We'll just pass him there / Why should we even care?
So, kind of late to the game with this and really shouldn't be spending my diminishing free time writing this up (sister's crazy wedding in India coming up, deadline for first dissertation chapter, panic all around about future job prospects....), but I finally got around to seeing the first Iron Man movie.
And while I love superhero stuff, Tony Stark's character is insufferably masculinist and chock full of American exceptionalism which set my teeth on edge but I'm not going to delve into that. What struck me was that the first long speech by the fictional terrorist elements the Ten Rings, based in Afghanistan, was all in Hindi. Setting aside the fact that native Afghanis would not speak Hindi at all, it makes no sense to represent any Islamic militant group speaking Hindi simply for ideological reasons. It doesn't work.You know, that inconsequential part where Hindu and Muslim ideologues don't get along. But the movie blatantly doesn't care--they acknowledge a certain laziness when the terrorist leader brags about how the organization is international and so many languages are necessary.
But what baffled me the most is the sort of interchangeability posited between these languages. One moment they are in Hindi and in another (as far as I could tell) in Arabic or maybe Pashtu or Dari or even Persian? (note: I'm not familiar with any of these or other possible languages this could be--Farsi perhaps. Not Urdu because I can get bits of that...). As if anything that sounds foreign and doesn't have Germanic/Slavic/Romance roots is the same thing. There wasn't even any attempt to justify it with plot--like now he's talking to the group of terrorists from X country and so must switch languages. Moreover, I was watching the movie with my boyfriend, and he being unfamiliar with any of these languages didn't even realize that different ones were being spoken; he just assumed they were speaking the same language throughout. The movie gives no cues to let its audience know and creates the sense that these languages are interchangeable or on some level, just one big language of evil because the subtext is a sort of axis of evil--terrorists are speaking them ergo all these languages are languages of terror. The sporadic subtitling was strange too. At least for the Hindi portions, it wasn't entirely accurate and when it wasn't subtitled was really weirdly cliched and not quite...apt terrorist ranting.
I'd be interested in what someone better versed in more languages could say about what languages are used and in what contexts of terrorism.
Sorry for being so serious and such a Debbie Downer, y'all.
And while I love superhero stuff, Tony Stark's character is insufferably masculinist and chock full of American exceptionalism which set my teeth on edge but I'm not going to delve into that. What struck me was that the first long speech by the fictional terrorist elements the Ten Rings, based in Afghanistan, was all in Hindi. Setting aside the fact that native Afghanis would not speak Hindi at all, it makes no sense to represent any Islamic militant group speaking Hindi simply for ideological reasons. It doesn't work.You know, that inconsequential part where Hindu and Muslim ideologues don't get along. But the movie blatantly doesn't care--they acknowledge a certain laziness when the terrorist leader brags about how the organization is international and so many languages are necessary.
But what baffled me the most is the sort of interchangeability posited between these languages. One moment they are in Hindi and in another (as far as I could tell) in Arabic or maybe Pashtu or Dari or even Persian? (note: I'm not familiar with any of these or other possible languages this could be--Farsi perhaps. Not Urdu because I can get bits of that...). As if anything that sounds foreign and doesn't have Germanic/Slavic/Romance roots is the same thing. There wasn't even any attempt to justify it with plot--like now he's talking to the group of terrorists from X country and so must switch languages. Moreover, I was watching the movie with my boyfriend, and he being unfamiliar with any of these languages didn't even realize that different ones were being spoken; he just assumed they were speaking the same language throughout. The movie gives no cues to let its audience know and creates the sense that these languages are interchangeable or on some level, just one big language of evil because the subtext is a sort of axis of evil--terrorists are speaking them ergo all these languages are languages of terror. The sporadic subtitling was strange too. At least for the Hindi portions, it wasn't entirely accurate and when it wasn't subtitled was really weirdly cliched and not quite...apt terrorist ranting.
I'd be interested in what someone better versed in more languages could say about what languages are used and in what contexts of terrorism.
Sorry for being so serious and such a Debbie Downer, y'all.