THE INTERZINE

by Vadim Rizov

Richard Poplak’s The Sheikh’s Batmobile, a very cool new book tracing how American pop culture has infiltrated the Muslim world, argues mass cultural product—rather than destroying the indigenous and increasingly rare—helps bring otherwise at-odds people together on a new plane of understanding, normalizing pluralistic values where that idea’s unheard of. Poplak writes of Afghanistani bodybuilders training under watchful Arnold Schwarzenegger cut-outs and United Arab Emirates oil millionaires with too much money paying for custom-made Batmobiles. The argument goes all kinds of places (it’s a compelling work of occasionally danger-baiting on-the-ground journalism) that raises an inadvertent point: Hollywood is very good at producing accidentally iconographic work, and very bad at taking account of the ways it affects people. They conquer mental space then don’t acknowledge that.

Acknowledgment doesn’t mean the simple act of references for their own sake, the more obscure the better (discussed by Noel Murray earlier this year), nor scenes of people watching/listening to cultural product, nor spoofs, pastiches and the kinds of obsessive Quentin Tarantino homages paying tribute to his misspent youth. What’s missing is the really fascinating stuff: what happens when a movie becomes appropriated and fetishized for reasons that couldn’t have possibly occurred to the originators, mutating way beyond original money-making intent.