Us vs. Them

I think this blog post is a question, but I'm not sure it has an answer. It occurred to me to ask it in the UAE, but it was so sensitive that I never felt I could ask it of my Arab students or friends. So maybe it's more of a thought exercise.

I recently saw the film Black Hawk Down for the first time (thanks to VidAngel). I watched it because I loved the book and thought a visual representation would be just the thing for this story. Turns out I liked the book better (well done, Mark Bowden!). But: I was glad to watch the movie because it was one of the defining pieces of media during our time in Syria and Jordan. It was on constant rotation on MBC2, and I swear to you, any time I ever walked past a male gathering place (cafe, hookah lounge, barbershop area), this movie was playing on a TV mounted on the ceiling. It was an immensely popular movie in that region of the world (and probably still is, though I have sadly been out of touch with MBC2 for the last few years).

My question is, with what frame of mind were these Syrians and Jordanians watching Black Hawk Down? As an American, of course, my sympathetic characters are clear. I'm cheering for my country's soldiers. I want them to succeed in their mission against an enemy whose culture, religion, language, and, uncomfortably, skin color do not match my own. I actually did feel conflicted when watching the movie, but I knew I wasn't supposed to. The film made it very easy for me to identify my Us, and my Them.

But who are the Syrians' (for example) Us and Them? Do they see imperialist soldiers killing Muslims? Do they see white people killing brown people? Do they see occupiers killing the occupied? Or do they see good guys and bad guys, just as Hollywood intended?

Bringing it out of the sub-Saharan African Muslim world, how about movies like 13 Hours or Zero Dark Thirty? I watched Zero Dark Thirty (VidAngel, again) and wished I could have seen it in a theater in the UAE, just to get a feel for the tension that possibly could have been in that room. To watch bad guys, really bad guys like OBL, get killed, but to know deep down that OBL looks like them (a Saudi or even Pakistani theater-goer) and the people who killed him look like me. What does that do to your personal bad guy/good guy narrative?

Or maybe I'm over-thinking it. Maybe when we watch a movie, we turn off not only our brains, but our cultural trappings as well. Maybe everyone's Us vs. Them is fundamentally the same. What do you think?