The second ten minutes of Prince of Persia
Trigger warning: there's some discussion of sexual threats and implications of sexual violence later in this post
To recap the previous post, this film has interesting idea of Persia. It’s a confusing, almost mythic place, seemingly beyond common historical periods. It’s a massive kingdom with the borders and Gods of the Sassanid period but the artifacts and practices of times closer to the Safavid period. Worse yet, there’s scattered references to cultural markers in the intervening almost-millennium between those periods. The confusion is equally cultural as temporal. It’s a culture populated by Turks, Arabs, and European-looking fellows. Its architecture is only hazily defined as somewhere between Turkey and India.
But speaking of India, that’s apparently what they want us to think of when they at last give us a more detailed look at Alamut, the holy city full of supposed bad guys from last time. Here’s one of those looks:
And my, how Mughal. The small umbrella-like constructions over the guard towers are chhatri, and basically a shouted clue that Alamut is supposed to be vaguely Indian. Funnily enough, amidst the very Indian chhatri, we find this:
This is just one of many raised and elaborated doorways in the fortress-like city of Alamut. This is pretty overtly a remixed version of pishtaq, which while not unheard of in India is more strongly associated with, of all places, Persia (and a couple of other places, namely Central Asia). It’s interesting that Persian architecture in this movie has been somewhat faithfully rendered, but with a somewhat more Arab look to it (octagonal rather than decagonal structures, for instance), but there also seems to be a common problem with pseudo-Indian architecture in this movie being sort of represented in Alamut, but with a slightly more Persian appearance (like pishtaq). It’s almost as though these various versions of the “Orient” are collapsing westward, making the Persians more familiar to Europeans, while merging Persian and Indian variants of an “exotic” architectural landscape into somewhat inaccurate mixture.
In spite of these occasional oddities, there’s a clear connection trying to be drawn between Alamut and Indian cultures (or perhaps Indic cultures, to include Pakistani groups). We hear the crown prince brother of our protagonist remark that the princess of Alamut is quite beautiful right at the ten minute mark, and we immediately cut to this:
The henna-covered hands, paler than virtually any Indians, are our first glimpse of this Alamutian princess. Welcome to awkward objectification land. Well before we see her face, we also get treated to a glimpse of her ankles being henna’d by q-tip:
She’s interrupted by a gravel-y voiced advisor-type informing her that the entire Persian army is basically at her door. There’s some vague implications that the invading Persians are religious extremists of a sort, or as the advisor-type says it, “their faith has little love for any truth other than its own”. It also becomes apparent that this princess Tamina has actual political power.
Already it’s awkwardly clear where this is heading. She’s part of a pseudo-matriarchal or at least more female-inclusive sort of “Hindu” culture that we’re going to see contrasted, probably painfully, with the patriarchal and overtly male-dominated sort of “Islamic” Persians. Basically, we’re going to get the romance between Jodhaa and Akbar the Great as in Jodhaa Akbar. Perhaps instead, we’ll see the disastrous relationship between Ice Candy Man and Lenny’s Ayah as in Cracking India. In either case, we’re going to see a romance unfold that’s either overtly or covertly or accidentally about Hindu and Muslim relations, that clearly genders Muslims as male conquerors and Hindus as the female conquered. But instead of this just being an ill-suited metaphor that Indians and Pakistanis use to explain their own histories, this is going to be as told by white people who aren’t really involved and dangerously unaware of the implications.
Just so that American audiences are not-quite-consciously made aware of this archetype that’s being played with, we get this statue in the background:
It appears to be Airavata, the three-or-five-headed elephant steed of Indra, king of the devas, or demi-gods. This is a common icon throughout both Hindu and Buddhist areas of South and Southeast Asia (it appeared on the royalist Laotian flag and crest). Just in case that background shot wasn’t clear enough, however, we shortly get treated to more Hindu iconography throughout the scenes of Alamut. Like this:
Naturally, all of this is extremely confusing, since Alamut is a real city, in Western Iran. Not only is all of this geographic information extremely misleading, but the pitting of a supposedly pseudo-Hindu Alamut against a supposedly pseudo-Islamic Persia denies the centrality of Alamut to Persian culture. Alamut was the base of the Assassins, the first Shia resistance group within Persia to organize against foreign, Sunni control. The religious and military order that gained control of Alamut and used it as their primary location served as the inspiration for later indigenous Shia revolutions against external control of Persia. Even the modern Iranian regime, which established itself thanks to the deep resentment towards the foreign backed dictator, Shah Reza Pahlavi, draws indirectly on this.
Of course, in this film, the “Persian” empire conquers the city of “Alamut” which has nothing to do with the Assassins (we’ll see them later) or Persian culture (since they’re vaguely Hindu, of course). In the midst of that, the quite-clearly-white princess tries to have a loyal soldier whisk a certain dagger out of the city. Naturally this goes wrong, and it ends up in the hands of our protagonist.
Meanwhile, back at the “High Temple,” the princess is captured and Alamut, the actually Persian city, falls to a supposedly Persian Empire. Her benevolent conquerors give her two options - marry their crown prince or die.
She basically declines the non-deadly option, and only reneges once the protagonist arrives on the scene, not so surreptitiously with the macguffin dagger she had tried to get out of the city into safety. She immediately accepts the proposal, even after her fiancé pulled her shawl back with the tip of his sword. Besides the overt militarism to that, in this cultural context he quite literally stripped her in front of scores of men.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen (by Mughal or Safavid standards) a lot of the princess’s body, who previously was walking around wearing this:
In the previous scenes in Persia, women had worn hijabs or other Islamic coverings to show their modesty and purity. Even in the vaguely Hindu city of Alamut, we’re treated to vaguely Islamic head coverings, such as in this scene:
Given how the Islamic tradition of obscuring the hair is at least in part influenced by North Indian and pre-Islamic Persian ideas of purdah, meaning concealment of the female body (by segregation, head coverings, baggy clothing, and other means), the way female extras have been dressed is actually somewhat accurate for any of the various time periods this could be argued to have been set in.
But this representation of women as being literally obscured doesn’t seem to jive with certain scenes the director wanted in this film. Like this:
To review, Alamut has been completely divorced from its Shia history by this film. Instead, it has been thrust into a cultural context quite similar to Mughal India, turning it into the “Orient” respective to the Persian protagonist, who is respectively “Oriental” to the primarily European and American audiences of this film.
More than that, however, because this film has bought so completely into the binary of male “Muslim” conquerors and female “Hindu” subjects, the sexualized “Orient” can’t be vaguely Middle Eastern (or at least, can’t without being homoerotic, and Disney can’t have that). So our love interest is an exotic Indian (who just happens to look White) woman, who bears all of her hair, her shoulders, her cleavage. Naturally, she appears to frequently be covered in henna and has something of a leadership role, but which is dismissed and trivialized immediately as she, as the sovereign of Alamut, is conquered and forced into a subservient marriage to a Prince of Persia.
So, we’re not just dealing with an orientalism that looks at its objects as militant animals, but sometimes instead as sex objects. Usually this involves pitting the animalistic “primitives” against their sexy lady adversaries in a war largely across the gender binary. Great.
----------
This is the second of as many as fourteen posts on Disney's The Prince of Persia. (Here's the first.) I do not own this title. I have some knowledge about Islamic and Indian art and architecture, but it's fairly amateurish, so I welcome corrections, especially from any one from Iran (or elsewhere in the Middle East, Central Asia, and even India really).
To recap the previous post, this film has interesting idea of Persia. It’s a confusing, almost mythic place, seemingly beyond common historical periods. It’s a massive kingdom with the borders and Gods of the Sassanid period but the artifacts and practices of times closer to the Safavid period. Worse yet, there’s scattered references to cultural markers in the intervening almost-millennium between those periods. The confusion is equally cultural as temporal. It’s a culture populated by Turks, Arabs, and European-looking fellows. Its architecture is only hazily defined as somewhere between Turkey and India.
But speaking of India, that’s apparently what they want us to think of when they at last give us a more detailed look at Alamut, the holy city full of supposed bad guys from last time. Here’s one of those looks:
And my, how Mughal. The small umbrella-like constructions over the guard towers are chhatri, and basically a shouted clue that Alamut is supposed to be vaguely Indian. Funnily enough, amidst the very Indian chhatri, we find this:
This is just one of many raised and elaborated doorways in the fortress-like city of Alamut. This is pretty overtly a remixed version of pishtaq, which while not unheard of in India is more strongly associated with, of all places, Persia (and a couple of other places, namely Central Asia). It’s interesting that Persian architecture in this movie has been somewhat faithfully rendered, but with a somewhat more Arab look to it (octagonal rather than decagonal structures, for instance), but there also seems to be a common problem with pseudo-Indian architecture in this movie being sort of represented in Alamut, but with a slightly more Persian appearance (like pishtaq). It’s almost as though these various versions of the “Orient” are collapsing westward, making the Persians more familiar to Europeans, while merging Persian and Indian variants of an “exotic” architectural landscape into somewhat inaccurate mixture.
In spite of these occasional oddities, there’s a clear connection trying to be drawn between Alamut and Indian cultures (or perhaps Indic cultures, to include Pakistani groups). We hear the crown prince brother of our protagonist remark that the princess of Alamut is quite beautiful right at the ten minute mark, and we immediately cut to this:
The henna-covered hands, paler than virtually any Indians, are our first glimpse of this Alamutian princess. Welcome to awkward objectification land. Well before we see her face, we also get treated to a glimpse of her ankles being henna’d by q-tip:
She’s interrupted by a gravel-y voiced advisor-type informing her that the entire Persian army is basically at her door. There’s some vague implications that the invading Persians are religious extremists of a sort, or as the advisor-type says it, “their faith has little love for any truth other than its own”. It also becomes apparent that this princess Tamina has actual political power.
Already it’s awkwardly clear where this is heading. She’s part of a pseudo-matriarchal or at least more female-inclusive sort of “Hindu” culture that we’re going to see contrasted, probably painfully, with the patriarchal and overtly male-dominated sort of “Islamic” Persians. Basically, we’re going to get the romance between Jodhaa and Akbar the Great as in Jodhaa Akbar. Perhaps instead, we’ll see the disastrous relationship between Ice Candy Man and Lenny’s Ayah as in Cracking India. In either case, we’re going to see a romance unfold that’s either overtly or covertly or accidentally about Hindu and Muslim relations, that clearly genders Muslims as male conquerors and Hindus as the female conquered. But instead of this just being an ill-suited metaphor that Indians and Pakistanis use to explain their own histories, this is going to be as told by white people who aren’t really involved and dangerously unaware of the implications.
Just so that American audiences are not-quite-consciously made aware of this archetype that’s being played with, we get this statue in the background:
It appears to be Airavata, the three-or-five-headed elephant steed of Indra, king of the devas, or demi-gods. This is a common icon throughout both Hindu and Buddhist areas of South and Southeast Asia (it appeared on the royalist Laotian flag and crest). Just in case that background shot wasn’t clear enough, however, we shortly get treated to more Hindu iconography throughout the scenes of Alamut. Like this:
Naturally, all of this is extremely confusing, since Alamut is a real city, in Western Iran. Not only is all of this geographic information extremely misleading, but the pitting of a supposedly pseudo-Hindu Alamut against a supposedly pseudo-Islamic Persia denies the centrality of Alamut to Persian culture. Alamut was the base of the Assassins, the first Shia resistance group within Persia to organize against foreign, Sunni control. The religious and military order that gained control of Alamut and used it as their primary location served as the inspiration for later indigenous Shia revolutions against external control of Persia. Even the modern Iranian regime, which established itself thanks to the deep resentment towards the foreign backed dictator, Shah Reza Pahlavi, draws indirectly on this.
Of course, in this film, the “Persian” empire conquers the city of “Alamut” which has nothing to do with the Assassins (we’ll see them later) or Persian culture (since they’re vaguely Hindu, of course). In the midst of that, the quite-clearly-white princess tries to have a loyal soldier whisk a certain dagger out of the city. Naturally this goes wrong, and it ends up in the hands of our protagonist.
Meanwhile, back at the “High Temple,” the princess is captured and Alamut, the actually Persian city, falls to a supposedly Persian Empire. Her benevolent conquerors give her two options - marry their crown prince or die.
She basically declines the non-deadly option, and only reneges once the protagonist arrives on the scene, not so surreptitiously with the macguffin dagger she had tried to get out of the city into safety. She immediately accepts the proposal, even after her fiancé pulled her shawl back with the tip of his sword. Besides the overt militarism to that, in this cultural context he quite literally stripped her in front of scores of men.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen (by Mughal or Safavid standards) a lot of the princess’s body, who previously was walking around wearing this:
In the previous scenes in Persia, women had worn hijabs or other Islamic coverings to show their modesty and purity. Even in the vaguely Hindu city of Alamut, we’re treated to vaguely Islamic head coverings, such as in this scene:
Given how the Islamic tradition of obscuring the hair is at least in part influenced by North Indian and pre-Islamic Persian ideas of purdah, meaning concealment of the female body (by segregation, head coverings, baggy clothing, and other means), the way female extras have been dressed is actually somewhat accurate for any of the various time periods this could be argued to have been set in.
But this representation of women as being literally obscured doesn’t seem to jive with certain scenes the director wanted in this film. Like this:
To review, Alamut has been completely divorced from its Shia history by this film. Instead, it has been thrust into a cultural context quite similar to Mughal India, turning it into the “Orient” respective to the Persian protagonist, who is respectively “Oriental” to the primarily European and American audiences of this film.
More than that, however, because this film has bought so completely into the binary of male “Muslim” conquerors and female “Hindu” subjects, the sexualized “Orient” can’t be vaguely Middle Eastern (or at least, can’t without being homoerotic, and Disney can’t have that). So our love interest is an exotic Indian (who just happens to look White) woman, who bears all of her hair, her shoulders, her cleavage. Naturally, she appears to frequently be covered in henna and has something of a leadership role, but which is dismissed and trivialized immediately as she, as the sovereign of Alamut, is conquered and forced into a subservient marriage to a Prince of Persia.
So, we’re not just dealing with an orientalism that looks at its objects as militant animals, but sometimes instead as sex objects. Usually this involves pitting the animalistic “primitives” against their sexy lady adversaries in a war largely across the gender binary. Great.
----------
This is the second of as many as fourteen posts on Disney's The Prince of Persia. (Here's the first.) I do not own this title. I have some knowledge about Islamic and Indian art and architecture, but it's fairly amateurish, so I welcome corrections, especially from any one from Iran (or elsewhere in the Middle East, Central Asia, and even India really).