The first ever google doc I made to brainstorm for this project was entitled, “a matter of perspective.” At that point, I wasn’t even remotely close to picking Jack Ryan as a primary source, but in hindsight, that name still applies really well and it’s been really interesting to see how my original vision for the paper materialized in this show. That’s because it’s a matter of perspective as to (1) how we look at Muslims and choose to portray them in film, (2) how they, as a result, look at us, and (3) perhaps even themselves. The cyclic idea that the media can definitively shape our perspectives and our perspectives shape the media is really intriguing to me, and I hope my paper captures that idea. And further, it’s a matter of perspective as to what extent Jack Ryan has succeeded in rehumanizing Muslims through unconventional representations, if at all.

That's why I'm titling my research paper, “A Matter of Perspective: Progressive and Regressive Muslim Representation in Jack Ryan.” Or something like that.

Jack Ryan’s inception with the original Tom Clancy’s novels classifies him as a Cold War postcolonial character. The American spy genre essentially filled that void of postcolonialism and offered modern audiences a way to indirectly and vicariously experience the "fruits of imperialism" through a strong American protagonist (almost invariably a white male) who bolstered the notion of American intellect and strength by taking down international adversaries. It's a genre related to the dangerous comfort of the ethnographic fantasy (Weir).

• The show’s secondary and explicitly post-9/11 context (achieved by framing the antagonist, Suleiman, as a second Bin Laden) situates it within a genre that portrays Americans as victimized underdogs with upstanding morality who only resort to killing as a necessary evil, and terrorists, who tend to be Muslim and Middle Eastern, as largely one-dimensional villains with little justification for their violence besides religious objectives. These antiparallel processes result in the conflation of spirituality with violence (Riegler).

• Jack Ryan, the TV series, is inextricably connected to both of these histories, except rather than the Soviet Regime, the modern enemy takes form in transnational terrorist networks based in the Middle East.

Out of all the Hollywood representations, Jack Ryan has taken the biggest step forward to rehumanize Muslims. But it’s still not enough. The show is regressive in that it ultimately remains entrenched in the inaccurate and monotonous black-and-white trope of good American vs. bad Muslim (alongside other misrepresentations), but also progressive, in that it wades into the area of gray perception by really fleshing out the backstories and exigencies of Muslim characters.

The big question is whether we can fully overturn these tropes without implying their validity. For example, if a movie chooses to take the extreme opposite route and portray a Muslim character as the infallible protagonist (as many recent works have done through the trope of “the good Muslim”), is such a depiction only meant to counter-balance the “bad Muslim” character? Will good Muslim representations simply be interpreted as being employed for the sake of boosting the film industry’s cultural sensitivity and avoiding scandals? How can Muslim characters be rehumanized from their minimization and constraint to being plot devices? Essentially, how can you shift the narrative without triggering the recollection of the narrative?

As a bit of primary source analysis, I thought I would analyze Jack’s PTSD flashbacks, nightmares of his Marine days back in Afghanistan which incorporate the "killer kids" trope (as Professor Alhassen calls it).

In the scene to the left, Jack and his team are wrapping up a mission when he comes across an orphan named Sahim, who takes pictures of people and then charges them $10 for it. Sahim begs the Marines to take him with them, and Jack, overwhelmed with sympathy, agrees. As the helicopter takes off from the ground and all is well and the white savior has done some terrific white saving, Jack watches as Sahim pulls the pin on a hand grenade. It's over in moments. Blood and carnage follow quickly after. Jack takes the PTSD and the polaroid back home with him.

This may very well be the most complex assembly of tropes throughout the whole show. It's black and white and gray all mixed together. As for black and white, we have the humanization of the White Savior who’s literally in the process of saving; the well-being of a person of color rests solely in his hands. His guilt is two-fold: (1) the white, Western guilt that a child could live in such horrid conditions and (2) the survivor's guilt he carries for a disaster that was indirectly his fault.

At the other extreme, we have a brown, manipulative Muslim who engages in premeditated, unprompted violence, takes advantage of white compassion and, to add injury to insult, is a suicide bomber that takes down a helicopter full of Marines.

And yet, this terrorist is just a child. A child who we initially regard sympathetically (because of course he wants to escape his barbaric native land), but then he sets off a grenade and our sympathy gets confused. We struggle to reconcile his heinous crime to his inarguable innocence. He might’ve known what would happen, but surely, he couldn’t have intended it? He couldn't have espoused all that venomous hatred, could he? As an orphan, he has nothing to gain or lose from life; his marginalization makes him the perfect candidate for a suicide bomber. If we interpret his motives through a religious lens, then at least he'll merit Jannah (paradise); that's at least more digestible than having to consider a twelve-year-old might have political resentments. But we resist the idea that this hate he has for America is self-generated. That, along with the grenade, must have been "generationally handed down" (Alhassen).

It's interesting to analyze how we perceive Sahim in the aftermath. Is he a "mini-terrorist" in the making? Is hate really passed down? Or do America's actions legitimize these consistent grievances throughout the generations? Do we still believe in Sahim's innocence? It seems that Jack does. In relating the events, Jack recalls with noticeable sorrow, "He died in the crash." Not, "He caused the crash." Not, "He's the reason for the scars on my back and why I can't sleep well at night and why all my friends died." Jack seems to be placing the blame on himself, rather than Sahim. So maybe Jack's burgeoning guilt is simply a ploy that makes us pity the white savior all the more. Or maybe this is a rare window into understanding terrorist exigency without projecting our own (largely uninformed) obstinacy onto it.

*It's worthy pointing out that the episode this scene is from is titled, "Inshallah," meaning, "if Allah wills it."

I acknowledge the validity of two perspectives - one which champions Jack Ryan for acknowledging that the war on terrorism is a war in and of itself and for fleshing out the backstories of Muslim characters, and another which degrades the show for simply regurgitating stereotypical narratives that ooze patriotism and racism. My vision for future Muslim representation in Hollywood is one in which Islamophobia is at last incongruous with patriotism. After all, there's nothing inherently wrong with American ideals themselves; in fact, a Gallup survey representing 80% of the global Muslim population showed that, when asked about they admire most about the West, Muslims frequently listed political freedom, liberty, and freedom of speech. The issue lies in what we think needs to happen in order for these ideals to be realized. Configuring the War on Terror into a humanitarian effort despite the employment of highly controversial interrogation and torture methods is a good example of this.

In his address to a joint session of Congress following 9/11, President George Bush drew a distinction between Muslims and terrorists, saying, "The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends. It is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them." But he also goes on to say, "Americans are asking 'Why do they hate us?' They [terrorist groups] hate what they see right here in this chamber... They hate... our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." But as we learned from the Gallup survey, this is not accurate.

Notice the term, "they." Bush makes a commendable effort to differentiate terrorism from religion. But ultimately, blurring the two is inevitable. We homogenize "they" as a one-size-fits-all grouping that sees a hijab and perceives violence. We misconstrue, we conflate, we condemn. After all, it's easier to aim our venom at a single source; nuance makes that process harder.

But by acknowledging this nuance, we come to realize just how similar "us" and "they" are. But we have to see this nuance, we have to internalize it. That's where Hollywood comes in. By finally ridding cinema of the White Savior vs. Bad Muslim dichotomy, American audiences may finally see black and white blur together into a gray. We may see, for example, a Good Muslim who doesn't just exist to counterbalance a terrorist, but rather stands on their own as a character. This is the drive for change.

I think Muslim representation in Jack Ryan is, in many ways, central to the APP theme. In terms of power dynamics, Muslims are often powerless, both fictionally at the hands of the White Savior, and oftentimes in reality as well, unable to assert control over how they are portrayed in the media. As we have seen in core, dehumanization often comes about through how a person or group of people is represented by someone else; we’re looking indirectly through the hatred of someone else’s eyes rather than directly at the person themselves. In the case of the media, we look where the camera looks, and the camera (a sort of metonymy for Hollywood portrayals) very frequently dehumanizes Muslims. Contextualizing this dehumanization to colonialism and the unjust domination of one culture over another has also been a recurring theme in core. I would go so far as to say that modern cinema with Muslim representations is a sort of human zoo in and of itself. The dominance of Hollywood culture is the captor. Muslim peoples are the detainees. The movie screen is the cage. The whole spectacle is set up for the enjoyment of paying American audiences who are fed a deeply flawed and contrived reflection of a different culture. And the exigency of the zoo is to persuade audiences of the infallibly heroic efforts to subjugate international peoples to the benevolent might of American military power and ideological domain. And as a result of being imprisoned in this zoo that is untethered to reality, people are concurrently animalized and dehumanized. What we see in the zoo ostensibly justifies what we do in real life, and what we do in real life justifies the existence of the zoo. It's a vicious cycle, and we should be invested in figuring out how to break it.

Sonia Saraiya's take on Jack Ryan falls on the more critical side of the reviews spectrum.