Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (43 page)

Eventually, as filmmakers like Majidi, Kiarostami, and Bani-Etemad took more risks—and made it past the censors—Iranians began to flock to the movies. And the movie that attracted more viewers and sparked more reaction than any other in recent memory was
Two Women,
by the feminist filmmaker Tahmineh Milani.

The film tells the story of two women who had become friends years earlier in college in Tehran: Fereshteh, a poor woman trapped in a loveless marriage; and Roya, a successful career woman with a loving husband. But in Milani’s mind they are reflections of the same person—a woman as Islamic society sees her and the woman as she sees herself.

Fereshteh had been a gifted math student, until a deranged stalker threatened her, and her father took her back home to Isfahan. There, her parents pressure her to marry a man she doesn’t love. Fereshteh’s husband turns cruel, reneging on his promise to allow her to continue her studies, forbidding her to read books, locking the telephone so that she cannot communicate with the outside world, and accusing her of having a lover. “You should be controlled,” he tells her.

Fereshteh seeks a divorce. The judge asks whether her husband stays out all night, beats her, has bad companions, or gambles. She replies that the problem is different.

“He humiliates me,” she says.

“These are not good reasons,” the judge declares.

The stalker resolves the problem for her. He kills the husband, leaving Fereshteh and her two children on their own. Suddenly, she doesn’t know who she is. “I feel like a free bird but I don’t have wings to fly,” she tells her friend Roya. “I can take computer class . . . I have a lot to do . . . I must work, go to school, be the father and mother to my children.”

The women in the audience cheered and clapped.
Two Women
became the biggest box office hit in Iranian history.

Afterward, I asked my Iranian friends what they thought of the film. For one female friend it sparked memories of the way her late father, as a provincial governor, granted divorces. “Men would come to our house and throw three stones over their shoulders and say, ‘I divorce you once. I divorce you twice. I divorce you three times,’” she recalled. “That’s all it took to divorce a woman in those days.”

Another friend recalled the story of her cousin’s divorce. “Her husband refused to give her a divorce,” my friend said. “So she decided her best strategy was to treat him nicely and pretend that all was well. In a moment of weakness he gave her permission to travel. She left for the States with her child and never came back again.”

The reaction that surprised me the most came from the fifty-seven-year-old wife of a bazaar merchant. She did not have a job outside the home. Her life had been devoted to making her husband and her son happy. “Iranian society has always been a patriarchal one,” she said. “Society tells us that the man is always right and the woman is always wrong. The shadow of the man always lingers, even after he is dead. The bitter memories always stay.”

Another of the best new Iranian films was
Taste of Cherry,
written and directed by Kiarostami. It was the story of Mohsen Badii, a prosperous, apparently healthy middle-aged man obsessed with suicide.

Much of the film is shot from the claustrophobic interior of Badii’s Range Rover as he drives across a sunbaked lonely landscape on the outskirts of Tehran in search of someone to pay to bury him in the grave he has dug for himself in preparation for his suicide. A young cleric from Afghanistan tells him that the Koran bans suicide. A young Kurdish soldier assumes Badii’s proposition is a sexual one. But an elderly taxidermist engages Badii, telling him about his own botched suicide attempt. The taxidermist says that he had once planned to hang himself from a mulberry tree, but the scent reminded him of his love for mulberries. Won’t you miss the taste of cherries? he asks Badii.

In the end, I was left with the impression that Badii does indeed end his life, although the film can be interpreted differently. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1997 and other international awards but had been shown in Iran only once—at an unauthorized screening at the University of Tehran in 1996—and would not be commercially released until the spring of 1999. What especially bothered the censors was that the film presents the act of suicide not as a sin but as a rational or at least understandable decision. “He’s exhausted and can’t wait for God to act,” Badii says at one point about himself.

Ayatollah Khomeini had wanted films to educate the Iranian people. Certainly,
Two Women
made Iranians think about the relations between men and women and
Taste of Cherry
made people think about the wisdom of suicide, but not, I suspect, in the way the father of the revolution ever anticipated.

If the press and cinema have been bold and even subversive at times, those who disseminate information or entertain through television must walk a finer line. This medium is controlled directly by conservatives who report to the Supreme Leader. Yet even here, I have noticed a remarkable shift over the years toward material that reflects more closely what people are doing and feeling, rather than what some of the clerics would like them to do and feel. And that transformation reflects an increasingly realistic attitude on the part of the government that Iranian television has to change if it is to attract an audience.

Consider the case of my young Iranian friend Mohsen, who spends much of his day watching television. He is an importer who buys and sells industrial spare parts. Given Iran’s troubled economy, he has a lot of time on his hands. So much of his social life revolves around the twenty-one-inch Sony television and VCR that he hand-carried back from Japan and gave a position of honor in his living room. Mohsen, like many other Iranians, has an illegal satellite dish that gives him access to CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, and French, Turkish, Indian, and Arab television. If he positions the dish right, he can tune in Hong Kong and Japan. I have watched
Monday Night Football
and
Larry King Live
from his living room. His wife, Lili, a graduate student, spends most of her free time buried in books in the small study of their apartment, and calls him a “TV victim.” In fact, in the many years I have known the two of them, I have never been to their apartment when the television wasn’t on. But these days Mohsen is an equal opportunity viewer. He divides his time between Iranian and foreign television. That’s because over the years Iranian television has gotten better.

The revolutionaries’ goal has always been to produce Islamically correct television. In the early days, Ayatollah Khomeini put one of his most trusted aides, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, in charge of radio and television. Ghotbzadeh had no experience in radio and television and seemed ill-suited for the job, but he was in no position to turn it down. In its earliest days, revolutionary television served as a kind of national mobilization force, recklessly ordering all able-bodied Khomeini supporters as reinforcements to various battle scenes. Television stirred up emotions both for and against the revolution by broadcasting the show trials of the Shah’s generals. Then the religious propaganda and censorship began to elicit criticism and condemnation. A young television reporter I knew back then produced an investigative story on the reopening of the vast bazaar in Tehran after months of strikes, showing that revolutionary prices were higher than pre-revolutionary ones. The story was killed. An early editorial in the now-defunct leftist
Tehran Journal
called Ghotbzadeh’s censorship “worse than the Old Regime’s. No reds under the camera here, please, this is an Islamic station. . . . Well, someone should tell him that the proletariat are yawning as widely as everyone else at his revolutionary broadcasts.”

Leftist guerrillas who felt that they too had a stake—but no space—in the revolution staged protests outside the television headquarters. One night, when I was visiting the television studios soon after the revolution, a group of gunmen decided to attack. They called for Ghotbzadeh’s death and shot at the building with machine guns and pistols for hours, knocking out as many windows as they could before they gave up and went home.

Before long, American shows like
Kojak
and
Star Trek
were replaced by revolutionary songs, speeches, poems, and prayers, repeated over and over throughout the day. Unveiled women were banned from TV screens; employees who did not share the view that an Islamic gloss was necessary for every broadcast were fired. Children’s Koran-reading contests appeared. There were so many clerics on television that ordinary people dubbed it “mullahvision” and turned it off. One joke declared that Iranian television was black and white—black turban on channel one and white turban on channel two.

Simply put, revolutionary television was boring. And within a few years it proved no match for a new invention, the VCR. Before long, even ordinary people on limited incomes were saving their money to buy imported VCRs. The clerics struggled to ban trafficking in videos, labeling them “an invitation to prostitutes from the East and West to come into your living room.” The campaign didn’t work. And that should not have surprised the Islamic Republic. The revolution itself had been spurred on by contraband tape recordings of Khomeini’s voice preaching from exile. Why should anyone think Iranians would tamely yield to a new regime’s efforts to ban a new kind of tape cassette?

A lively underground business quickly grew up, selling pirated American films illegally on the streets of Tehran before they were sold legally in the United States. Because of the convenience and availability, I saw more first-run films in Tehran than I ever would have seen in the United States.

Then came satellite dishes. They were illegal but in high demand, particularly after intrepid entrepreneurs began producing them locally—which made them one-tenth the cost of foreign-made ones. Newspapers would periodically run stories of police seizures of hundreds of satellite dishes. That only made people more inventive in hiding the dishes: under foliage, elaborate covers of plastic sheeting, or camouflage tarps; in the trees; at the bottom of swimming pools; on balconies and in gardens. Even some of the most seemingly traditional families had “satellite.”

Turkish television in particular built an audience with its fare of striptease dancing, violent action films, and soft porn. Then, in the summer of 1999, a massive earthquake struck Turkey, killing more than seventeen thousand people and preempting regular programming for days. “Everywhere I went in Tehran,” recalled a friend who was visiting Iran at the time, “I heard complaints that the regular Turkish television shows were not being shown. One taxi driver told me, ‘Okay, I can understand it for one or two days, but it’s been a week of nothing but earthquake.’”

In the late 1990s, the clerics openly admitted that state-run television was second-rate. The government poured tens of millions of dollars into new programming. The result has been to make Iranian television schizophrenic. The news side is tightly controlled and largely predictable. But the entertainment division is downright avant garde.

The news side broadcasts the speeches of the Supreme Leader, the sermons of the Friday prayer leaders in Tehran, and the important debates in Parliament. The evening news is an empty ritual. For years it opened with file footage of the Iran-Iraq war and military marches. It would be as if American news began with footage of the Vietnam War and John Philip Sousa.

Whenever I visit Iran, I try to catch the English-language evening news. I watch it less for the content than for one of its anchors, an American-born woman with the unlikely name of Judy Garland who is married to an Iranian. (They met in chemistry class at the University of Oklahoma in the 1970s.) On the one hand, I find it disconcerting to hear an American voice reading Iranian propaganda. On the other hand, it is nice to know she is there every night, year after year. I have watched her as she has become more confident and loosened up a bit. She has even begun to wear makeup. Although I have never seen a strand of exposed hair, she has experimented with hoods of color—beige, brown, and blue. Sometimes I think I have detected the trace of a smile on her face.

Television still plays a blatant propaganda role for the government. I once happened to be in Isfahan with a group of American tourists on November 4, the anniversary of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran. Except for the “Death to America” banners hanging from lampposts, there was no evidence on the streets that day that this was a particularly ominous day. But television news that evening showed angry bearded men and women draped in black chanting “Death to America” in two dozens cities and towns throughout Iran. “Today is considered ‘Death to America’ Day,” the broadcaster announced.

My fellow tourists giggled. One said he could tell that the footage from Isfahan was fake because the protesters were wearing heavy jackets even though it had been shirtsleeve weather that day. Another noticed that some of the angry protesters were schoolkids who smiled at the camera. A third found it particularly amusing that the American flag in one bit of footage had put the stars and the stripes in the wrong place.

If Americans with only a few days’ exposure to Iran can see the emptiness of the newscasts, imagine how Iranians themselves feel. I don’t know a single Iranian—from any class or any part of Iran—who watches television to get the news. Politicized Iranians read the newspapers; those who can’t be bothered with the newspapers listen to the Persian-language services of the BBC and Voice of America on the shortwave of their radios, just as they did before the revolution. Some prefer the Persian language radio broadcasts beamed from Israel and France, and others the American-sponsored Radio Free Europe beamed from Prague.

And yet Iranian television’s entertainment division is dramatically different. There is an appetite for programs that make people laugh. So an all-out effort has been made to attract viewers—with game shows, soap operas, call-in shows, sports events, even American films like
One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(censored and minus the closet scene).
The Fugitive
with Harrison Ford, once sold as an underground video, eventually made its way to television—with the scenes of unveiled women excised.
Jumanji
with Robin Williams was aired over and over, as was
Dances with Wolves.