Reel Evil

I still remember the unexpected fever that washed my skin in red as I watched him, the forty-third president of the United States, George W. Bush, apply a black-and-white overlay to the world in his 2002 State of the Union address. That speech followed a series of unthinkable terrorist attacks on American soil on September 11, 2001. My visceral response as I watched the State of the Union that night is captured by a descriptive French phrase, colère du lait (milk anger), a state of being that boils into sudden rage when heated.

In that speech, President Bush spoke of three "axis" countries: North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. They were evil. They developed and tested dangerous weapons of mass destruction. They curtailed their citizens' freedoms—repressed, starved, and tortured them. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was, by far, the worst among them.

This political rhetoric is by now familiar ground. The forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald Trump, applied it to President Bashir Assad in his first postelection act of military aggression against Syria and again to Iran's president Hassan Rouhani's in a speech in Riyadh in May 2017.¹

In the spring of 2003, still outraged by the reconstruction of the world in terms of good and evil, I designed the Reel Evil: Films from the Axis of Evil film series at Duke University with my colleague and collaborator miriam cooke, the eminent Middle East literary scholar, and Hank Okazaki, Screen/Society's film curator. By that spring, six countries in total had been identified as members of the "axis of evil" by the Bush administration.

Reel Evil, our festival of films from North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Cuba, launched just days before the United States went to war in Iraq in March 2003. The war implemented the military doctrine of "shock and awe"—rapid dominance in order to shut down the adversary's society completely, incapacitating the ability to fight.² The Reel Evil film series, which ran from February 26 to April 17, 2003, featured a variety of film genres from the axis of evil—comedies, vérité films, melodramas, war epics, and Godzilla films. The series was media activism in its own right. The sheer variety of featured genres emphasized the presence of well-developed societies in these vastly different "adversary" countries against the backdrop of a rhetoric of uniformity and backwardness in the media landscape. The festival's range established that there was an infrastructure supporting the making of feature-length films in the axis countries atop a culture and viewership that enjoyed a hearty laugh and a solid cry.

Global media outlets went bonkers when they heard about Reel Evil. Hank, miriam, and I gave interviews about the festival for weeks on end that spring. The BBC, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Fox News, MTV, NPR—the news networks were all excited.³ The conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh denounced us. He wondered what the concession stands on Duke's campus would sell during the screening of the North Korean Godzilla movie Pulgasari (1985): fried frog legs and critter soda?

Made in 1985, Pulgasari was Kim Jong Il's crowning achievement in filmmaking. To make it, he kidnapped a South Korean director, Shin Sang Ok, and his wife, the talented actor Choi Eun Hee.⁴ (The film is clunky, and it is so dreadful that it is awesome!) Teetering on this foundation of grave corruption and wrongdoing by the filmmaker himself, the film itself tells the people's story, the story of a giant metaleating monster who fights alongside the peasants to overthrow an evil monarchy.

The semester-long film series was intended to educate Duke students about cinema and film industries in the axis countries that had come into focus. This simple act, we thought, would undo the representations of otherness that daily colonized our media on the level of content. It would also upend formal film standards that had been normalized by dominant cinema in its circulation around the globe. Our films would show that cinema could speak in a multiplicity of formal...