Images of an "Oriental Other" - Assignment Example

But tools have changed, and nowadays Western foreign policy is expressed through mass culture and Orientalism is widely presented in mass media production (Nicha 2012). The image of “Oriental Others” discussed in this essay is the image of Persian Prince, which was presented in 2010 in American movie Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The part of the Prince is played by a famous American actor Jake Gyllenhaal and therefore, Persian Prince looks more like a White, Western man, a “hot”, protagonist and American superhero, as Jehanzeb Dar puts it (Dar 2010).

The orientalism of the discussed image is illustrated well through a screen shot from the movie. On this picture Prince fights and defeats an antagonistic personage, a one of the hirelings Assassins, who were hired by “evil side” to kill Prince. It’s typical in modern American mass culture that the Orient got associated with mysticism, barbarism, despotism, imagination and violence, “in other words, the opposite to the world of Western Europe”, as West imagines itself (Nicha 2012). Despite that Jake Gyllenhaal visually looks more like American man than like Persian one, the whole plot of the movie and characters are presented in stereotypical way.

First of all, there’s a lot of violence in a movie, a lot of fights, and on this particularly picture where Prince fights Assassin, both of them are cold steel armed with weapons traditionally associated with bloodshed. Edward Said says, it’s typical when Oriental Others are shown as people who like violence and understands only force, so “civilized people” have no other choice but to deal with them using a military force. However, the true reason such image is justification of U.S. military intervention on Middle East, and behind the powerful myths about how Arabs’ are originally threatening for Americans, true geopolitical