Contraband Cinema Piracy, Titanic, and Central Asia

Abstract

This essay examines piracy as a powerful means of circulating films transnationally. Titanic's worldwide success, and in particular its underground popularity in Afghanistan, prompts consideration both of the impact of unlawful distribution on Hollywood cinema's global reception and of theoretical issues raised by discourses that invariably surround cases of media piracy.

As the US blockbuster unspools, the screen flickers darkly; the sound is audible, but muffled, and audience members shift in their seats. This is not only, as it first might appear, a description of a motion picture theater as a film begins. Rather, it is a scene from Hollywood's idea of a horror show. Made by a film pirate armed with a digital camcorder, this video reproduces the theater's ambience along with the projection of the blockbuster. Destined for mass reproduction, the copy will later be sold at low prices from stores or kiosks in markets worldwide. Through theater camcording and other methods of illegally capturing the original, pirated films end up on the Internet, where they are streamed, downloaded, subject to file-sharing, and/or burned onto a DVD or other digital disc format, creating a highly mobile, illicit version of a video club.

According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the studios it represents lost $6.1 billion in revenue to film piracy in 2005, with approximately $4.8 billion of that sum resulting from piracy abroad.¹ While illegal trafficking in cinema is a problem in the United States, it represents the largest losses and arouses the deepest industry anxieties in relation to lucrative foreign markets, where US films can gross more than double the domestic take.² The significance of international revenues to the studios' economic health has caused the MPAA and associated organizations to direct antipiracy programs that assist law enforcement efforts, lobby Congress to strengthen copyright protections and international trade agreements, and pressure foreign governments to crack down on media pirates. Still, due to a continuing lack of regulation and ineffective enforcement of copyright laws abroad, international black markets often operate with impunity, making progress in this arena difficult.

In the meantime, Hollywood officials have indicated in no uncertain terms the gravitas with which acts of piracy are to be regarded. In 2002, the late Jack Valenti, then MPAA President, stated that "[w]e're fighting our own terrorist war." In this war, scores of films are "kidnapped or abducted by unscrupulous forces" on a daily basis. This post-9/11 rhetoric, along with other developments such as the passage of legislation that makes theater camcording a federal felony, defines piracy as a serious criminal activity. Indeed, the MPAA describes the involvement not only of organized crime, where profits from media piracy fund prostitution and drug trafficking, but of terrorist organizations that use gains from pirated goods to finance their attacks.³

Piracy has thus incited an economic, legal, and moral panic in Hollywood, causing pirated films to appear as monstrous transgressions of copyright laws. For others, however, the waking nightmares of Hollywood honchos swiftly become swashbuckling populist adventure stories. In the Ukraine, one of Europe's largest sources of illegal media, producers and distributors of such goods see themselves as modern-day Robin Hoods who save their low-wage constituency from the "high prices set by avaricious US" companies. In this context, the making and selling of intellectual property "liberated" from Hollywood and other Western media centers is a matter of national pride.⁴ In the literature on copyright, intellectual property, and piracy, some scholars too view the illegal media trade as a weapon against Hollywood's attempts to ensure "domination of the world market" through "monopolistic distribution schemes."⁵ In these arguments, piracy becomes a mode of "nationalism and resistance" to US-style globalization.⁶ Meanwhile, in the name of free speech and/or a democratic politics of access, anti-copyright organizations, such as the Swedish "Pirate Bureau," and hackers, such as those who cracked and shared Hollywood's encryption codes for high-definition movies, challenge corporate attempts to police ownership claims.⁷

I mention these positions concerning Hollywood's copyright wars because they often set the parameters for discussions of piracy. However, rather than engage the usual terms of debate, wherein the pirate is either Tony Soprano or Robin Hood, and piracy itself is either vilified as a criminal activity or embraced as an anticorporate maneuver, I would like to reframe the discussion. Without denying the importance of piracy's legal and economic implications, I want to consider what we can learn from its de facto existence as "a viable form of film distribution,"⁸ a powerful means of circulating films transnationally. In the Global Hollywood volumes, Miller et al. argue that the industry should recognize that piracy comes under "fair use in areas where traditional forms of distribution/exhibition result in market failure" (e.g., where movie theaters are few or nonexistent; where the citizenry is too poor to afford tickets or commercial video rentals). Further, piracy plays a significant "role in creating audiences and demand for media products" via the "cultures of anticipation" it inspires for US films worldwide.⁹ Without piracy, Hollywood's products would not have the presence in global markets—some well beyond the pale of motion picture theaters—that they currently enjoy. Piracy thus helps to maintain a visibility and desire for Hollywood cinema in corners of the world that might lack access to viable film outlets or be more strongly defined than they already are by indigenous films or other popular national cinemas on the global stage. In such circumstances, as Brian Larkin notes, piracy is not a "pathology of the circulation of media forms, but its prerequisite."¹⁰

With its pervasive presence as a media supplier, piracy provides an opportunity to investigate the impact of practices of film distribution deemed unlawful by the MPAA and major international trade agreements on cinema and its global reception.¹¹ At the same time, piracy prompts us to explore the theoretical implications arising from the transnational circulation and consumption of films outside of officially sanctioned channels. In conceptualizing such transnational interactions, we can ask whether pirated US films, despite their illicit status, represent a form of imperialism in foreign markets; whether they, conversely, attest in particularly graphic terms to the power that local conditions exercise over the meaning of imported goods; or whether they raise other questions not fully addressed by the imperialism and localism positions.

To pursue these and other issues, I undertake a case study of the reception of James Cameron's Titanic (1997) in Central Asia in 2000 and 2001, when pirated copies of the film were smuggled into Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The film quickly became a cause célèbre among the Afghan population, despite or perhaps because of the fact that the Taliban explicitly outlawed cinema, along with many other media. As a result, residents of Kabul, the nation's capital and largest city, could only see the film via piracy and a form of underground circulation necessitated by cinema's contraband status.

Titanic's appearance in Afghanistan presents a charged meeting under highly vexed political circumstances of a Hollywood juggernaut and a foreign audience that illuminates piracy's importance to grasping the intricacies of cinema's international impact. As the first film in history to gross more than $1 billion in legitimate worldwide distribution and as a remarkably hot property in the piracy market, Titanic is an exemplary global cinematic phenomenon. In fact, as we shall see, the film's trumpeted success across borders makes it appear as an almost mystical force capable of bringing the world together as a rapt audience. As it happens, the film is also based on a legendary event—the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic—that had immense public importance at the time of the ship's disastrous collision with an iceberg in the North Atlantic and that resonated long after in the folklore of various nations.¹² Further, both the ship and the film have been hailed as models of modernity: as the world's largest and most advanced passenger steamship at the time, the "unsinkable" Titanic was seen as the apotheosis of architectural design and technological achievement.¹³ Cameron's film, winner of eleven Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Director), was regarded as a pinnacle of Hollywood's epic storytelling and special effects wizardry.¹⁴ The case of Titanic in Afghanistan, then, incites reflection not only on piracy's significance to theories of transnationalism, but also on the manner in which the contemporary blockbuster appears to incarnate modernity for viewers in developing nations.

Details of the film's reception in Afghanistan and elsewhere as they are reported in the press are clearly important to this essay. However, an ethnographic account—a field-tested verification of the cultural codes Afghans and other viewers employed to decipher Titanic—lies outside the scope of the essay. My study ultimately focuses instead on the legend of Titanic as a global phenomenon. I will examine the critical role played by circuits of discourse surrounding successful, globally distributed US films in shaping how transnational interactions are publicly presented and understood. I am specifically interested in analyzing the manner in which these circuits define high-profile examples of film piracy, especially as pirated films circulate in oppressive national circumstances. I thus eventually shift my analysis to focus on English-language news sources as discursive regimes that construct such interactions—that enunciate transnational hybridities, to paraphrase Marwan Kraidy—attesting to this area of inquiry's significance to discussions of globalization. How do media accounts of transnationalism advance "our understanding of intercultural relations," of hybrid fusions of "relatively distinct forms, styles, or identities"¹⁵ as they occur across national borders? What stakes are involved? To begin to address these questions and to provide some context for the particularities of Titanic's fate in Afghanistan, I would like to chronicle briefly the film's popularity during its initial theatrical run and ancillary exhibition.

The Global Titanic Phenomenon

From the beginning Titanic was promoted as a major event abroad: its theatrical premiere was held in Japan in November 1997, with a London premiere following later that month. The film opened officially in the United States in December, and then in more than forty other countries from January through April 1998 (save for Pakistan, where it opened theatrically in August 1998). Although the Titanic's sinking was not a part of most global audiences' history or popular lore, the film based on its story earned substantially more money abroad than it did during its domestic theatrical run. Taking in $600 million in the United States, it grossed an extraordinary $1.2 billion in initial foreign distribution, making it, as I have mentioned, the first film to hit the $1 billion mark at the overseas box office (Figure 1).¹⁶

Figure 1.

A Japanese movie poster for Titanic (Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, and Lightstorm Entertainment, 1997).

In the process of achieving this distinction, Titanic broke box-office records in some locales. For example, when it was released in the Middle East and in Indonesia (the country with the world's largest Muslim population), it became the top-grossing film of all time.¹⁷ It was also the most profitable movie in Israel's history, with one out of five Israelis—approximately 900,000 citizens—going to see it. In New Delhi, Titanic was the first film to break the language barrier between English and Hindi, attracting substantial non–English speaking audiences.¹⁸ Post-theatrical exhibition also proved successful; according to IMDb.com, the film's early video release generated more than $324 million domestically and $900 million abroad. Of course, once piracy enters the mix, the film's international presence and profitability increase exponentially. In China, for example, Titanic earned $44 million theatrically, making it, until 2009 when it was superseded by another US blockbuster (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Michael Bay, 2009), the highest-grossing title in the nation's history.¹⁹ In the early aftermarket, Chinese vendors sold 300,000 legitimate copies of Titanic. However, in a country where pirated films typically constitute more than 90 percent of the market, this figure is dwarfed by the staggering estimated 20 to 25 million copies of Titanic sold by pirates.²⁰ Since Titanic was a major commodity in black markets worldwide, we can only imagine the extent of its actual global penetration.

Like US audiences, viewers in other nations were reportedly attracted to the film's spectacular special effects and to its Romeo and Juliet love story, featuring Kate Winslet as the upper-crust Rose DeWitt Bukater and Leonardo DiCaprio as the working-class Jack Dawson. Audiences did not all read Titanic in the same way, of course. The New York Times reported that in Japan, for example, young women swooned over DiCaprio, while others were impressed by the stoicism shown by British aristocrats and other passengers on the ship in the face of tragedy, a stance toward adversity that appealed to the Japanese sense of "gaman" (endurance in the face of pain or misfortune). The British saw the film as a parable about class and class tensions, but objected strenuously to the portrayal of ship's officer William Murdoch—a national hero in Scotland—as corrupt and cowardly. In Cairo, Egyptian audiences greeted Titanic enthusiastically because it recalled the romance of old Arabic movies, a welcome contrast to the gritty realistic films their own country produced at the time. Moreover, although they disliked blockbusters such as Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996), which confirmed their view of the United States as intent on world domination, Egyptians saw Titanic not so much as an American film but a "human" film. Indian and Israeli audiences remarked further that their ability to view the film shortly after its US release and to share in its widespread popularity gave them a sense that their nations belonged to a modern world community. Meanwhile, in China, Communist Party Chief Jiang Zemin praised Titanic in a speech to the National People's Congress, saying, "Let us not assume that we can't learn from capitalism." Titanic appeared as an impressive example of venture capitalism at work, a means of "better understanding [the] opposition" that could ultimately enhance Chinese know-how. In fact, the Chinese government initiated a project to reproduce the film's digital effects.²¹

As I discuss later in more detail, we must be wary of oversimplifications of national response in press accounts (and, in this example, an account appearing in a US publication seeking to explain Titanic's global appeal). For now, however, such accounts provide a modest view of the film's diverse decodings as it circulated transnationally. Coupled with its global polysemy, Titanic's extensive success in international markets allowed it to attain the status of a common experience among communities within different world populations. This was certainly true in Afghanistan, a nation to which I now turn.

Titanic in Kabul

Afghanistan is a predominantly Muslim country that is variably designated as geographically located in Central Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia. For thousands of years, what is now the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was a vital crossroads connecting China, India, and Europe, as well as East, West, and South Asia. The nation's strategic locus made it into a thriving trade and travel route. It was, for example, part of the Silk Road, an extensive maze of trade routes that extended from China and India to Mediterranean Europe, and part of the Grand Trunk Road that extended from Kabul through Pakistan and India to Bangladesh.²² Today, some of its crossroads heritage remains in the form of the substantial popularity of films from India's Bollywood, as well as in Pakistan's central role as purveyor of pirated media. By 2001, Pakistan had attained the status of one of the world's largest producers and exporters of pirated optical media (including CDs, VCDs, and DVDs), with hundreds of kiosks selling such matter in one Karachi market—the Rainbow Centre—alone. Many pirated media products appearing in Kabul shops are produced in Pakistan, as well as in other nations that were part of former networks, including China.²³

Historically, Afghanistan's geostrategic location has also subjected it to successive waves of invasion and conquest. If we consider this pattern in recent times, the nation has endured substantial political and economic instability, instability partly responsible for making it one of the poorest, most underdeveloped countries in the world. During the last forty years alone, Afghanistan has seen almost continuous civil war, while being invaded and occupied by the Soviet Union (1979–1989) and the United States (since 2001). After the Soviet departure, a fractious coalition of mujahideen (roughly translated as "holy warriors" or "freedom fighters") and territorial warlords attempted governance. One group of mujahideen, the Taliban, successfully gained control of Kabul in 1996, and of much of the rest of the country by the end of 2000. During this time the Taliban instituted order through a strict interpretation of Shariah, Islamic law. Among other things, they placed severe restrictions on women's lives and also prohibited music, cinema, television, and the Internet as non-Islamic or as influenced by the West.²⁴ While no brief summary can do justice to the nation's history or to this particular historical moment's complexities, Titanic's meteoric rise to popularity in Kabul unfolds during the Taliban's last two years of rule; prompted by the events of 9/11, a US-led attack deposed their government by November 2001.

Because of the ban on mass media, many Kabul residents did not see Titanic until 2000–2001, when black market copies of it and related paraphernalia, such as postcards and photos of DiCaprio, were smuggled in from neighboring Pakistan. As citizens secretly shared DiCaprio's images and watched the film on outlawed TV sets and VCRs hidden in their homes, Titanic captivated the public, achieving the kind of popularity it had had in other countries—including those with predominantly Muslim populations—during its initial international run. Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, though a fictional account of life in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion to the rebuilding period immediately following the US attack, provides a glimpse of the film's importance. As Hosseini writes, during a terrible drought in summer 2000, "Titanic fever gripped Kabul." When there was electricity, "after curfew, everyone locked their doors, turned out the lights, turned down the volume, and reaped tears for Jack and Rose and the passengers of the doomed ship. … A dozen times or more [families] unearthed the TV from behind the toolshed, late at night, with the lights out and quilts pinned over the windows."²⁵

In trying to fathom Titanic's particular appeal for Afghans, press articles cite the special effects, DiCaprio, the sex scenes, Celine Dion's theme song, "My Heart Will Go On," the emotional love story based on class conflict, and an experiential link in the audience's mind between the ship's doomed history and their struggling, war-torn country—a link given a more hopeful turn by the film's qualified but life-affirming ending.²⁶ Although identifying similar elements, Hosseini's characters are less optimistic about the ultimate source of Titanic's powerful allure: "It's the song. … No, the sea. The luxury. The ship. It's the sex. … Leo … it's all about Leo. Everybody wants Jack … to rescue them from disaster. But … Jack is not coming back. Jack is dead."²⁷ Whether the film's allegorical potential as tragedy or other elements figured more prominently as attractions, a Vancouver newspaper reporter exclaimed that Cameron's venture was "as close to a national entertainment sensation as you're ever going to get in Afghanistan." The same piece cites an Afghan admirer as saying, "Everyone remembers where they were when they first saw the movie," suggesting that Titanic had attained the kind of emblematic status usually reserved for events of supreme national importance.²⁸

To capitalize on the sensation, merchants affixed the Titanic name, unlicensed, to an array of goods, including T-shirts, burqas, shoes, cosmetics, toothpaste, perfume, and wedding cakes. Although the Taliban encouraged bakers to mold their confections into replicas of Afghanistan's historical monuments, wedding cakes designed in the ocean liner's shape were especially popular; at large weddings, the "ship" was accompanied by another piece of cake resembling an iceberg.²⁹ Through the film's popularity and this proliferation of things Titanic, Kabul became "Titanic City."³⁰ Yet, the film's attraction reached farther still. Part of its hold on Kabul had to do with DiCaprio's hairstyle: "Leo's haircut" was all the "rage."³¹ Adolescent Afghans sought to imitate DiCaprio's look as Jack, having barbers cut their hair short in the back and leave it long on top with floppy forelocks, creating what became known as the "Titanic haircut." Even if an adolescent male didn't particularly like the film, he might admire this look as making an already "handsome boy"—DiCaprio—additionally handsome and worthy of emulation (Figures 2 and 3).³²

Figure 2–3.

Leonardo DiCaprio's haircut was widely imitated by Afghan fans of Titanic: DiCaprio in the film and the "Titanic" haircut as it was fashioned in Kabul barbershops.

In mimicking the cut, these young men took part in a ritual that has defined fan behavior for generations. Imitating some aspect of a celebrity, from hair, makeup, and clothing to voice, gesture, and behavior, is a common marker of fan devotion. Circumstances dictated, however, that this would not be an ordinary relationship between a Hollywood star and his audience. In a story that captured the attention of major news services, the Taliban jailed dozens of barbers for giving Afghan youths the Titanic haircut.³³ This collision of fan response and the state resulted from the Taliban's interpretation of Shariah as it applied to appearance (with the burqa head-to-toe covering a familiar signifier of dress codes enforced for women under this regime). According to the Taliban, men were to follow the prophet Mohammed's example and have evenly cut hair, either closely cropped or reaching the ear lobe, jaw, or shoulder, with a center parting and a full and untrimmed beard.³⁴ With its front-to-back lopsidedness, the Titanic haircut could not deliver this kind of symmetry or proportion. Further, the Taliban contended that the floppy forelocks interfered with prayers, a process that involves bowing to Mecca, Islam's holiest site in Saudi Arabia.

Because the Taliban's religious police frowned upon Islamic adoption of Western ways, the haircut could not be administered or worn without risk. One barber remarked that the haircut joined other outlawed styles for men, such as the so-called English or Beatles cut, and thus was given either very early or very late and then secretly and only for friends.³⁵ Once given the cut, men often hid it under turbans or hats. If discovered by the police, barbers were accused of popularizing anti-Islamic Western hairstyles and jailed for a few days to a few weeks; those sporting the haircut were subject to beatings, instant trims, or, in some accounts, to having their heads publicly shaved. The religious significance of hair, combined with anti-Western policies and a ban on media, made what otherwise would be a routine fan response—a copycat hairdo—into a transgressive phenomenon worthy of state attention. As Kobena Mercer reminds us, hair is "never a straightforward biological fact," but "raw material, constantly processed by cultural practices which thus invest it with meanings and value."³⁶ Leo's haircut, then, became a site upon which cultural battles were waged within specific circumstances of reception. (On a similar front, The Beauty Academy of Kabul [Liz Mermin, 2004], a documentary about six Western and Westernized women who teach Afghan women the professional skills of doing hair and makeup, defines hair salons—also prohibited by the Taliban—as capable of advancing female independence and even of healing the nation.)

Titanic's taboo status in Kabul thus seems a straightforward case of the culturally subversive use of Hollywood fare on foreign soil. However, as I will argue, it also provides a starting point for a more complex consideration of the pirated film's significance within globalized circuits of distribution and exhibition. Further, while press accounts furnish a schematic sense of Titanic's import to Kabul audiences, the prolific coverage of the film's popularity suggests that there are other interests at stake, interests that lead us to weigh the pirated film's place in the rhetoric of transnationalism.

Contraband, Transnationalism, and Modernism

Clearly, there would be no Titanic phenomenon in Afghanistan without piracy: the film's illegal copying and circulation and the ensuing unlicensed proliferation of tie-in goods. Further, the pirated film did not enter a market where citizens could openly enjoy cinema, but a sociopolitical context that prohibited such experiences and punished violators. From a Western perspective, Titanic thus attains a double underground status stemming from copyright infringement in its reproduction and distribution and unlawfulness in its exhibition and consumption. With its Academy Award–winning blockbuster credentials and worldwide popularity, the film seems far removed from the kind of marginality usually associated with "forbidden fruit." Nonetheless, in certain circumstances, any film can fall into the category of contraband.

According to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, contraband describes "goods or merchandise whose importation, exportation, or possession is forbidden; also, smuggled goods." This term might call to mind the import of illegal arms into war zones, such as Iraq, or the export of "conflict diamonds" to finance insurgencies or invasions in troubled African nations. When applied to cinema, contraband might conjure up film genres that are illegal to produce, distribute, or consume in many countries—child pornography, for example. As the wide range of titles on banned book lists attests, though, contraband goods often fall into less dramatic categories as well and are subject to social and historical variables.

Contraband films—a vast number of titles—create their own strange subclass, dependent on absolute censorship and other restrictions that bar them, often temporarily, from a commercial market.³⁷ Their prohibited status can be defined by as small a territory as a municipality or as large as a multinational jurisdiction; their status is equally circumscribed by time. Contraband cinema can cause moral panics, as in the 1980s "video nasties" campaign in Britain that banned such violent films as The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1974) for their ostensible ill effects on youth. Alternately, contraband can inspire heroic stories about the insistence of free speech during dire times, as when, during World War II, Henri Langlois and friends smuggled films like Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) past German soldiers during the Nazi occupation of Paris, both to save such films from destruction and to allow French cinephiles to watch them in subterranean locales.³⁸

Contraband films, then, are an unpredictable lot, characterized by fluctuating identities based on context. For the United States and other nations supporting global intellectual property regulations, all pirated films are contraband since their production, distribution, and purchase by consumers are against international law. Yet the case is not always so clear-cut. In locales in Africa and Asia, for instance, piracy is the major supplier of media goods, and boundaries between legal and illegal media are not sharply drawn (hence, after the Taliban's fall, when told by a reporter that the films he is selling are illegal, a Kabul merchant expresses only bewilderment).³⁹ Making matters more complex, not all contraband films involve piracy. As we have seen, some films are banned because of content involving sex and violence or because of national origin. As the case of Afghanistan under Taliban rule further attests, Titanic was outlawed not because it was pirated, but because it violated multiple aspects of a version of Shariah law. Thus, contraband, subject to a multitude of different possible conditions and circumstances, is among the most mercurial of classifications.

As the above examples from France and Britain indicate, contraband also provokes discourses saturated with nationalism, specifically with heroic or demonic characterizations of nations (wherein French cinephiles during World War II demonstrate the commitment of freedom fighters resisting the occupation's tyranny through US cinema, and, by contrast, the United States, as a producer of video nasties, emerges as a violent country responsible for degrading the morals of impressionable youth in the United Kingdom). As a title that once had strict prohibitions against its exhibition in Afghanistan, Titanic gains membership in a volatile category filled with films that have tested and broken the law during their cultural circulation. In the process, Titanic's "Americanness" appears as heroic, as providing a means by which citizens—also heroic in their viewing efforts—can subvert a repressive regime.

If we step back for a moment from this unexpected classification of Titanic, its blockbuster status might otherwise lead us to consider its success as evidence of global imperialism, of a flow of US goods that facilitates US hegemony abroad.⁴⁰ In this view, Titanic's popularity in Afghanistan and elsewhere would represent Hollywood's expertise in controlling world markets and colonizing the imaginations of audiences, including those with anti-Western attitudes. The information we have of responses from abroad seems to indicate the triumph of Hollywood storytelling methods and stars against the backdrop of a familiar narrative, the ill-fated romance sprinkled with sex. Audiences also reacted favorably to another widely promoted aspect of Titanic, the verisimilitude of the special effects. Through this lens, global fans appear to have fallen under the sway of Hollywood's seductive imperial power, taken in by, among other things, the smoke and mirrors of its dream machine and the "shock and awe" of its technological displays.

However, this version of the imperialism thesis cannot by itself satisfactorily explain the grip of "Titanic fever" on Kabul. In a well-known intervention into globalization theory, Arjun Appadurai rejects the idea that globalization obliges cultural homogenization or Americanization. Instead, he maintains that "[i]f the genealogy of cultural forms is about their circulation across regions, the history of these forms is about their ongoing domestication into local practice." Through what he refers to as "vernacular globalization," film and other media "allow modernity to be rewritten," not so much according to national and international policies, but rather according to the imperatives of appropriation that define local contexts. The "materials of modernity" are in this way subject to the potentially surprising alchemies of domestication. Neither necessarily colonizing nor liberating, localization defines a "space of contestation" where "individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their practices of the modern" and into routines of self-imagining that take place as "an everyday social project" elicited by media contact.⁴¹

This perspective further fuels the idea that, in Afghanistan, Cameron's film is definitively aligned with the liberating impulses that constitute one of vernacular globalization's possible effects. From a local angle, Titanic's reception exemplifies an instance wherein a big, glossy imperial product was transformed into a subterranean good—literally, as both a commodity smuggled across the border and an instrument of subversion of state laws. By circumventing Hollywood's hold on global distribution and the Taliban's strictures against media, piracy provided Afghan audiences with access to a US blockbuster that allowed them the luxury of transgression. The otherwise rather tame practices of watching a film and mimicking a hairstyle are thus infused with religious, political, and national significance. Through this lens, Titanic becomes an unusual artifact indeed—a contraband blockbuster—that signifies freedom from oppression and serves as a foundation from which fans, through stealth viewing, haircuts, and T-shirts, are able to practice a kind of Ecoesque "semiotic guerrilla warfare" through taste and style.⁴²

Press reports already cited suggest additionally that Titanic's transnational viewers are responding to what Miriam Hansen has referred to, after Appadurai, as Hollywood's "vernacular modernism." This term describes Hollywood's potential, via its embodiment of modernity and modernization, to challenge "prevailing social and sexual arrangements," by offering "new possibilities of social identity and cultural styles" within specific local circumstances. Through US mass culture's displays of sophisticated technology, limitless consumerism, and an egalitarian ethos, transnational audiences may experience modernity's "liberatory impulses—its moments of abundance, play, and radical possibility … and [its vision] of an alternative public sphere."⁴³ Although Hansen writes about vernacular modernism during Hollywood's classical era (roughly from the 1920s to 1960), as we have seen, audience remarks about Titanic from such countries as India and Israel (where watching the film signified membership in a modern global community) suggest that some may still react with pleasure to Hollywood's incarnation of modernism. As we have also seen, Afghan audiences reportedly resist official culture by remotivating the significance of a Western commodity so that it represents both an act of civil disobedience and contact with a different world—the world of Titanic—that lushly embodies the modern, from the film's effects-laden images, steamy sex, and class-defying romance to the "radical possibility" it offers of bittersweet salvation in the midst of disaster. An imperial product is thus subject to potentially massive rewriting according to the social coordinates of the destination culture.

Certainly, Western media's ability to stoke impassioned, subversive self-reimagining appears in testimonials such as Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, a first-person account of the significance of the work of novelists, such as Vladimir Nabokov and Jane Austen, to a group of women struggling in the 1990s with the restrictiveness of the Islamic Republic of Iran.⁴⁴ To interrogate further the impact of vernacular globalization or modernism in relation to Titanic's pirated distribution in Afghanistan, more would need to be known about numerous cultural variables, from the barbershop's role in constructing desirable images of masculinity to patterns of media consumption (including piracy's place in and Bollywood's substantial importance to Kabul's film culture), to the process of media globalization itself during decades of war and civil strife. Like any nation, Afghanistan is marked by a confluence of cultures and historical indebtedness to multiple international influences.

Granting the importance of further study, it remains now to take stock of how and to what ends the rhetoric of transnationalism, as it is expressed through English-language accounts of this meeting between East and West, operates to construct the legend of Titanic as a global sensation. As it advances a certain "understanding of intercultural relations,"⁴⁵ this rhetoric does not cancel out localism's crucial significance; rather, it adds a discursive dimension as critical to analyzing film distribution across borders. Although a small footnote in reports on the nation's contemporary political struggles, the story of Titanic and the Titanic haircut provides an occasion for a proliferation of discourses about Afghanistan that school the reader in the country's plight and its citizens' state of mind. While furnishing clues about the dynamics animating Titanic's reception in Kabul, this micro-story becomes an ambassador for certain perspectives on Central Asian Muslim audiences and nations, especially as it reveals the therapeutic role that US mass media and the "American way" play in contexts of social and political repression. These transnational interactions, then, also provide an occasion to tout the special character and impact of US cinema. As reporters for the Los Angeles Times write, the fact that Hollywood films have appeal in societies "where 'Death to America' is being chanted … is a testament to the raw power of US popular culture, a force that seems to transcend politics, foreign policy, even war."⁴⁶

Plainly put, because localism in its transgressive manifestations is the preferred reading of the press, caution should be exercised in embracing this interpretation of transnational reception outright. In the widely circulated articles about the Titanic haircut I have cited from both Eastern and Western sources,⁴⁷ the press portrays US influence, enabled by piracy, almost exclusively as liberating, as bringing back joy and individual freedom in a time of oppression; meanwhile the local context appears as an enthusiastic receptacle for Western media. As Titanic's global audience responds to the film's mastery of storytelling, stars, romance, class conflict, sexual explicitness, and technological proficiency, press accounts acknowledge certain overall themes in the film's international appeal: its inherent humanism, its display of capitalism and modernity, and its representation of democracy or freedom. From this vantage point, Hollywood incarnates the modern and progressive, inspiring oppressed and/or developing countries especially to experience it as a means of rising above political and social repression, as well as underdevelopment. In Afghanistan, under the avowedly antimodern Taliban, stashing a TV set and a VCR in the toolshed, buying black market videos, and getting the Titanic haircut constitute subversive acts that signal the deep appeal of Hollywood's cosmopolitanism and the West's affective status as a possible utopia. This particular rhetoric of transnationalism is thus informed by another rhetoric—that of modernism.

As Kraidy has argued, associations of modernity and freedom with the West in discourses on hybridity are problematic. Such connections define individual freedom "in terms of consumer desire for US technology and popular culture," while presenting this technology as "a fetish of Western modernity and creativity to which foreign audiences aspire." Further, as the press portrays non-Western audiences' avid pursuit of Western goods, the "longing for Western popular culture [appears to be] an irrepressible force that subverts even the most authoritarian governments and suggests that, in the absence of cultural repression, [audiences] would flock to US popular culture."⁴⁸ By equating the consumption of US products with freedom and the experience of modernity, these accounts eulogize the nation on its own ideological terms as a land of liberty and cutting-edge plenty that provides a compelling natural alternative to other systems of governance. More subtly, as Kraidy contends, this coverage obscures any hegemonic control the US exercises abroad by portraying its influence as emotionally irresistible to foreign audiences eager to be schooled in Hollywood's "sophisticated" aesthetics. At the same time, in a rhetorical sleight of hand, the US appears to be absolutely central to global entertainment. This proposition minimizes the extensive "horizontal" intercultural relations existing among other countries, while also failing to provide a sufficient sense of the cultural codes at work in reception and the diverse meanings world audiences activate in relation to US media.⁴⁹

The story of Titanic's worldwide popularity is very much a part of this insistent and multifaceted discursive pattern. As Titanic's success attains legendary proportions, it provides the New York Times and other sources with an occasion to probe transnationalism, an investigation that often confirms the striking effectiveness of Hollywood's charisma on foreign audiences. Reports devoted to the Titanic sensation in Kabul depict the city's space as permeated with a passion for US cinema; similarly, its marketplaces, sites of prolific Titanic merchandising, are imbued with spontaneous and uncontainable capitalist impulses. Even in the face of state censure, desires for the West cannot be expunged. Thus, as the press presents US media as furnishing tools for minor revolts against repressive regimes, the West and its economic system appear as the true objects of desire for non-Western peoples once they are left to their own devices. In this way, reporting reintroduces through the back door an imperial thrust to transnational exchange, while obscuring other local, cultural factors at play in the encounter.

The case of Titanic thus demonstrates that, while Western products may indeed have a subversive charge in certain situations of reception, transgressiveness is also a prized commodity in descriptions of the global circulation of Western products—a discursive antidote to more troublesome scenarios of hegemonic control. Such accounts demonstrate the "American way's" implicit rightness, as well as Hollywood's relevance to all national contexts, its ability to speak to heterogeneous peoples, irrespective of potentially profound economic, social, and political differences. Thus, another powerful mode of transnational rhetoric—the incendiary language accompanying statements about film piracy by the Jack Valentis of the media business—finds counterpoint in other public assessments embracing illegal distribution as a form of free speech that justifies Hollywood's significance to global media experience. The press ignores the legal and financial implications of Titanic's illicit circulation in favor of defining its social and political impact—its affective contribution to relieving repression under the Taliban. That the pirated film in this case is outlawed by the government of the destination culture amplifies the sense of Hollywood's critical importance to foreign markets.

We return, then, to familiar territory with criminal versus redemptive visions of contraband cinema, dueling views of outlawed artifacts infused with nationalistic sentiment. Outcries in the United States focusing on piracy's illegality and immorality inflame sentiments against nations participating in this enterprise (such as China), demonizing them in the process. Discussions of piracy's emancipating functions in Afghanistan take a different tack: it is not the Pakistani pirates, but the bootlegged object itself that, as it implicitly represents Hollywood and the United States as epicenters of liberating impulses, radiates a heroic nationalism. In this case, discursive regimes construct intercultural relations through the thematic of transgressive localism, a thematic that, in turn, becomes a powerful means of characterizing the United States as a desirable place that incarnates visual plentitude, technological sophistication, and freedom, a representation of modernism that, among other functions, promotes Hollywood as an attractive fantasy locale.

In this contemporary chapter of the RMS Titanic's history, modernism attains at least a double identity: it describes a pleasure that transnational audiences may very well experience at the sight of a Hollywood special effects behemoth, and it embodies a subtle ideological agenda that portrays Hollywood as a benignly progressive center of influence that appeals to audiences ready to embrace freedom, especially in underdeveloped and/or repressive national contexts. One identity does not necessarily displace the other: considering modernism as a discursive strategy does not discredit the vernacular experience of cinema any more than local testimony involving modernist pleasures puts that strategy to the lie. In fact, these functions are interdependent: the press relies on such testimonies to authenticate and construct its accounts, while the local often becomes public through media coverage. In various and complex guises, then, modernism is a fluid, polyvalent force that weaves its way through experience as well as through the public discourses devoted to describing that experience. While theorists have often debated modernism's function as an experiential register in the globalization process,⁵⁰ its operation in discursive regimes that define how cultures interact indicates too its prominence as a mode of defining transnational exchange.

As we have seen, as a de facto form of film distribution, piracy is capable not only of making a film into a national sensation, of enabling Hollywood cinema to achieve an influential presence in national imaginaries abroad, but of acting as a discursive magnet that allows certain stories to be told about transnational reception. My findings suggest that, although imperialism may seem a less persuasive account at a time when localism provides needed specificity and agency to acts of reception by destination cultures, some discursive terrains hijack the local to perpetuate a view of America's centrality to and felicitous impact on developed and developing nations worldwide.

Postscript: The Film Will Go On

When the Taliban fell in Afghanistan in November 2001 (only to resurge several years later), newspapers and online sources conveyed this event's impact through coverage of, among other things, the reopening of Kabul's Bakhtar Cinema. Reports showed a spontaneous mass eruption of freedom-feeling by male moviegoers (screenings remained segregated by gender). The first time in five years that many had seen a theatrical film, "movie mania" broke out in Kabul, with thousands waiting and then rushing to get into the dilapidated 650-seat, single-screen cinema for a screening of an Afghan title, Uruj (Ascension; Noor Hashem Abir, 1995), about mujahideen guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation.⁵¹

As a newspaper correspondent remarked of this occasion, "You'd have thought Harry Potter had just premiered."⁵² Headlines such as "Afghans Scramble to See Hollywood Films" with bylines such as "Collapse of Taliban Rule Means It's Movie Time Again" followed. Kabul TV began broadcasting interviews, news, and prayer readings, and video stores reopened, renting US blockbusters such as Independence Day, Rush Hour (Brett Ratner, 1998), and Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000).⁵³ Most reports quoted Afghans as saying that they were finally able to enjoy themselves again.

In the midst of this potpourri of media experiences, Titanic still had not lost its luster. In 2002, the Media Education arm of the commercial Canadian television program MuchMusic (CTV, 1984 to present) sent interviewer Jennifer Hollett to Kabul to film life there post-Taliban, with a special focus on youth and media. Among other things, she found that, whenever she mentioned movies to Afghans, they inevitably brought up Titanic. During the time of the Taliban, pirated copies of the film, she discovered, had been "secretly distributed resulting in a national obsession" (Figure 4).

Malaiz Daud, a young man she interviews, agrees that "Titanic was a big movie here," offering further that "there are markets named after the Titanic … Titanic snuff, Titanic glass, Titanic teapot, everything." Ms. Hollett also asks Daud about the Titanic haircut: "Didn't the Taliban ban Leonardo DiCaprio haircuts?" He responds, "They tried to make people by hitting them, by beating them, not to have Leonardo DiCaprio haircuts." Ms. Hollett then travels to M. Fazel's barbershop to inquire about the cut. Fazel remarks that he styled many young men's hair in this way (Figure 5).

Figure 4.

An intertitle from the MuchMusic TV special on Afghanistan (CTV 2002) announces Titanic's underground popularity.

Figure 5.

From the MuchMusic TV special: a young Afghan wearing a Titanic T-shirt featuring DiCaprio.

In 2003, six years after its premiere, Titanic is once again in the limelight in Afghanistan, with a screening at Kabul's Cinema Park. While Bollywood fare dominates the market and piracy is still rampant, Cameron's blockbuster ranks as one of the most important official post-Taliban US imports, along with Arnold Schwarzenegger films, Michael Jackson's music, and Rambo III (Peter MacDonald, 1988) (a film "dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan" that features Sylvester Stallone's title character fighting with the mujahideen against the Russians). Press headlines such as "In Kabul, the Taliban Sank but the Movie 'Titanic' Goes On" treat the film's reappearance as the triumphant official return of the repressed. A reporter describes how "boys now freely get their hair cut floppy like the movie star, Leonardo DiCaprio [and] girls hum the movie theme's song, 'My Heart Will Go On.'" Afghans also recount when they first saw or acquired the film during the Taliban's reign (on trips to Pakistan, as refugees in Iran, as smugglers hiding the film in their underwear as they crossed into Afghanistan); everyone in Kabul has "seen the blockbuster film … several times." Further, barbers recall the first "Titanics" they gave and the danger both they and the wearers faced from Taliban angry about the film's popularity. Meanwhile, in the city's central market, vendors sell Titanic Mosquito Killer, Titanic Perfume Body Spray, and its variant Titanic Making Love Ecstasy Perfume Body Spray, and citizens buy Titanic-brand toothpaste, shampoo, baseball hats, and T-shirts. The film continued for a time, then, to be not "just a movie [but] a way of life."⁵⁴

Taken together, these three commentaries suggest that media and media-related commodities remain a means of portraying political change and US influence in Afghanistan. While capturing the citizenry's joy, the press defines this first blush of independence from Taliban rule in ways that continue to secure connections between media (including US cinema) and liberty. By concentrating on media access as an embodiment of this politically charged transition, such reports ignore the military action that spawned the Taliban's fall at the same time as they subtly celebrate the West as the cause of a new media ethos. As the two latter accounts in particular indicate, Titanic has both a significant local meaning for Kabul citizens and an enduring presence in the press as a means of representing the Taliban and immediate post-Taliban eras. Further, testimonials from Afghans in these accounts and comments in blogs from visitors, US personnel stationed in Central Asia and the Middle East, and even humor magazines showing Osama bin Laden with a Titanic haircut⁵⁵ suggest that the film and its famed haircut quickly became part of cultural memory, part of a map to the past. This means of recollecting the injustice of the recent past demarcates it from an ostensibly new order that offers, among other things, freedom in media consumption (although in reality restrictions on and the banning of certain media still apply, including things Titanic).⁵⁶ In this way, memories of Titanic help to define past and present for those grappling with a substantial moment of transition in the nation's history. At the same time, the rhetoric of transnationalism presents the film's once contraband status as the stuff of national folklore, constructing it even more securely as a text that subverted the dictates of a repressive regime and confirmed favorable Western influence—functions that minimize the heterogeneous, even contested, nature of its meaning for these audiences and their attitudes toward the West.

As Titanic sailed back onto Afghan cinema screens and into video stores and markets, it is clear that piracy had successfully fomented "cultures of anticipation," keeping alive, even stoking a taste for, Titanic and Hollywood—both in the legitimate and black markets—long after the film's theatrical premiere. Without denying the significant resonances the film may have had in vernacular registers (as a means of subverting state authority during the Taliban and as a springboard for a blissful media experience in the aftermath of their overthrow), attention is also due to its operation as a visible marker of the nature of transnational exchange. In this case, as media are represented in press and online accounts as synonymous with free speech rather than hegemonic control, the manner of fathoming the impact of US cinema on global popular culture attains a heroic sheen. The description of the apparently free market in Kabul continues to demonstrate that, lurking behind substantial cultural, religious, and political differences, are national impulses informed by an unstoppable consumerist and capitalist spirit—a spirit that the West would have no trouble recognizing as an old, reliable friend in the midst of Central Asian and Middle Eastern wars representing a far more agonistic relationship.