ad any validity at all. More recently, it has been influenced by images from the Gulf War or from airplane hijackings, as if the most extreme aspects of a culture represented that culture as a whole. Indeed, the way Arabs are used in American films today is as if the Oklahoma City bombers were to become the model for the depiction of all Americans by foreign filmmakers. This reflects some of the ideas about Orientalism. The older Arabian Nights fantasy involves one type of Arab stereotype:
The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries (Sered).
Different types of Orientalism are identified by Sered:
Latent Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is. Its basic content is static and unanimous. The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior. Manifest Orientalism is what is spoken and acted upon. It includes information and changes in knowledge about the Orient as well as policy decisions founded in Orientalist thinking. It is the expression in words and actions of Latent Orientalism (Sered).
Latent Orientalism leads to Manifest Orientalism in many films. Abbas Fahdel recently wrote about the way Western filmmakers have treated the Arab, developing images more from fantasy and imagination than reality:
This colorful, mysterious and exaggerated picture, this O...