HOLLYWOOD ET LES IRANIENS : Ben Affleck’s “Argo”: A Movie about a Movie
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Affleck’s film sets out to bring the CIA’s role in the operation out of its obscurity. There’s a deep irony in this project that no major reviewer of the film seems to have noticed. Iran experts broadly agree that there is a direct line between the CIA’s overthrow of the progressive, nationalist, anti-colonial, and pro-democracy Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953—replaced by the ruthless dictatorial Shah, who remained in power until the 1979 revolution—and the storming of the US Embassy shortly after the Shah was deposed.
Media studies experts have also documented that t his link was systematically erased in the American public sphere’s packaging of the story. (In this vein, Argo begins with an historical montage referring to the Mossadegh coup as precursor so briefly that no one with the bad luck of encountering a long popcorn line will catch it).
The immediate cause of the storming of the US Embassy in late 1979 was overwrought protesters’ anger over the Shah being given refuge in the United States after the revolution, but for the many Iranians who would not have agreed with the violation of the diplomatic sovereignty of the Embassy, there no doubt remained a creeping sense that the Embassy represented a threat to Iranian sovereignty and that the CIA would try once again to reinstate the Shah as it had done a quarter of a century earlier.
Argo not only thrills its American viewers, it also proves that these Iranian suspicions were at least partially correct in that the CIA was active in Iran before, during, and after the revolution.
