The Trouble with "Argo"

My wife and I went to see Argo last night. The venue was a shopping mall multiplex where New Jersey's suburbs and its truly mainland portions merge. Its virtues are that its screens are big, the prints are in good shape, and the sound systems deliver appropriate oomph. Argo, which we'd been told was a fabulous movie, seemed to deserve a decent theatrical experience.

By the end of the picture, I wondered if I had watched the same movie Argo's fans had. The movie, except for John Goodman's and Alan Arkin's delicious comic depiction of two Hollywood insiders, made me squirmy. Affleck takes a flag-waving, feel-good story and presents a flag-waving, feel-good story. While he's at it, Affleck scores some political points, mostly at the expense of the US State Department and the Carter Administration. Hamilton Jordan, Carter's chief of staff, comes across as something of a provincial dim bulb, while Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's name is not even mentioned. Why Vance is spared while his department is unflatteringly depicted is a curiosity.

However, that's small potatoes compared to the movie's "uplifting" ending, in which the nervy Yanks escape the clutches of the evil Republican Guard. Argo makes it clear that the Iranian Revolution was a dreadful event. Inferentially, how could Americans today allow those same anti-Western religious fanatics any chance at obtaining nukes? No way. To that end, I wonder if Affleck and the movie's producers found it useful to remind the public about perceived American "weakness" with the dangers Iran's ruling mullahs and military Praetorian Guard represent. While the Tehran embassy hostage crisis took place during "weak" President Carter, they were released shortly after the inauguration of a "firm" Ronald Reagan.

Former Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor,
who hid the American embassy personnel in Tehran.
Read the Canadian TV interview with Taylor,
noting how Affleck's original ending (shown at the Toronto Film Festival!)
praised the CIA and implied the Canadians sat on their hands.

There was something eerie about watching Argo while Hamas (Iran's proxy along the Israeli border) and Israel (to some extent, America's regional proxy) begin their duel to the death in Gaza. This most recent conflict began on the American presidential election day, and reached the boiling point while President Obama was in Myanmar. It's hard to imagine 44 couldn't have been further from the world's media centers, or more inaccessible to the American audience that is separated by a dozen or more time zones from Southeast Asia. Of course, any military action against Iran proper would probably require Israeli neutralization of Hamas' military capability in Gaza. One wonders if Carter-Reagan was heading toward Obama-Romney, with Mitt on record as egging on Bibi Netanyahu's "bombs away" approach to Israel's neighbors.

The people in the movie audience who felt good about Argo's blend of daring escape and Rambo-style jingoism probably felt we delivered a blow against the bad guys -- a blow we should deliver again. We should be careful what we wish for. It's going to take more than Hollywood chutzpah to successfully manage any conflict with Iran and its allies.

PS. Ken Taylor's issues with Argo were amplified in a February, 2013 New York Times piece. Among them was Affleck's interesting decision to not invite Taylor to the film's premiere at, ironically enough, the Toronto Film Festival. Notable in the Times piece is Affleck's reasoning for "adjusting" history to fit narrative and entertainment "needs" (my quotes in both cases in this sentence).