[MUSIC PLAYING]
OK, I think we're
going to start exactly
on time, contrary to
cultural conventions.
So my name is Shahzad
Bashir, and I'm
the director of the program
in Middle East studies.
Thank you very much for
coming to this talk.
I will say a little bit about
the context of this talk
and then introduce our speaker.
So this is the first
in a series of talks
that is called Iran Today.
And the idea is
actually very simple,
just to have a number
of presentations
on contemporary
research on Iran partly
because Iran as
it is represented
in the American
political context,
but also in many other
places, is almost
treated as a kind of
political caricature.
But underlying that there is, of
course, a very complex society
with an extensive
and long history,
and all kinds of other
activities that are going on.
And there are research
professionals who are actually
working on these aspects.
So what we're trying to do
is to bring some people who
are actually doing research
on Iran, in Iran, underground,
and then to start a
discussion or to densify
our notion of what
Iran might be or is,
and find out where it might be
going and so on and so forth.
So today's the first
lecture with our colleague
Alireza Doostdar.
And later in November, we
have a second person coming
who will talk about contemporary
playwrights in Tehran.
But you will get
the details of that
when everything is settled.
Today it is my pleasure to
introduce Professor Doostdar,
who is a professor
of Islamic studies
and the anthropology of religion
at the University of Chicago.
He got his PhD at
Harvard in 2009
and has been at the University
of Chicago since 2012.
He has authored many
interesting and important works,
most recently this
wonderful book
called The Iranian Metaphysicals
that recently came out.
One of the things that I can say
about Professor Doostdar's work
is that it is conceptually
and intellectually compelling,
but also it belongs
in the best tradition
of ethnographic writing
that is lyrically beautiful.
So it's always a pleasure
to read his work.
And I hope that this
will come across
as we hear the
talk today as well.
And last, but not least--
at least of the
last I spoke to him,
he's also a hidden
international celebrity.
And the reason is that if
you ever travel on Iran Air,
the English announcements
are actually in his voice.
I don't know whether
it's continuing on or no.
So, Alireza, please, welcome.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Shahzad, for
that wonderful introduction,
and thank you for
the invitation.
Thank you all for coming.
It's a delight to be here.
It's my first visit to Brown.
My first visit to
Providence, actually.
And special thanks
to Saraya McPherson
for making everything
extremely smooth and easy.
As for my voice on
Iran Air, it depends on
whether you can hear
it over the engines.
Sanctions haven't
been done kindness
to the Iranian air fleet.
So I'm going to speak about a
topic that is directly related
to my book, which
recently came out,
but it's also slightly at a
tangent in relation to it.
So many of the themes that
I'll be speaking about,
for further context, you can,
if you want, look at the book.
But the arguments that I'm
making, much of the content
is actually not in
the book itself.
Iranian enthusiasts
of the occult
often draw on Hollywood
fantasy and horror
cinema when they try
to make sense of things
they deem to be metaphysical.
I grew accustomed to hearing
such filmic references
during research in Tehran
on occultism and alternative
spirituality.
In one of my earliest
interviews in 2006,
a private Arabic instructor,
an amateur treasure hunter,
recommended that I watch Peter
Jackson's Lord of the Rings
to get a sense of the
appearances of different tribes
of jinn, presumably those
creatures that Tolkien
named orcs, ringwraths, balrogs,
elves, dwarves, and so on.
Around the same time,
a mechanical engineer
and entrepreneur told
me that Mr. Tumnus,
the fawn in Andrew Adamson's
The Chronicles of Narnia,
was uncannily similar to
Islamic representations of jinn.
A few years later, a minor
television actor and occult
practitioner described some
of her dream visions to me
and compared them to scenes
from the Wachowski's The Matrix.
Meanwhile, a young psychology
student and therapist
who self-identified
as a sorcerer
told me half-jokingly of her
affinities with Harry Potter.
Finally, when I enrolled
for seminars in the popular
therapeutic mystical movement
known as Cosmic Mysticism
at [NON-ENGLISH],, I learned
that the group liked to compare
their healing practices to
exorcisms depicted in William
Friedkin's The Exorcist and
Francis Lawrence's Constantine.
Participants shared copies of
these films among themselves,
and the seminar's master
quipped that I resembled
constant Constantine's
titular character played
by Keanu Reeves.
I had more hair, and
it was more black.
As I will show in my
presentation today,
these exuberant, if
peculiar appropriations
of Hollywood cinema
can hardly be
dismissed as eccentric
flights of fancy
among a subcultural fringe.
I suggest instead that we
attend to them as expressions
of broader attitudes toward
transnational cinematic
circulations.
That is, such redeployments
of Hollywood products
channeling sounds and images
manufactured for entertainment
in the service of
cosmological, ethical,
and therapeutic speculation
grant us a privileged window
through which to
examine the logics
of cultural circulation between
Iran and the United States.
The empirical materials I
will be examining are diverse,
but they can be brought
together under the sign of what
I am playfully calling
Hollywood cosmopolitanism.
What I want to capture
with this label
is the diverse range of ways
in which people open themselves
up to cultural and
religious others
through the mediation
of Hollywood movies.
I begin by considering the
rise of global spiritual cinema
in Iran as a mode of
cross-cultural experimentation
with existential religious
and mystical themes in film.
I then turn to right wing
criticisms of spiritual cinema
that attack Hollywood movies
as vehicles for propagating
Satanism even as their assaults
draw inspiration from arguments
provided by American
white supremacists
and evangelical Christians.
Finally, I return
to the examples
with which I began to probe the
complex ways in which Hollywood
cinema resonates
with some Iranians
as they seek to understand the
forces that shape their world.
In 2005, officials at the
Farabi Cinema Foundation,
and official arm of the Iranian
Ministry of Culture and Islamic
Guidance, inaugurated a period
of experimentation with what
they called Ma'na gara,
or spiritual cinema.
Part Islamic philosophical
speculation, part film theory,
and part criticism, discussions
of spiritual films revolved
around the problem of
representing Ma'na as expressed
in two senses of the term.
First Ma'na was
understood as meaning,
indexing a concern with
philosophical, mystical,
symbolic, and moral motifs that
made a film into something more
than escapist entertainment.
Second, Ma'na was used to
refer to spirit as the opposite
of matter, or [NON-ENGLISH],,
hence evoking the potential
of films to gesture toward
an immaterial domain beyond
mundane existence.
From the start,
these conversations
were mired in controversy.
The proponents of
spiritual cinema
struggled to articulate why a
new filmic category was useful
and what conceptual
and critical work
it performed that
could not be achieved
using other appellations
like religious, transcendent,
mystical, or
illuminationist, all of which
had been deployed at
one point or another
to describe or valorized
certain kinds of films.
Circulating alongside
these conversations
were actual films.
They were screened at the
annual Fajr International Film
Festival in Tehran, critiqued
at monthly spiritual cinema
events at the upscale Cinema
Farhang on Shariati avenue,
broadcast to a mass audience on
national television Channel 4
as part of a series dubbed
Cinema and Metaphysics,
exchanged on CDs and DVDs, and
downloaded off the internet.
Iranian films were
central to discussions
over spiritual cinema
from the outset.
They both enabled the
development of ma'na gara
discourse and acted as audio
visual artifacts linking
the new debates to older ones
over the place of Islamic
piety, revolutionary commitment,
and mysticism in film.
This local frame
notwithstanding,
spiritual cinema was conceived
as fundamentally global.
In each of its annual
events from 2005 to 2009,
for example, the Fajr
Festival screened
over a dozen spiritual
films of which only a few
were produced in Iran.
Submissions also came from the
United States, Canada, France,
Germany, Greece, Italy, the
Netherlands, Poland, Russia,
the UK, China, Hong Kong,
Japan, and South Korea.
Channel 4 Cinema and Metaphysics
had a similarly ecumenical
vision.
The series was famously
inaugurated in 2005
by Francis Lawrence's
Constantine,
and its roster included David
Fincher's Seven, Wim Wenders'
Der Himmel uber Berlin, Ismael
Ferroukhi's Le Grand Voyage,
Andre Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice,
M. Night Shyamalan's The
Village, the
Wachowski's The Matrix,
and even Rhonda Byrne's The
Secret, an Oprah favorite.
Hollywood productions
played an outsized role
in this cinematic
imaginary followed
by movies that owed their
fame to the global circuits
of prestigious festivals,
especially those of Cannes,
Berlin, Toronto, and Venice.
Refracted through the lens of
Ma'na, these foreign films were
recruited to a rich and varied
inquiry that was at once
cosmopolitan and
distinctly Iranian.
European existentialist films
and Hollywood fantasy sci-fi
and horror will thus
become commensurable
with the mystical, at
times messianic cinema
of Iranian auteurs like
Majid Majdid, Reza Mirkarimi,
and Kamal Tabrizi.
At its most expensive, the
ma'na gara project was framed
as an inquiry into the ways
in which cinema could aid
a universal human
search for meaning.
At its most particular, it
was a moment made possible
by a specific historical
experience of cinema,
of westernization and
American domination,
and of revolution and
Islamic commitment.
In their universalism, the
proponents of spiritual cinema
shared a modernist
vision of film
as a medium capable of
inspiring ethical and social
transformation that
can be traced back
to the constitutional revolution
of the early 20th century.
Their attitudes toward
Hollywood, on the other hand,
departed in subtle,
but significant ways
from some of their most
influential fore bearers
and critics.
Whether participating in the
new wave of the 1960s and '70s,
the cinema of the sacred
defense in the 1980s
and later, or the art house
movement of the 1990s, Iranian
filmmakers and critics
often articulated their work
in opposition to Hollywood.
For these Iranians, Hollywood's
bloated commercial fantasies
pander to spectators' base
desires for sex, thrills,
and violence rather than
enabling critical reflection,
understanding, and transcendence
somewhat further by blaming
Hollywood for enabling American
imperial domination, a view
of filmic efficacy
that they shared
with some American policymakers
from at least the 1940s onward.
Accordingly, these
filmmakers set
themselves the task of producing
alternative cinematic visions
which would be responsive to
their local social milieus
while remaining
globally attuned.
Among others, they
would draw inspiration
from Soviet, Italian neorealist,
French new wave, and Latin
American third cinema.
The defenders of ma'na gara
project retained this earlier
concern with meaning,
transcendence,
and spirituality, but
they departed from
Hollywood's detractors
by expanding their field
of critical experimentation
to include some of those films
that their colleagues wrote
off as delusive and degenerate.
This expansion sometimes went
so far as to not only include
Hollywood productions, but to
place them at the very center
of ma'na gara cinema.
For example, the Farabi
Cinema Foundation
published a festival
book in 2005
analyzing 49 spiritual films
of which a whopping 25--
more than half-- were
made in the United States.
In its introduction, the book
claimed that in cinema, one
could find, quote, "the loftiest
locus for the manifestation
of spirituality and for
dialogue among the spiritually
minded people of the world."
But the book founded its
spiritual universalism
upon a distorted planetary
geography of filmmaking.
And this and other expressions
of the ma'na gara imagination,
the foreign films most deserving
of discussion had either
enjoyed the power and funding
of Hollywood or the seal
of approval of elite European
and North American festivals.
The film roster is produced
at the height of fascination
with spiritual cinema, thus
made scarce mention of movies
from the Arab Middle
East or Turkey, barely
anything from Africa,
only a handful
of entries from South
and Southeast Asia,
and little from Latin America.
The specificity of this
cosmopolitan imaginary
comes further into focus
when we juxtapose it
against the very different,
but no less cosmopolitan
take on global cinema among
Iranian cultural producers.
The Resistance
International Film Festival
is a biennial event organized
by the Basij militia in Tehran.
The festival originated
in 1983 to celebrate
films about the Sacred
Defense, or the eight-year war
against Iraq.
Since 2010, the
Resistance Festival
has accepted foreign
entries for competition
and screened a selection
vetted by a jury.
Its aim has been to build a
global anti-imperial cultural
alliance by
encouraging filmmakers
from around the world
to, quote, "create
a convergence between
their productions
and the concepts and
terminology of the discourse
of Islamic revolution."
In 2016, the 10
finalists included films
from Syria, Morocco, Palestine,
Indonesia, Peru, and Slovenia.
The festival's call
for submissions
suggested topics such as,
quote, "confronting racial
discrimination and
American police
brutality against
people of color;
the resistance of the peoples
of Lebanon, Palestine, Syria,
Iraq, and Yemen against
Israel and the US;
confronting Islamophobia
and Iranophobia; confronting
the imposition of the Western
lifestyle; and, most notably
for our purposes,
the role of Hollywood
in furthering the
goals of imperialism."
As one might expect,
no Hollywood movies
were included in the program.
However Hollywood
productions were indeed
screened outside of
competition in prior years
at the same festival.
In 2000, for example,
the roster of films
included Steven
Spielberg's Saving
Private Ryan, Oliver Stone's
Platoon, Stanley Kubrick's Full
Metal Jacket Jean-Jaques
Annaud's Seven Years in Tibet.
Even the Basij militia
could find something
to savor in Hollywood
cinematic offerings.
For the advocates
of spiritual film
at Channel 4 and the
Farabi Foundation,
Hollywood offered a range of
cinematic models and techniques
to think with, critique,
and even emulate.
As we have seen, the ma'na gara
project proceeded alongside
alternative cosmopolitan
imaginaries that resisted
Hollywood.
It also received a number
of direct challenges.
Not only were the advocates
of spiritual cinema forced
to reckon with criticism
of their conceptualization
of Ma'na in film, they were
also targeted for their supposed
naivete in valorizing
degenerate, repugnant,
or downright evil
Hollywood movies.
These criticisms were largely
uncoordinated and came from
a variety of quarters, but their
authors shared a conservative
orientation to the politics
of culture in part marked
by anxiety about a cultural
onslaught, [NON-ENGLISH],,
or soft war, [NON-ENGLISH],,
that the West waged against Iran
society to undermine
piety and social cohesion.
The fiercest attacks
on spiritual cinema
were waged in
opposition to Satanism
as propagated by Hollywood film.
The ex-Marxist turned
Islamist cultural critic,
Mas'ud Ferasati, emerged as
one of spiritual cinema's more
learned and
philosophically-minded
detractors.
Over the years, Ferasati has
repeatedly chastised Iranian
cultural administrators for
failing to properly understand
both cinema and Ma'na.
As he argued in 2011, quote,
"with the medium of cinema,
the Americans use
technology to bamboozle us
with pseudo-philosophical
concepts.
These friends of ours"--
meaning the Farabi
Foundation and Channel 4--
"are attracted to these
vulgar movies that
pretend to be
philosophical, but are,
in fact, superstitious and
sometimes even Satanist.
They become interested
in extremely superficial
and vulgar films, like
What Dreams May Come.
Or one of these learned
Muslim friends of ours
takes The Truman Show
to be a religious film.
The point is that
they look for motifs,
but they don't understand form.
This is why the Americans can
subject us to whatever calamity
they choose.
They prepare the
world with cinema,
and then capture
it with weapons.
But we have not been
able to use images
ourselves to offer any of our
own value-oriented slogans."
Ferasati's point was not only
that Hollywood films frequently
peddled superstition
and Satanism
in place of spirituality, but
also, and more importantly,
that Iranian cultural
managers failed
to recognize the ways in
which cinematic form could
be deployed for a
transformative effect.
Hollywood producers took
advantage of these forms
to propagate their own values,
while Iranians satisfied
themselves with sloganeering
through cultural disseminations
in which form and content
remained incongruous.
Another outspoken
critic of Hollywood
spirituality was Mohammad
Hoseyn Farajnead,
an author who was
published widely
on Zionism and deviant
spirituality in film.
Here you can see him holding
a copy, a Persian translation
of the ultimate Harry
Potter and philosophy--
Hogwarts for muggles.
In one of his
articles, Farajnead
argued that
Hollywood had schemed
to promote a kind of
spirituality aligned
with secularism
and postmodernism
to further American
imperial goals.
To this end, American movies
advertised what he called
inverted mysticisms,
[NON-ENGLISH],, like Buddhism,
Christian mysticism,
and Jewish Sufism,
which the author
equated with kabbalah;
Native American mysticisms,
new age religions,
humanistic and
secular mysticisms,
and Satanism and witchcraft.
After laying out a brief
history of Zionist complicity
with Asians in attacking
Islam, which allegedly began
with Mongol collaboration
with, quote,
"Jewish and Christian
crusaders in
the 12th and 13th
centuries"-- he's
really out there, this guy--
Farajnead proceeded to analyze
a number of Buddhist themes
in Hollywood and
non-Hollywood film.
In the final page of his
essay, he criticized the Farabi
Foundation's vague, secular,
and derivative definition
of, spirituality which
he claimed, quote,
"led to the screening of
a Christian Satanic movie
called Constantine as the
opening film in Channel 4's
Cinema and Metaphysics as
well as the sanctification,
propagation, and rewarding of
numerous films of Hollywood
Buddhism and eastern mysticism."
By the way, state
television in Iran,
at least for the
past 20 years, has
been administered-- has been
managed by conservatives.
So this is not a case of
a reformist administration
versus, let's say, a right-wing
or a conservative set
of critics.
It's actually-- much
of this is internal
to various conservative camps.
Hasan Abbasi is a third opponent
of Hollywood spirituality
who first came to prominence as
a firebrand critic of Mohammad
Khatami's administration.
Known as a maverick
public speaker
and occasional
television commentator,
Abbasi leads a small
think tank that
formulates what he calls
strategic doctrines
for the Islamic republic.
Abbasi's public lectures
include detailed analyzes
of Hollywood movies
and television series
with particular
attention to the ways
in which these
productions advance
Zionist strategic interests.
One of his better known
critiques in the mid 2000s
was directed at
Constantine, which
he described as a
Satanist movie that
asserted the
supremacy of Lucifer,
quote, "the evilest
of the devils,"
over a demonic new world order.
He reserved special barbs for
Channel 4 charging that, quote,
"the idiot who calls
himself a cinema expert
and broadcast this
anti-religious film
on the Islamic
republic's television
has become fully fused
into Hollywood culture."
In the aftermath of the
controversial presidential
election of 2009, criticisms
of Hollywood Satanism
sometimes melded with a more
diffuse right-wing anxiety
about the circulation of
Satanist emblems and practices.
Anti-Satanist activists
noticed suspicious signs--
triangles, broken crosses, the
eye of Lucifer, and so on--
everywhere, on public
buildings, subway murals,
middle school textbooks,
clothing, and jewelry.
In February 2010,
Tehran police announced
that it was banning the
popular air freshener
in the shape of
a black rectangle
with a large white x
on its face because it
carried a symbol of
kabbalahism and Satan worship.
For a brief period, right-wing
activists and bloggers
even worried that the newly
constructed Majlis building,
the parliament, on
Baharestan Square
expressed Masonic
and Satanist meanings
because it was designed
in the shape of a pyramid.
In the meantime, the media
carried police reports
about the proliferation
of Satan worshipping
cults in which young men and
women danced to heavy metal
music, performed grotesque
and sometimes violent
rituals, consumed alcohol
and illegal drugs,
and engaged in dangerous
sexual behavior.
The anti-Satanists
formulated their criticisms
in terms of a worry over foreign
influence and the corruption
of the pious Muslim interior.
The principal narrative
about Satanic signs
was that they silently
advertised Satanism
and insinuated themselves into
the minds of their beholder's
in order gradually to infect
them with doubt, irreligion,
and immorality.
In some formulations,
these tokens
were imbued with a supernatural
talismanic force mediated
by demonic other-worldly beings.
In the most alarmist
accounts, the emblems
foretold cataclysmic
events yet to come.
For example, Ali Akbar
Ra'efipur, a public speaker
with a cult following among
right-wing student groups,
claimed that the x in
the banned air freshener
signified the imminent
manifestation of Satan
and enslavement to his rule.
That the sign should be
circulating so openly,
he claimed, could only be
a herald of the end times
and Masonic plans to
institute a new world order.
We may read these
anti-Satanist utterances
as expressions of
counter-cosmopolitanism
to the extent that they
betray anxieties about
brought border crossing
and cultural pollution.
As strident as the
anti-Satanists were
in their denunciations of
dangerous flows, however,
their discourse was
itself fundamentally
shaped by circulations
connecting Iran to the US.
The kernel of right-wing
Iranian criticisms of Hollywood
spirituality, the notion
that Jews control the US film
industry and use
movies to further
their strategic
interests, has long
served as a cornerstone of
white supremacist conspiracism
in the United States.
The Iranian version
of this discourse
can partly be credited
to American organizations
like the National Vanguard and
white supremacists like David
Duke and Mark Webber.
The Iranian
anti-Satanists similarly
borrowed the concept
of a new world order
from American
right-wing populist
and Christian
evangelicals preoccupied
with the looming apocalypse.
The very epistemology and
methodology of anti-Satanist
detective work--
hunting for visual
tokens and public spaces
as proof of conspiracy--
was imported from abroad.
Even the inventory
of Satanic emblems
which appeared on countless
anti-Satanist blogs
and was displayed at
university events on Satanism
was translated from a handful
of English-language sources,
like the Christian
fundamentalist web
forum exposingsatanism.org.
In drawing attention to the
global circulations that
shaped Iranian
anti-Satanic discourse,
I'm not trying to
reveal hypocrisy, irony,
or incoherence in the
anti-Satanist stance
toward foreign influence.
What I want to argue instead is
that self-conscious antagonism
to cultural pollution can
itself depend on openness
to external epistemic authority
and syncretistic forms
of borrowing.
Not all forms of
mixture, that is,
need to be experienced
as polluting.
At issue is not
so much a conflict
between the attitudes of
openness and hostility
toward outsiders as
a question over which
aspects of an external
other's knowledge and power
can be usefully assimilated
in the service of combating
other undesirable elements.
Alleged counter-cosmopolitans
may, on closer inspection,
be cosmopolitans, too.
While the anti-Satanists
had no qualms
about admitting that crucial
aspects of their discourse
were imported from
the West, they
prefer to conceal their
source's specific ideological
proclivities.
Thus none of the anti-Satanists
with whose work I am familiar
acknowledged borrowing
from white supremacists
and apocalyptic Christian
fundamentalists.
Even when they mention an
organization like the National
Vanguard and individuals
like David Duke,
these activists fail to disclose
their American counterparts'
white supremacist leanings.
The power of
anti-Satanist discourse,
therefore, depended on a
form of cosmopolitan openness
that had to remain covert in
order to avoid embarrassment.
It would be
embarrassing for them
to say we are drawing
from white supremacists.
In any case that's not clear.
In 2011, I spoke with several
anti-Satanist activists
about the circulations
of Satanic emblems
in order to understand
the semiotic ideology that
underpinned their
discourse and practice.
For those of you who
don't know this term,
"semiotic ideology" merely
means conceptions about how
symbols work in the world.
My interlocutors explained
the efficacy of these signs
either by recourse to
mystical energetic flows
or in terms of
psychological suggestion.
A medical student, an
activist named Amin,
described the influence
of Satanic emblems
as a form of energy transfer.
The world, he told me,
is a world of energy.
You are constantly
exchanging energy
with the environment around you.
When you hold the [? Koran ?]
close to your chest,
you absorb energy and
feel a sense of calm.
In the same way, if you
have contact with something
with a negative charge--
in my example, a Satanist sign--
it will cause negative effects
like mental disturbance,
loss of self-awareness, and
growing distant from God.
Mahdi, another student
activist, told me
how his own friend
had been infected.
A good student in high
school with pious appearance
and conduct, he
had begun watching
American and European television
series on bootleg DVDs.
According to Mahdi,
quote, "these series,
especially the ones that have
come out in recent years,
are full of Satanic signs."
One of his friends
favorites was Supernatural,
a series about the
paranormal pursuits of two
demon-hunting
brothers, which still I
believe is on air after
12 years or something.
It's awful.
I've seen a few episodes
for work purposes.
After exposing himself to
the series for some time,
Mahdi explained,
his friend started
to dress and groom himself
like a central character
in the film.
He even organized his room
and belongings in a way
so as to resemble him, to
appear classy, [NON-ENGLISH],,
as Mahdi put it.
After two or three years, Mahdi
realized that it was not only
his friend's appearance
that had gradually shifted,
his faith had also
been transformed.
He was taking bits
and pieces of beliefs
from Supernatural
and other series
leading him to question God's
justice and omnipotence.
He then started to skip some of
his daily obligatory prayers.
At this point, Mahdi
intervened, realizing
that his friend was headed
for, quote, "denial of God
and the worship of nothingness."
He had a serious conversation
with his friend in an attempt
to return him to
the straight path,
and he seemed to be
satisfied with the result.
It will be too easy to
write off these accounts
as folk theories about
cultural circulation motivated
by conservative paranoia
over pollution and declining
religious observance.
But by pointing to the
hidden workings of signs
and their filmic vehicles,
the anti-Satanists usefully
highlight an aspect of
circulation that cannot be
grasped by focusing on
self-conscious attitudes toward
global flows, whether
those we might characterize
as cosmopolitan or
counter-cosmopolitan.
They draw attention, that
is, to an occult efficacy
that may be a condition
of possibility
for both openness and
antagonism toward otherness.
This is an efficacy
that works not
so much at the level
of overt discourse
with its rules of
persuasion and coherence,
but on the deeper structures of
affect, desire, and perception.
One way to think of
this occult efficacy
is to draw on the psychoanalytic
concepts of fantasy
and identification.
On this account, Mahdi,
the anti-Satanist activist,
explained how his
friend came to identify
with a character
from Supernatural.
The filmic fantasy shaped his
desire to become the character,
granting this desire a
specific substance, direction,
and schema that would teach
him how certain real world
objects like styles of
dress, modes of comportment,
possessions, even beliefs
could become desirable to him.
But this would be to
provide a theory for Mahdi's
interpretation of his
friend's experience, not
an account of the
experience itself,
nor even of Mahdi's friend's
interpretation of it,
to which I have no access.
So I don't know what
his friend thought
was happening to him when
he was watching the series.
All I know is what
the friend interpreted
to be happening to him.
We can reformulate the
problem, then, as follows.
It is not so much that
Mahdi's friend identified
with Supernatural's
filmic fantasy,
but that Mahdi's belief
that his friend did so
sustained an ideological
fantasy of Hollywood's
preternatural efficaciousness.
There is still an occult
efficacy at work here,
but it is immediately
apparent in Mahdi's, rather
than his friend's
Hollywood encounter.
Mahdi's friend may
or may not have
been in thrall of Hollywood,
but Mahdi himself certainly was.
I want to examine this
anti-Satanist fascination
with Hollywood, the idea that
Hollywood images have the power
to unilaterally reshape Iranian
subjectivities in terms of what
William Mazzarella
following Peter Sloterdijk
has called
constitutive resonance.
With resonance, Mazzarella
wants to identify a relationship
through which people
and things mutually
constitute one another.
Resonant encounter,
he writes, quote,
"as a way of thinking about the
making and unmaking of selves
and worlds as well as
the attachments of selves
to the worlds in which
they can feel alive usually
by means of some ambivalent
combination of affirmation
and refusal," end quote.
The feeling of recognition
in the moment of resonance
can be satisfying, exciting,
fulfilling, and so on.
But it can also cause
anxiety, dread, or repulsion
about losing oneself
in the other.
So imagine, I mean-- one
of Mazzarella's examples
is when you see something,
you see, let's say,
a piece of clothing or you see a
piece of jewelry or a chocolate
or whatever, and you say,
this is what I always wanted.
The recognition that this
is what you always wanted
happens in the encounter
with that thing.
If it's something you always
wanted, but you didn't name it
before, it means that you didn't
know that you always wanted it
until that encounter happened.
So for him, that
moment of the encounter
between the person, the
desiring subject, and the thing
is that moment when
both things become
constituted, as
the desiring person
and as the thing desired.
So that's what I'm
getting at with this.
And it's not only
a moment of desire.
It could also be repugnance.
It could be, I hate this thing.
And it could be some
ambivalent feeling
of both attachment and a feeling
of being repelled or terrified.
And, of course, so
repulsion about losing one's
self in the other, this
idea that I want it,
but I don't want to want it.
I want it too much, and so on.
This is the psychoanalysis and
what Mazzarella's getting out
by drawing on
[? Sloterdijk ?] really
helps to think about some
of these complex forms
of attachment.
Was it an accident
that, according
to Mahdi, the figure in whom
his friend supposedly lost
himself was an
American demon hunter?
Could Mahdi's anxiety
about Hollywood's
Satanic nihilistic
reach have had something
to do with an
ambivalent resonance he
felt between Supernatural's
demon hunter and his own self
as a soul-saving activist?
Even more terrifying,
could it be
that it was only in encountering
a figure like the Hollywood
demon hunter that
Mahdi found himself
as an activist striving to save
souls from Hollywood's demons.
It is important to stress that
the resonant relationship is
considerative on both sides.
It not only makes
a person like Mahdi
into a subject who ambivalently
desires and is repulsed
by Hollywood, but also
shapes the Hollywood image
like that of the demon
hunter into something
desirable, classy,
repulsive, and terrifying.
The image is none of these
things before the encounter.
Certainly no one
in Hollywood could
have predicted, much less
planned, precisely this kind
of resonance.
But to the extent
that Mahdi's encounter
prompts discourse and action--
that is, to the extent
that it incites, recharges,
and recalibrates the specific
social forms associated with
what I'm calling
anti-Satanist activism--
it also enables further
resonances of this sort
even if it can never be repeated
in precisely the same way.
In other words, it can travel.
It can be mimicked and so on.
Let me now return to two of
the examples with which I
began my presentation.
In summer 2006, my friend
Ahmad, the Arabic instructor,
told me that The
Lord of the Rings
provided accurate
representations
of various tribes of jinn.
To justify his claim, he told
me of a dramatic encounter
in which he faced off against
a terrifying jinn that
was possessing one
of his students
who had earlier been
diagnosed with schizophrenia.
The encounter
occurred in what he
called a true dream
in which Ahmed
was ascending
building while pulling
his student by the hand.
The jinn hung onto the
student, wide-eyed,
bearing its fangs like
some of the menacing beings
in Peter Jackson's films.
Ahmad brought his right fist
down toward the jinn directing
his semiprecious ring which was
set with Koranic inscriptions
against the creature.
The jinn shrieked and released
the young man, plummeting
into the darkness below.
In winter 2008, I
enrolled in seminars
with an underground mystical
group called Cosmic Mysticism.
The group held weekly treatments
sessions in a private apartment
and exorcised about a
dozen patients each time.
And I'm going to show you a
clip of one of these exorcisms.
The person you see
here is [INAUDIBLE],,
who was the exorcist, but he's
also the founder of this group.
And this is the group's own--
they uploaded this themselves.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Ostad!
He's choking.
- Help me!
Help me!
Help me!
[END PLAYBACK]
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
[END PLAYBACK]
OK, that's enough.
But basically what happens
in these exorcisms--
and I have a lot more detail
about this in several chapters
of the book--
is there is a
conversation that happens
between the exorcist and
the demon-possessed person
through which the act of
healing ultimately happens.
I often spoke
about the exorcisms
with my friend [? Balbec, ?]
a master's student
in business administration who
attended the seminars with me.
After our first visit
to a treatment session,
he told me that when I
watched the movie Constantine,
it never occurred
to me that any of it
might be real until I came here.
In my interactions
with the instructor
and some of his
students, I learned
that Constantine
and The Exorcist
were two of their
favorite films.
They exchanged copies of
the movies among themselves,
not only for
entertainment, but also
as visual commentary on
aspects of their teachings,
including the exorcisms.
How are we to make
sense of these examples?
Ahmed remarked to
me that the fact
that certain creatures
in The Lord of the Rings
resemble jinn like
the one in his dream
suggested that Peter Jackson
or someone in his crew
had actually encountered
jinn before making the films.
For Ahmed then, these
films took on an aspect
of documentary realism.
The Cosmic Mystics, too, argued
that movies like The Exorcist
and Constantine amounted
to faithful representations
of reality.
They found it unsurprising that
their healing rituals resembled
filmic exorcism.
If anything, the resemblance
offered circular proof
that both kinds of exorcism
were authentic and unstaged.
These accounts provide
causal explanations
for the resemblances
between, on the one hand,
real-life beings
and experiences--
jinn and exorcisms--
and, on the other hand,
the images of Hollywood
horror and fantasy.
It might be tempting to turn
the causal tables around
and suggest, contra
my interlocutors,
that the reason they dreamed of
jinn and experienced exorcisms
that look like Hollywood
images was that they all--
dreamers, exorcists,
and the possessed--
had previously watched
The Lord of the Rings,
Constantine, and The
Exorcist, thereafter
internalizing their images
and enabling certain modes
of identification.
But both kinds of
causal explanation
depend on something
that is logically prior,
a relationship of
constitutive resonance
that emerges through
a protracted encounter
and produces the very
terms that are subsequently
ex post facto linked
in causal association.
Ahmed's dream image and
Peter Jackson's orcs
had to resonate together as jinn
before a causal relationship
could be identified
between them.
Otherwise, how did
someone like Ahmed
know that what he's seeing on
the film screen is the jinn,
or what he's seeing in
his dreams is a jinn?
Similarly, the Cosmic Mystics'
healing and Keanu Reeves' demon
hunting had to resonate
together as jinn exorcisms
before anyone could
explain how or why.
Subject and object, thing
and representation, image
and reality were all mutually
constituted through extended
moments of encounter.
The filmic resonances
I've described point
to a kind of cosmopolitanism,
a form of spiritual receptivity
to foreign others that is
neither overt nor covert
for both of these depend
on self-conscious,
even if strategically
concealed openness.
Instead, this is an occult
receptivity, one whose workings
remain hidden and
mysterious subject as they
are to the vagaries of
unconscious attachments
and aversions, identifications,
and disidentifications.
Occult cosmopolitans neither
embrace nor reject Hollywood
but are Hollywood possessed,
by which I mean not only that
their subjectivities are
colonized by Hollywood images,
but also that they, in turn,
possess Hollywood film,
giving it a distinctive
spiritual significance
and signifying power, a special
kind of Ma'na, if you like.
The very same
occult relationship
that enables these cosmopolitans
to see and experience
spiritual phenomenon
through Hollywood
also makes Hollywood
cinema into a medium
through which to
see and experience
the spiritual world
in distinctive ways.
To conclude, I've
described three ways
in which Hollywood films have
mediated Iranian receptivity
to cultural and
religious others as they
grapple with spiritual
and metaphysical realms.
In overt cosmopolitanism, such
as we find in the Farabi Cinema
Foundation's ma'na gara project,
Hollywood movies were openly
screened, critiqued,
and analyzed
for their contributions
to re-imagining filmic
spirituality.
Here, openness toward
word global cinema
went hand-in-hand with a
constricted imagination
of the global that
effectively ignored
the cinematic creativity taking
place outside of Hollywood
and the circuits of
prestigious festivals.
With covert cosmopolitanism,
right-wing critics' antagonism
toward American cultural
flows was partly
enabled by American conspiracist
discourse and its associated
hermeneutical strategies
and semiotic ideologies.
The policing of cultural
borders thus relied
on a kind of openness to
external epistemic authority
that could only be
efficacious as long as some
of its dimensions remained
unmarked and unacknowledged.
In occult
cosmopolitanism, finally,
receptivity toward Hollywood
evaded conscious articulation
altogether and
instead took the form
of deep-seated resonances
and ambivalent attachments.
On the surface, occultist
grasp of spiritual reality
was shaped by a relationship
of reference and citation
involving Hollywood film.
That's what we see
when someone says
here is what jinn look
like, pointing at a movie.
Below the surface,
however, there
lurked an occult relationship
of resonance, identification,
and capillary efficacy that
both resignified the image
and remade the spectator.
How might we think these
three modes of cosmopolitanism
in relation to one another?
In their dynamics of
receptivity and closure,
we can think of overt and
covert cosmopolitanism
as two sides of the same coin.
Avowed openness to some
forms of difference
is often accompanied
by closure to others.
And, conversely, open antagonism
to some cultural circulations
goes hand-in-hand with
receptivity before other flows.
This is why I find distinctions
between cosmopolitanism
and counter-cosmopolitanism, as
in the well-known articulation
by the philosopher
Kwame Anthony Appiah,
to be less useful than the
resonant entanglements that
ground both what we think of as
receptivity and non-receptivity
to otherness.
If openness and hostility
to cultural difference
depends on hidden
resonances, it becomes
difficult to distinguish
the cosmopolitan
from the counter-cosmopolitan
in as much
as both orientations are
constituted in ways that
not only escape their subjects'
consciousness and control,
but are regularly misperceived
as their opposites.
And we could say
something also about what
the ethics of cosmopolitanism
actually also entails
in this kind of situation,
which I'm not going to get into.
Attention to
constitutive resonance
may enable a more
complex understanding
of the diffuse ways
in which power shapes
cosmopolitans' subjectivities.
A crucial dimension
of these residences
is their historical contingency,
instability, and ambivalence.
What resonates one way now
may later resonate otherwise,
rearranging cosmopolitan
attachments in the process.
So I'll close by elaborating
on one example we've already
encountered, the
X air freshener.
It so happened that the X air
freshener is making the rounds
in Tehran and other
cities that year
were identical to promotional
items commissioned
in 1992 by the
late Betty Shabazz,
Malcolm X's widow, days before
the theatrical release of Spike
Lee's Malcolm X. It is
likely that the same product
or knockoffs eventually
made their way to Iran,
shedding their original
promotional referent
in the process.
Malcolm X is widely revered
in Iranian state discourse.
On February 21, 2017,
the Supreme Leader
of the Islamic Revolution,
Ayatollah Khomeini,
inaugurated a
conference in support
of the Palestinian Intifada
by calling on participants
to recite a prayer for Malcolm
X since the day coincided
with the anniversary
of his assassination.
Over three decades
earlier in 1983,
Malcolm X's autobiography
was translated to Persian
and published by a major press.
The following year, Iran
produced a postage stamp
commemorating the Universal
Day of Struggle Against Race
Discrimination with Malcolm
X depicted in Hajj attire
and reciting the call to prayer.
When Lee's biopic
was released in 1992,
Iranian publications
covered the event
with analyses and critiques.
More recently, the film
was dubbed into Persian
and broadcast several
times on state television.
For most of the past
35 years, Malcolm X
has acted as an emblem
for the Islamic republic's
anti-racist, anti-imperial
cosmopolitanism,
a revolutionary
universalism that
has no trouble incorporating
Hollywood cinematic power when
necessary.
But for a brief
anxious moment, X
resonated as a sign
of Satan, shot through
with occidental phobic paranoia.
Perhaps this
contrapuntal resonance
was only made possible
by decontextualization
and ignorance.
If only the anti-Satanists
knew that the air freshener was
a promotional reference-- was
a promotional item for Spike
Lee's film, their concerns
would have been dispelled.
But maybe the ability to
resonate as Satan was already
a feature of the
cinematic Malcolm X
as well as his
pre-filmic incarnations.
In Alex Haley's
telling, Malcolm X
describes his rebellious
anti-religious days in prison
where he earned the
nickname Satan as he would,
quote, "pace for hours
like a caged leopard,
viciously cursing
the Bible and God."
Lee's film adaptation
depicts copious amounts
of irreligious
behavior, including
a moment in solitary confinement
when Malcolm taunts the prison
chaplain by calling out to Jesus
to "kiss my ass," something
that's actually
completely changed
in the Persian version of it.
If you want, I can tell
you what the Persian says.
It's not "kiss my
ass" to Jesus--
nothing even close
to blasphemous.
Eventually these textual
and filmic narratives
show Malcolm X
prevailing over Satan.
In the film, the moment of
his political awareness as X
is represented
with the utterance,
"I ain't Malcolm Little.
I ain't Red.
I damn sure ain't Satan."
But in a psychoanalytic
reading, we
could say that
Satan remains part
of a fundamental antagonism,
one that the narrative attempts
to resolve by
rearranging its terms
into a temporal succession
but can never fully overcome.
So this is something that
psychoanalytic film theorists
have talked about, how if you
look at film narrative, what
it often does is there's some
kind of antagonistic situation,
some tension that the
narrative overcomes over time.
But, in fact, this is a
fantastical representation
of what the fantasy is doing.
It's resolving attention
by making it into--
by rearranging it.
Both are powerful
and disempowered.
It's the disempowered
moment becomes
the moment of empowerment
so that you overcome
your disempowered status.
But that's a fantastical
representation.
Could it be that the
Satanic X was not so much
the mistaken identity of
an otherwise wholesome
global ally, but the
index of an unruly element
that destabilizes even those
cosmopolitan attachments that
seem most secure?
As I have shown,
Hollywood cinema
has granted Iranians a useful
set of external reference with
and against which to define
their distinctive modes
of spiritual cosmopolitanism.
But beneath the self-conscious
acts of reference,
we can also read
Hollywood for clues
as to the myriad
ways in which things
might resonate otherwise.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Will you take questions?
I'm happy to take
questions, yes.
I was wondering, I assume
you interviewed these people
like Mahdi, you mentioned.
Right?
Yeah.
Did ever the name of
Rumi or Shams come up?
Because they should
be Satanists by them.
Not in my
conversations, but there
are anti-Satanist activists
who really dislike Sufi poetry.
There's really a range, too, of
what I'm calling anti-Satanism.
What I've given you is sort
of the far right fringe of it.
There are more
mild versions of it
that see dangers
in Hollywood film
and see kind of
polluting elements,
let's say, or morally corrupting
elements in Hollywood film,
but don't necessarily
go so far as to say
there's this giant conspiracy
and that this pervades
everything and so
on and so forth.
What I'm talking about
is that extreme fringe.
And, yes, in some parts
of it, Sufi poetry
would also be implicated
in one way or another,
even though that's less on the
forefront of that discourse.
[INAUDIBLE] was considered
[INAUDIBLE] by the clergies,
right?
Some of them.
Some mullahs were
really using [INAUDIBLE]
because they didn't
want to touch the book.
I mean, yes and no, in the
sense that there's also
a very strong kind of mystical--
mostly elite mystical-- trend
within clerical Shiism, not
Sufism.
I mean, there is Sufism, but
from the 16th century onwards,
at least, there's an elite form
of mysticism that takes Sufi
poetry as some of the
highest forms of expression
of ma'na, of meaning
and of spirituality.
So Ayatollah Khomeini famously,
himself, was enamored of Rumi.
He was enamored of
[INAUDIBLE] and of Hafiz.
And there are
stories about clerics
who even during certain
parts of the prayer
would have recited Hafiz poetry.
So you have that.
And then you also have people
who are adamantly against it.
And the opposition can also
take very different forms.
Thank you.
I think it's working.
Perfect.
Thank you so much.
This is a really
interesting talk.
I want to follow up on the
question of anti-Satan activism
or anti-Satanist activism.
You made it clear how the
Hollywood symbols circulate
through film festivals, through
bootleg DVDs, these things.
When you were describing some
of the anti-Satanist discourse,
it definitely
reminded me of videos
that are widely
available on YouTube.
If you look for Illuminati,
et cetera, et cetera,
millions of videos like that.
So I was curious in what forums
the anti-Satanist discourse
circulates.
It takes a number of forms.
Sometimes it's online.
I mean, there are
YouTube channels, blogs.
I mean there used to be blogs.
I mean, there's fewer blogs now.
Some of those videos,
actually, are dubbed.
I mean, Amin, the first
person I mentioned
as an anti-Satanist activist,
he was introduced to me
by someone else as a
person who was translating
one of these new world order,
Freemasonry kind of things
to Persian.
And I asked Amin.
There was no desire on
his part to hide anything.
He was, this is a
documentary, and I'm
translating it to Persian.
So there is that.
And then there are
certain public events.
So there was a university
student-organized conference
in 2009 that I attended
at [INAUDIBLE] University
where there were a
number of speakers.
And there were three
or four speakers.
And they spoke in
different ways.
They were brought in as experts.
There was a sociologist who was
a deputy in the Tehran police
force for social affairs.
And he talked about music--
heavy metal music-- and its
relationship with Satanism.
There was a professor
of communications
at the University
of Tehran who spoke.
And he was the most,
I think, nuanced.
He was talking mostly about
the relationship of music
in the United
States and Satanism,
but nothing that he said
really was not true.
He was talking about groups
like Black Sabbath and Marilyn
Manson and groups that are very
unabashed about their Satanism.
And he also said that,
look, when they're saying
"we're Satanists,"
it doesn't mean
that they're worshipping
Satan as some kind
of metaphysical figure.
It doesn't mean that there's
some kind of spiritual
or, sorry, supernatural
component to this.
It has certain kinds of meanings
in that particular context.
And there was also a
cleric who was at the time
a PhD student in
religious studies,
I believe, at Edinburgh.
And he wanted to study for
new religious movements.
And at the time he
was there, he was also
presenting on Satanism.
So there's this
public type forum.
Here, the one that
I'm talking about
was more of a
discussion-based thing.
But then there's others
that are more like lectures.
So Ali Akbar Ra'efipur,
I mentioned, he's often--
he was often invited by
right-wing student groups
to come and discuss
things like, how do we
interpret Hollywood film?
How do we interpret video games?
He famously had this
one speech where
he said that Super
Mario Brothers
and Sonic, the Hedgehog,
if you put them together,
Mario and Sonic becomes Masonic.
[LAUGHTER] And you can tell--
even the white gloves
that they where.
Why is it that all these cartoon
characters wear white gloves,
I wonder?
Mickey Mouse, definitely,
all the way to Sonic.
That's a clear sign of
their Masonic affiliations.
So there's also
that kind of stuff.
But, again, I mean,
what I want to emphasize
is that there are these guys,
and they're also in a context
where they're ridiculed
by other groups
that they're kind of furiously
debating with, still others.
And it can't be neatly
divided in a reformist
versus conservative
frame, even though most
of what I'm talking about has
a clear right-wing orientation.
It's on the far right
of the spectrum.
Yes?
I was wondering if spiritual or
cult connotations are applied
to any American superhero
movies like Avengers, X-men,
and whatnot.
For sure.
And if so, what's the most
contentious character or story
line?
That I don't know, to
be honest with you.
There are a lot of commentaries
on superhero films.
I haven't followed
the last few years.
I mentioned this book that
the Farabi Institute put out
in I think it was 2009--
it was 2010 or
something like this?
2009, I believe.
Sorry-- yeah, well,
whatever, around 2009.
And one of the films that
they selected from the 49
was Hulk, the first Hulk film,
and Hulk as a spiritual film.
So there, he was talking
about not in a negative way.
This author was saying here are
some ways in which this movie
represents spiritual topics.
And you have to also understand
that these guys aren't
necessarily the proponents
of spiritual film.
They're not necessarily
saying this is the right way
to represent spirituality.
They're saying
here are some ways
in which spirituality
is represented.
So character
transformations, humans'
potential supernatural
powers, and so on an so forth.
But this was a more
neutral/positive kind
of representation.
And then there's negative ones.
I know X-Men-- there's
been a lot of videos.
I think Ali Akbar Ra'efipur
might have talked about it.
I've seen against the X-Men
posters talking about X-Men as
particularly nefarious.
But I wouldn't say
what is the most.
And I think it's the
[INAUDIBLE] of the X
that there's something
there for sure.
Yes.
Thank you for fascinating talk.
I think that as part
of your article,
you mention that the
anti-Satanists deploy
white supremacist arguments.
I didn't understand that.
Could you explain that, please?
So the white supremacist
arguments that they make
are the arguments about
a Jewish conspiracy
behind the propagation of--
so Jewish conspiracy
to use films
as a form of global domination.
That's what they
very explicitly draw
from people like David
Duke and Mark Webber.
And there are translated
interviews with Webber.
There's a book by
David Duke about--
I want to say it's about film,
but I might be mistaken--
or some component of it
might be about film that have
been translated to Persian.
Those are the
white supremacists.
And then the ones that do more
of a kind of emblem hunting,
deciphering, those
kinds of things,
They're not so much the white
supermecists necessarily
as mostly fundamentalist types.
But there are also
some new world order--
NWO-- new world order,
right-wing groups
that also make those
kinds of association.
And a lot of these things
really blend together
when you look online,
not necessarily
at some of prominent figures.
Yes?
And then was it over here?
Yeah, kind of off
of that point, I
was hoping to elaborate on
an image you had earlier
of the Satanist jewelry.
And I noticed there were
swastikas among that.
So were those identified
as Satanist symbols?
And if so, how does
that connect it
to the Association of
Zionism with the Satanism?
It seems--
Yeah, over here.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Oops.
Did I pass it?
It's over here.
So this image was posted
on a news website that
was talking about
how the police is now
looking at certain jewelry that
is being sold in jewelry shops
to make sure that they're OK.
So they didn't identify
necessarily the swastika
directly.
I think I've seen the swastika
identified as a Satanic sign.
I can't really
tell you right now.
But there were points when I
had conversations with people,
and I pointed out
certain things that I
thought were inconsistencies.
So, for example-- and
this will give you
a hint of a possible
explanation for this.
It might not be the explanation
because that might not actually
be considered one [INAUDIBLE].
But I was at this conference
I mentioned at [INAUDIBLE]
University, and there
was a video that
was played from
Bowling for Columbine
where Michael Moore
interviews Marilyn
Manson because the shooters
at Columbine, the two kids,
said that they had
been inspired by
or that they had listened
to Marilyn Manson
music or something like this.
And then so Michael Moore goes
to Marilyn Manson and talks
to him and says, what do
you think about all this?
And in the clip where
this is being shown,
there are these protesters
standing outside
of a concert where Marilyn
Manson is performing.
And one of the speakers,
the speaker who was invited,
was a well-known.
pro-Israel senator
from the US Senate.
And I'll have to think
to remember his name.
But he was a very well-known
Democratic senator
who later shifted and became
centrist or maybe even became
Republican.
So I asked.
I asked a question.
I said, look, you're saying
that the this kind of Satanism
is a Zionist project.
At the same time, you have
a representative of Zionism
at this protest.
And he's protesting
against Marilyn Manson.
How can you reconcile
those two things?
And one of the
speakers, the cleric
who was studying the religious
movements, he said, well--
I mean, he basically
gave an explanation
that could be an
explanation of anything.
I mean, he said, well,
sometimes a group
will both create the
phenomenon and the opposition
to it in order to hide
themselves the event.
I mean, that can't really
be the explanation.
The building had brickwork
in its interior design that
looked like an inverted cross.
And I asked him, well,
there's inverted crosses
in this building, are you
saying that this amphitheatre
was built by Satanists?
And he said, no,
we know something
about the background
of these people.
But you're saying that
this is the explanation
for the background.
So anyway, all this to
say that the explanations
don't necessarily
always cohere such
that it allows a certain
kind of expansiveness
in interpreting symbols.
I think we had a question here.
My question was about the
particular form of the jinn's
supernatural Constantine all
taking video form and then
the videos you showed
of the exorcism.
If you could speak more about
how that influences [INAUDIBLE]
as opposed to reading a
book, which might also
be removed from circulation.
You mean why is it that
video, in particular?
That's a really good question.
And I don't know the answer.
The closest
suggestion I can give
is that there's something
about verisimilitude
in special effects in
that the special effects
in cinematic
representations attempt
to come as close as possible
to real-world visual experience
so that when you see a jinn
next to a human the way
that you actually see
humans, I suspect that that's
why that aspect of the
technologically mediated
verisimilitude, that that's
why these are particularly
compelling.
Now it would be really
interesting to look
at older representations
and ask if, let's say,
the visual depictions
of jinn in [INAUDIBLE]
from the medieval period
or the early modern period,
whether those were also taken
in some way as factually close
to the representation.
And perhaps also, in some
way, coming close to the way
that people experience
jinn either in dreams
or in waking experience.
I don't know that, but it never
happened that someone told me
this is very similar--
that the video
representation is very
similar to a pictorial
representation.
What I would often
hear would be that they
would say the video
representation is very
similar to received reports,
what we've heard about what
jinn look like, which could
come from religious sources,
but it could come from all
kinds of other sources.
It could be someone claimed
that they've seen a jinn.
And there's stories just
like there's ghost stories.
But I haven't seen
an association
between the pictorial,
necessarily, and the cinematic.
Yes?
First of all, thank you so
much for the presentation.
I want to say I
thought the flickering
light was a nice touch.
[LAUGHTER] [INAUDIBLE]
talking about.
But The question
I had was in terms
of covert cosmopolitanism, as
you talk about it, if you were
to talk to someone who
had Western influence
in their anti-Satanic beliefs,
and you brought us to the fact
that they were themselves
Western-influenced just as much
as maybe the guy's friend
who watched Supernatural
[INAUDIBLE].
Have you done that?
And then if you have,
what have reactions
to that conclusion been?
Yes.
That's a good question.
I mean, I asked the guy who
was translating the films.
I said, so you're
translating this.
Where did you get this film?
And he said, oh, it's online.
So it was a very matter
of fact kind of statement.
And I think to me
what that suggests
is that the very idea that
something is "Western"--
quote, unquote-- and that
label is either something
that can be positively
or negatively evaluated.
That's not a question
that always comes up.
In the same way that, say, a
scientific truth statement--
if you ask, is Neptune
the eighth planet
in the solar system, people
don't necessarily label that
a Western knowledge, a
Western truth statement.
It doesn't come up as
that because it doesn't
necessarily-- the
source of that knowledge
isn't necessarily
localized in a particular
historical or religious
or cultural background.
I mean, it should be if you
take the insights of, say,
science studies or the
history of science,
that kind of localization
is what scholars often do.
But certain kinds of knowledge
take on universal qualities
in the same way that
nobody ever in Iran
necessarily problemetizes
the fact that Einstein
was European, German,
Jewish, any of those things.
He's a universal figure.
There's poetry from
the mid-20th century--
[INAUDIBLE], I think.
No, not [INAUDIBLE].
[INAUDIBLE],, I think
it's [INAUDIBLE]..
He has a poem where he compares
Einstein to Muslim mystics.
And what's happening there is
that is really his background
is not as important as
the fact he's a figure who
is seeking universal truth.
So I think that's something
that in a way comes to the fore
here.
How that actually
happens, I mean,
it's interesting to
see how that happens.
It seems to have something to
do with the compelling nature
of how some kinds of
statements, some kinds of images
take on compelling force.
If someone finds it
compelling, then the question
as to where this is
coming from and whether we
should be distrustful of the
source doesn't even come up.
Yes?
I was wondering if
this phenomenon as you
call it is mainly seen
in or exclusively seen
in Shia communities?
Or does it stem
from a kind of need
to protect this
religious identity?
Or is it more of a political
nationalistic stance
against that?
You mean the anti-Satanism?
Yeah.
It's very hard to say.
I mean, what I would
say is that there
is a very particular
historical moment
at which this kind of
anti-Satanist critique
of Hollywood has emerged.
And for me, what's
interesting is
that it emerged at
the very same time
as the interest in
Hollywood horror
as potentially saying something
valuable about spirituality.
So the interest in it and
the antagonism toward it
emerged roughly
around the same time,
but it also merged
at a time when
there was quite a bit
of political tension
around the presidential
protests in 2009,
for example, the reaction to
the protest, the accusation
that there was fraudulent--
that the election
was stolen and so on.
So I don't think it's
necessarily by Shiism, per se.
I mean, there are ways in which
you can trace back the concern
with Ma'na, the idea that
there is meaningful spiritual
expression through
pictorial representation.
There's a certain
way in which that
can be traced back to
a particular strand
within Islamic philosophy.
And that is a strand that
has been very deliberately
articulated over time.
It goes back to
at least the 1980s
with war documentary filmmaking.
People have written about this,
about the way in which there's
a genre of
documentary filmmaking
that attempts not just to
represent what happened,
but to create a
certain kind of truth.
So by presenting what is
happening on the war front,
you create a transformative
spiritual experience.
And then some people who
theorize these kinds of--
and some of the filmmakers
who were creating
these documentaries,
they explicitly
connected their forms
of visual representation
and visual expression to Islamic
illuminationist philosophy.
And that has a background
that is steeped in--
I mean, not exclusively--
Shia Islam, but certainly in
mystical Islamic expressions.
But I wouldn't say
that it's necessarily
a sectarian kind of thing.
And it would be
interesting to see
whether there are other kinds
of either the positive side
of valorizing certain kinds
of films for their potential
for spiritual uplift
or transformation,
or the negative side, whether
that exists in other--
I'm sure it does.
I mean, I'm talking about
this as a global form
of circulation.
And there's others who
from all these countries
that I talked about who saw
something valuable in engaging
in that conversation,
that they are
trying to do some things
that are similar in using
the form of cinema in
order to experiment
with spiritual topics.
Thank you so much.
It was really interesting.
So I grew up in North
Africa in Sudan.
And we have possession
all the time there.
People have never been to
cinemas or know anything
to do with different languages.
And yet in that
form of possession,
they speak English fluently and
they act in very bizarre ways.
And yet, that form
of possession--
you can call it like you've
shown in a couple of clips--
there is a way of
removing Satan, basically,
who comes in different forms.
So that has been going on for
years in both the southern part
of Egypt and Sudan and
to some extent also
Eritrea and Ethiopia So that's
one for you to think about.
What form does those
kinds of possession
also take outside
of the film genre.
Another thing that I thought was
interesting, the three figures
that you showed--
the letter A in the middle
and the eye, the Egyptian eye,
and then the third one is
this star kind of thing.
Now, the last two I have
seen just a few months back
in [INAUDIBLE].
There's the letter A is actually
the symbol of anarchists.
So this has now taken
a Satanic symbol?
And here, too, it says anarchy.
See?
So this is partly what
I'm talking about--
Wow.
--with the radical
openness of interpretation,
that something like even the
anarchy sign, some people
may interpret it in that way.
I see.
For the first question, I
mean, you're absolutely right.
I mean, in Iran, too,
there are all kinds
of possession practices.
I mean, there's the czar
cults, so-called, in the south,
which are similar and have--
I mean, they're
materially connected
and historically connected to
czar possession in the Sudan.
And then there are others like
what's called [NON-ENGLISH]
among Turkmen in the Northeast.
As far as I know, I mean, I
haven't studied [NON-ENGLISH]
or czar possession other
than watching videos of them.
As far as I know, though,
Hollywood cinema isn't
part of the repertoire of
the way they talk about that.
What I found striking when
I participated in Cosmic
Mysticism was that actually
I could see ways in which
the forms in which some of the
possessions took were actually
quite similar to Hollywood film
in a way that differed from
either [NON-ENGLISH] or czar.
And that's one of the
things that initially
got me interested was to think
about how it wasn't just they
who noticed the similarity.
I, as an outsider, was
also seeing a similarity.
Now we could go after
a causal explanation.
Why is it that this is similar?
Is it because they're
watching films?
Is it because the films are
actually somehow influenced
by these kinds of possessions?
Or you could look for all
kinds of chains of association.
Or is there something
else going on?
So I was I was
interested in going
beyond merely a causal sort
of interpretation of that.
Thank you.
So I have a question
that has two parts that
are interrelated and yet not.
So one is a question as to
whether any of interlocutors
had any comments
about Iranian film
rather than something
from the outside.
And the second one,
relating to that,
was the question of
whether the fact of dubbing
or a secondary language-- is
the displacement of language,
is that doing
something that makes
it cosmopolitan as being that
which is separate but also
together?
And that's why Iranian film
wouldn't do this or not
or something?
Yeah, very interesting.
On the first
question, yes and no.
So the yes is about people,
authors and film critics
who've written about
spiritual cinema,
they often do comparisons,
not necessarily between horror
cinema and say [NON-ENGLISH]
but between Ingmar Bergman and--
I don't know,
[INAUDIBLE] or something.
Right?
There's films that they find
commensurable in some way.
But definitely a lot of the
intellectual exertion around
spiritual cinema had to
do with slotting films,
like seeing which films actually
fit in this and which didn't.
There was another
side to this, which
was that as more and more
horror, supernatural, sci-fi
films were broadcast
within Iran itself,
there were also attempts to
create Iranian films that
in some way approached
stylistically, technologically,
thematically those kinds
of representations.
So big budget example
was a film about Solomon
that was made by--
I forget who the director was--
but it was made about, I
think, five or six years ago.
It didn't succeed,
but it was an attempt.
I didn't hear anybody
saying I watched
Solomon and the representatives
of jinn were accurate.
But the producers
and the critics
definitely saw this as an
experiment in spiritual cinema.
And famously also
around the same time,
there were a lot of TV series
broadcast during Ramadan
in particular, where
there was some kind
of supernatural component.
So there was one TV
series, for example,
about a guy who
gets knocked out.
He's in a coma, and then his
soul starts to venture around.
And he gets embroiled
in a murder--
I mean, in the case
of, essentially,
his own disappearance.
So there was a lot of
very direct references
to the film Ghost in
that film, both in terms
of the way the ghost actually
acts in the world, his ability
to move through things, and
so on, but also in terms
of narrative structure.
But what was different
about it compared to Ghost
was that there was a
very explicit attempt
to make this not just a
piece of entertainment,
but actually something that
taught people something
about spiritual matters.
And these were controversial
I mean there were always
after each of these sessions
there would be a discussion.
There would be a
roundtable on TV
where people would
be discussing.
So how do we think about this?
How do we think
about this episode?
And so on.
Even representations-- is this
an accurate representation
of what souls actually
do in the world?
One thing that I found
really interesting
was that after a certain
point, these TV series
began hiring, at least on
paper, religious experts to show
that they had done
their homework
in their representation,
which didn't necessarily
dissuade the critics.
I mean, the critics were
often, eh, none of this
really makes any
sense, but whatever.
On the second question,
it's really interesting,
and I don't know,
the dubbing question.
I mean, some of these films--
most of the films that I was
talking about have been dubbed
and they're watched
in their dubbed form.
But people also seek
out the originals,
and sometimes they will
watch the originals.
Whether their
compellingness has to do
with the doubleness
of the language,
I mean, that's something really
interesting to think about.
More questions?
I think that's all.
Thank you very, very much.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
