of the region's exoticism persisted. This reality was to have a profound effect on the way filmmakers showed Middle Easterners, particularly in the post-Cold War era of political correctness. In short, the legacy of Middle Eastern filmic ethnic exoticism would help to ameliorate Hollywood's tendency to paint that region in the stark political terms reserved for Soviets during the Cold War.; Thus, Hollywood portrayals of the Soviet Union/Russia and the Middle East have differed from one another markedly. Images of the USSR were tied to notions of Soviet officialdom; those of the Middle East often proved more complex, relying upon ethnic stereotypes and, to some extent, the region's diversity. What links such depictions together is an implicit assertion in motion pictures that each region served as a powerful foe to America and the reality that real-world diplomatic relations helped shape screen images.