It is worth stating here that students generally found the issues raised in the questionnaires, surveys and discussions conducted throughout the research to be important and interesting ones. At the end of questionnaire 2 (see appendix) a female student Hamda (11) writes:

‘I think your topic choice is very good and very important. In my opinion this topic must be taken seriously. It will help people, especially the Gulf people, to see how much these films effect them and how much it starts to control their minds. They have to know there are some goodness to take and badness to avoid.’

This shows a typical concern with powerful ‘effects’ and a sense of ideological ‘invasion’ (‘it starts to control their minds’) that can be found in a sizeable majority of the formal responses that I collected. I shall deal with perceived ‘effects’ in this section along with the popularity of western films; fears of cultural invasion and attrition; various aspects of reception including gender-orientated patterns; the central role of Islam; and educational/language issues.

From my initial conversations, interviews and surveys, it quickly became apparent that Hollywood movies were popular with a large majority of students. In an initial survey of 100 female teacher trainees in Ibri (a remote and quite conservative town) only 15% of students claimed never to watch English language material on television, and of this 15%, none had satellite dishes in their homes. Further evidence of the popularity of western films was provided when a video store in Ibri (Al Zaidi Video Centre) made its entire video records collection available to me. This was due to a change in the application of the copyright law which came into force at the end of 1998, which meant the store had to throw away virtually its entire collection of videos. Consequently, the records were of no use to the manager and he kindly donated them to me. The results showed that of 426 customers 309 took out English language films. The figures were higher when only Arab customers were counted with 188 out of 225 (83.5%) borrowing western films.

From the results of questionnaire 3 it seems that students in Al Ain (a more developed and less remote town) watch even more US films than than their peers in Ibri. When asked how often they watched US movies, only three out of sixty students judged this to be ‘rarely’ while just one student claimed ‘never’ to watch US films. Perhaps significantly, three of these students were in their forties which would support the view expressed by many other students that young people were particularly interested in, and affected by, western films. The remaining students, on average, watched at least one film a week with some claiming to watch US films ‘every day’. When asked what percentage of their viewing they thought was American, Arab, Indian or ‘other’, both the men and women judged American films to make up over 70% of their total, with women watching slightly more US and Indian movies than the men. On average, Arabic movies made up 17% of total films watched and appeared to be more popular with men than women (12). These figures are supported by other conversations, interviews, and worksheets (see appendix) in the research. Attitudes in favour of Hollywood films compared to Arab films were sometimes very strongly expressed, as in Maryam’s comment (see Case Study 1.2, lines 80-84).

This topic often emerged in discussions and debates without any kind of prompting, especially amongst students with a good grasp of English. This was usually related to a very widespread concern with ‘effects’ even amongst the weakest language students. This concern was expressed in a way that had a clear bearing on the arguments about cultural erosion. Here are some of the many examples:

‘The dish has many problems because it destroy the people and the country.’ (Fatma)

‘The dish copy bad custom to the Arab country.’ (May)

‘I don’t like it because it kill my traditions.’ (Nouf)

However, many students chose to reflect instead on the benefits of satellite television. Thurya’s statement was typical:

‘The television sometimes offered a good programmes. For example, a programme talk about science or discovery. The dish can also learn the news about the development.’

The focus here is on the ‘uses’ of television, and could hardly apply to film. Only a minority of the teacher trainees in Ibri were prepared to describe the ‘gratifications’ offered by having access to a dish. Nasra watched western programming ‘because it contains adventures’; Fatma ‘because [it is] beautiful sometimes’. A positive sentiment that was frequently expressed was that western programming was good, ‘because it gives me a chance to know the world.’ (Badrya)

A good number of students expressed ambivalent attitudes about ‘the dish’:

‘The dish sometime is good and bad. The dish has a bad influence because it has a bad film. The dish also lost the time. Sometime is good because it has an important news of world. This is a good thing for my country.’ (Salma)

This ambivalent reaction struck me early on in the research as a key to understanding the complexity of Arab attitudes to, and uses of western media. I shall return to this theme towards the end of this section.

It was far easier to find out what students thought about western movies in a general sense, than to isolate particular readings or specific examples of ‘resistance’. This may relate to the methodology employed and the research constraints that applied. However, I found screenings followed by discussions, interviews and surveys a curiously ‘intrusive’ experience. On occasions, the experience was potentially explosive. In Oman, for example, I noticed that particular texts, such as the blockbuster 'Titanic' had gained incredible popularity, particularly with female Arabic audiences. In straw polls of groups of up to thirty teacher trainees, almost two thirds had seen the film, many more than once. This finding was repeated several times in different classes and the film was also listed by 30% of male students in Al Ain as a ‘top two’ movie, two years after its release (worksheet 3, appendix). In Ibri at a special video screening in the college film club over a hundred students crammed into a room to watch 'Titanic' and the atmosphere was highly charged. In fact the screening (of a copy specially censored for sale to the Arabic Gulf) caused a great deal of controversy at the college, and I was obliged to see the Dean (a very sympathetic Egyptian woman) on two occasions due to the 'fall out' from the performance. It quickly became a 'site of struggle' between a more traditional and fundamentalist faction (represented by two teachers who made a brief appearance at the screening) and an audience, who while capable of quite medieval conservatism in other contexts, clearly and vocally enjoyed this particular film.

The screenings were a fascinating, but frustrating activity. My choice of films was proscribed by stringent linguistic and ‘moral’ limits in addition to an incredibly poor selection of available titles. However, most students had never been to a cinema (an ‘offlimits’ location for women in the interior of Oman, at least) and seeing, sometimes familiar, videos projected onto a large screen in a large darkened room for the first time was an exciting experience. One of the first films screened was ‘The Wizard of Oz’, and the moment Dorothy stepped over the threshold of her house (in black and white) into Oz (in colour) brought gasps from the students. The film’s possible resonance, played for the first time to women who often (from their own descriptions), like Dorothy, lived a quiet, fairly rural and domestic life with their families in desert landscapes, was difficult to discuss without patronising or ‘exoticising’ the audience (13). And while they clearly enjoyed the film, talking about it in groups afterwards on anything other than a surface level was either too difficult, or awkward. As in ‘Titanic’ where I developed my own explanations for the film’s popularity I felt, after several trial discussions that I would only be pushing my interpretations on the students, so I looked for other methods to assess the students’ ‘elusive’ readings. These included short essay writing (where, despite my efforts, narrative description and ‘moral purpose’ predominated) and two short (and largely inconclusive) worksheets, one on Chaplin’s ‘City Lights’ and the other on Disney’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’. Writing tasks more ‘open’ than these worksheets failed to get any response, probably due to language limitations.

The essays tended to be lengthy retellings of the plot with very brief character descriptions. The ‘personal responses’ were often cast in the form of ‘the moral of the tale’ which may reflect on educational norms. Laila writes of ’The Wizard of Oz’ in terms that reveal a 20 year old teacher trainee’s relationship with her parents:

‘It teaches the children not [to] run away from their house, because they will find a dangerous outside it and they must trust that their parents will love them. The message of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is "There’s no place like home" because we feeling very warm with our family.’

The worksheets, while generally disappointing due to lack of detailed answers, revealed a few surprises. Chaplin, a Hollywood icon from the early part of the century was a far more familiar figure to the trainees in Ibri than musical giants like the Beatles or Elvis, who were virtually unknown. Almost all the students in my classes were able to name Chaplin from a photograph, and 90% of those who attended the screening claimed to have seen a Chaplin film before. One outcome of the short worksheet on ‘City Lights’ was that the rich drunkard figure was perceived by students to be more a villain than a figure of fun, due to his whisky drinking and treatment of Charlie. Alcohol is generally not a topic of humour, and is regarded with genuine horror by most of the women I taught (if not the men). Films, like ‘City Lights’ which ‘position’ audiences to laugh at drunken behaviour met with uncomfortable silences. Asked if anything surprised them about ‘City Lights’, one student writes:

‘I surprise to the rich man when he love the Charlie and he hate Charlie. He love Charlie when he drink the whisky.’

‘Beauty and the Beast’ while generally approved of (the film was brought in by a student to be shown) showed how ‘conservative’ student ‘readings’ could be. Asked if there was anything they didn’t like about the film, one wrote: ‘I don’t like the kiss’. Most western videos distributed from Saudi Arabia have all kissing removed. In a discussion that followed the screening of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ some Disney films, distributed from outside Saudi were felt by several students to be totally inappropriate for children due to brief kissing scenes, ‘Snow White’ (a film that I screened) was mentioned (13). This opinion was not confined to the students in Ibri. Responding to question 5 in questionnaire 2, one student in Al Ain writes of how offensive she found the kissing in the recent Walt Disney version of ‘Tarzan’ because it was supposed to be a children’s film. Another student answers the same question:

‘Yes, the kissing parts in kid’s movies. I madly disagreed with this topic, coz we don’t want our children to see these bad stuffs, special when they’re young.’

Another objection that I had not anticipated was that students did not like to see things happen in films ‘that only God can do’. This included making rain, rainbows and other ‘godless’ miracles. The film ‘City of Angels’ was felt by several students to be blasphemous because, in the words of one female student from Al Ain, ‘…it have a wrong idea about angel how they look like or about how they live. I felt very angry about this types of films.’ Public discussions and surveys of films amongst the female students often brought stern religious judgements to bear on the films, especially when prompted by the question ‘Was there anything you did not like about the film?’ This may show how easily research frameworks can determine results.

Moores (1993) shows how new media technologies such as satellite TV allow audiences to ‘voice senses of identity and distinction’ (p.218). This distinction may have a socio-cultural context – an identity based on shared Islamic values, for instance, against western cultural imports. Yet identities may also have private and public faces, inhabiting various ‘realms of reality’ (Harindranath, 1998). As Hoijer remarks: ‘The tension between culture and individual identities is an existential dilemma which we all carry within us’ (1998, p.171). To avoid only investigating this oppositional, religious response to Hollywood films I gathered more evidence from students in Al Ain using a role play that involved as little input from myself as possible, other than in the choice of video covers (see Case study 2). I hoped this would give students an opportunity to articulate subjectivities that the line of questioning employed elsewhere had failed to take account of.

The results of the role-play were quite different from other research material that I had collected, in that there was no ‘hunt for effects’, either by the researcher, or interviewees. Films were being discussed on a quite different level, because the role-play required an appreciation of ‘gratifications’ rather than ‘uses’, or ‘concerns’. The tapescripts from Al Ain present less that can be immediately ‘seized on’ by a mass communications researcher than the interviews in Ibri, but they may be just as relevant because they show engagement with Hollywood at a more routine, everyday, even mundane level. Hollywood in these interviews is a commonly encountered phenomenon, and ‘the video shop’ with its selection of titles, is a situation the students seem familiar with and are happy, on the whole, to talk about and negotiate.

What conclusions can be drawn from these dialogues? Firstly, that genre is the most common mode of discussion amongst the students, and that the action genre is very popular. The term ‘comedy’ is mentioned just once by students (‘funny’ eight times) in the interviews and ‘science fiction’ and ‘horror’ twice. ‘Romance’, however, is mentioned nine times and ‘action’ is referred to forty-three times. Clearly the choice of films have a bearing here on the frequency of the terms used, but in selecting the video covers I attempted to have some balance in the genres represented (dramas, love stories, war, action, historical comedy – see list for Case Study 2.1). This is not reflected in the dialogues where the students are drawn repeatedly to action films, and where if asked, many (but not all) say this is their favourite genre (see lines 83, 864). Most of the students in these interviews are working men in their early twenties. The slightly older students (late twenties, early thirties) were sometimes less interested in action. Abdul Aziz, a married man in his early thirties clearly finds them puerile (lines 968-996) but says: ‘a lot of people here like action films.’ This view highlights Herman and McChesney’s (1997) claim that Hollywood has established itself as the preeminent producer of violent films on the international market (14).

This interest in action movies appears to be fairly age and gender defined. Questionnaire 3 found that just under 40% of all films watched by men were action films compared to less than 20% for women. Questionnaire 2 results from the Women’s College showed that comedy, horror, romance and historical were popular genres, with ‘Titanic’ and ‘Gladiator’ regularly chosen amongst the five most popular films (these films were also popular at the Men’s College), but that action was sometimes ranked as the women’s favourite genre (question 1b).

In terms of Barker and Brooks’ (1998) theory of ‘investment’ the interviews in Case Study 2 generally show quite ‘low investment’. It could be argued that Suleiman and Jassim (Interview 2B) perform poorly in the English language exercise because they are not regular viewers of English language films and have little to say about the covers (line 208, 255-65). Anwar and Mohammed are also limited by weak English, despite enjoying English films. Their comments are almost reduced to ‘labelling’ films as genre pictures, ‘action and story’, ‘science faction’ (sic) or as star vehicles ‘I think this is for Jackie Chan’ (line 459). From my research, there is a correlation between those students whose spoken English and listening skills were strong (it did not apply as much to writing) and those who regularly watched English language films (15). In this respect the level of ‘investment’ in US movies rose noticeably when the students were asked to talk about ‘why’ they watched these films. From Case Study 2 Masoud and Salem (lines 834-847), Abdul Aziz and Ahmed (lines 965-990), Humaid (lines 1235-1241) all claim they watch these films, ‘to learn more about English and learn more word’ (967).

From Case Study 1, Aziza, who was probably the best language student in Ibri claimed that she learnt her English through watching satellite TV (line 45). In total, 63% of the students answering questionnaire 1 in Ibri wrote that learning English was a major reason for watching western material.These results were further supported by the results of questionnaire 3 which show, perhaps surprisingly, that a small majority of students prefer to watch films without Arabic subtitles or dubbed voices (dubbing seems to be a rare and unpopular practice). In the words of Ahmed’s report on his group’s questionnaire:

‘Respondents said they preferred un-translated movies to subtitled movies because the translations were often inaccurate and interfered with their ability to follow the film in English.’

Several students interviewed after the screening of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in Ibri said they liked to watch it with subtitles first and then to watch it without subtitles to practice their English. They claimed that another reason they liked to see these versions was because the unsubtitled versions often had extra scenes that were censored in the subtitled versions. The example from ‘Beauty and the Beast’ that they gave was that particular scenes showing ‘magic’ were cut from the subtitled versions. This preference struck me as being at odds with the responses the same group of students gave when asked about parts of the film they did not like, and may indicate further evidence of ambivalent, or even dual ‘readings’.

What effects did students feel that watching Hollywood films was having on people in the Gulf? Here some of the most interesting answers emerged and it was a topic that nearly everyone felt strongly about. Few students talked about consumerism directly as a result of Hollywood films, but cultural homogenisation was a continuous topic of discussion. A female student in Al Ain answers question 7 in questionnaire 2 by saying:

‘Well, for one thing, they’re becoming more westernised day by day, some even forget their cultures and traditions. They copy what they see in movies.’

The traditional role of women in Islamic culture is also perceived to be under threat. Hamda answers the same question by saying:

‘Many people here are getting more exciting in what they see in Hollywood films. It starts to effect their life completely. We can see that in their clothes, behave and their thinking. They have different ideas than their parents had. They start to think that they have to be independent when they reached 18 because they are seeing actors do that. They don’t realize that independent life is very difficult, especially for women. Also girls start to feel depress because they are thinking that they didn’t have their rights, which actress have, or as they think the real girls in western life [have,] which doesn’t relate to our religion or even to our culture at all.’

This answer shows an interesting degree of ‘cultural relativism’ that is often absent in western discourse on Islamic society. Ahmed, a business student who helped draw up questionnaire 3 remarked (in interview) that Gulf countries were not affected as much as Egypt and north Africa by Hollywood films only because they were more heavily censored. Ahmed writes in questionnaire 2:

‘Regarding the Gulf States I don’t think they’ve changed a lot so far, since the Gulf society is highly restricted to the Islamic beliefs and emphasising the existence of some conservative aspects of heritage. Nevertheless, as a local I feel there’s a significant change has taken place since 1990. For instance, some marriage traditions, the wall between the two genders in the workplace has been demolished, the traditional head-cover has been removed slightly and also the way people, especially young people spend their leisure time.’

There are many examples of quotes like this amongst the questionnaires collected, suggesting that cultural and media imperialism is considered a grave risk by a substantial majority of students. Children and teenagers are thought to be particularly ‘at risk’ from ‘contaminating’ messages. The results of questionnaire 3 suggest that ‘sexual’ content in films is regarded as the greatest danger. Ahmed’s report indicates that:

‘About half of the people suggested sex as the most dangerous aspect of American films. A sixth of the people suggested violence and a seventh of them mentioned crime as the main dangers absorbed from US movies, and a few people mentioned vulgarity in that context.’

In answer to question 9 of questionnaire 3 (which asks how people are influenced by US movies) Aisha writes;

‘By imitation and violence, and girls learn bad immorals like ‘having a boyfriend’.

Aisha answers question 16 by saying the ‘shyness of girls is being reduced’ and ‘The girls are having a bad way of thinking’. It is interesting to note here that the same student claims to watch 90% US movies (question 2), thinks Hollywood has ‘attractive and brilliant’ stories’ (question 24) and feels that US films ‘change about 50% of our ideas’ (question 11).

Objections to sexual content are made by men as much as women. Abdul Aziz’s report on his group’s questionnaire details in vivid terms what he believes Arab audiences find outrageous:

‘Simply most of the U.S movies have several views of sexual actions and several kisses, some passionate. A lot of extended scene takes place before and during having sex, we can see lots of bare breasts, bare backsides and full frontal female and male nudity as minimum, or we see many topless women wearing tiny panties involved in even a non-sexual ceremony, lots of nude couples dancing together, men and women having intercourse with lots of thrusting, a man and woman doing oral sex on each other and women caressing each other’s breasts. I hope such description of what on this western movie will gives idea of what’s on it and how the culture in the America is different and allowing for such unbelievable scenes in normal American movie.’

In a follow-up interview with Abdul Aziz he explained (torn between laughing and trying to make a serious point) how provocative he felt films like ‘Pretty Woman’ and ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ were. In answer to question 6 in questionnaire 2 he said he sometimes felt pulled in different directions by films such as these, which offered erotic titillation and were clearly in breach of Islamic values.

Abdul Aziz’s concerns were reflected in the answers of many other male and female students.

Changing political views were mentioned by a handful of students as being affected by US movies. Salim writes in answer to question 11 in questionnaire 3:

‘Sometimes they [US movies] talk about subjects that people never expect to hear if they were home. I mean something like, talking about the government and some stuff they do.’

This view is echoed by Aziza in interview 1 when asked what changes she thought the dish brought:

‘Some of them [Omanis] change their ideas about the world. Some of the channels make them know the world a lot. Not by changing their clothes or changing their hair, but also by changing their ideas about everything. About other countries, about their countries, about politicians, about everything.’ (lines 245-250)

In most cases, however, the political effects were felt to be to the advantage of the US and against the Arab/Islamic world. Hilal, a young army officer who enjoys US films writes:

‘I think the Americans spend a lot of money to make good films, and by doing that they make money and they force people indirectly to adopt the American way, and people will sympathise with America whatever they do, and that applies worldwide.’

The notion of a political and cultural ‘trickle down’ effect of western media on Arab media (colourfully expressed by Dr Ahmed Al Dhabib in the section on media effects in the contextual section of this paper) was also picked up by a small number of students.

On the question of Arab representation there was virtual unanimity that negative stereotyping was the dominant trend in US films. Ahmed’s statistical analysis of his group’s survey indicated that: ‘over 98% of people were sure that US movies play a vital role in distorting the Arab image in their movies.’ Mohammed Gharib’s report expands on the reasons why this might be so:

‘The study illustrates the fact that most of the people who were questioned believe that American movies represent Arabs badly. In addition, they remember some titles of these movies. For example, ‘True Lies’, ‘Under Siege’ and ‘Independence Day’.

Various reasons are suggested for this negative representation. Tariq’s report highlights some of these.

‘Arabs think that American people do this because they lack an accurate picture of Arab people. Others feel that this is happening because of the examples of the Arab people in Western countries. A few believe that Jews are mainly responsible for these actions because they are controlling a high percent of the government.’

The power of the Jewish lobby in US governments and Jewish influence in Hollywood emerge as the most frequent explanation for Arab stereotyping. Significantly, this answer emerged only because of the type of questions that the five business students agreed on in questionnaire 3. I was puzzled by question 21 when it was first drafted ‘ "There are hidden hands behind the revolution of the American movies." Do you agree with such point of view?’ The students assured me that it would provide interesting results, and judging by the very large number who decided to write about ‘Jewish control of Hollywood’ in this question and for question 19 they were correct. My own surveys had not revealed the extent of this view, although one student wrote in answer to question 5c (questionnaire 2):

‘I feel the Jewish Party in USA trying to make the Arabs image dirty with whatever way they own - Hollywood racism against Arabs’

This linking of Hollywood and Jewish influence had been picked up earlier in the year by the national press who were indignant about a planned Disney exhibition portraying Jerusalem as an Israeli city (‘Gulf News’ September 17^th 1999). The issue was front page news for several days and resulted in protests by the Arab League and a threatened boycott of all Disney products.

Finally, the research shows strong evidence of ambivalent readings, possibly indicating ‘split identities’ amongst Arab audiences. In interview 1 the idea of ‘double consciousness’ (to use Gilroy’s (1993) phrase) first occurred to me as I tried to make sense of some of the shifting answers of the students. For example Aziza talks about her fondness for cowboy films (and other material earlier in the interview) around line 10, but later (after discussing the harmful effects of the dish) claims, ‘When I go home I always watch TV, that’s clear. But I don’t watch these American films or something like that.’ (line 200). After several discussions and interviews like this I decided the most straightforward way to ascertain the existence of ‘split identities’ was to ask students directly. Hence, question 6 in questionnaire 2 asks quite bluntly: ‘Do you ever feel in two minds, or pulled in different directions by a film? Is there ever a conflict between, for example, your religious beliefs and the pleasures and excitement of Hollywood movies?’ Some, particularly female students, in Al Ain said ‘no’ quite firmly to this question. Aseel throws the question back with a pointed use of my own words in inverted commas: ‘No, personally, I have no conflict between my religious beliefs and the ‘pleasures’ and ‘excitement’ of Hollywood.

Others, however, were less categorical. One female student writes:

‘Look maybe sometimes we think by two minds, but I’m sure when the matter reach our religion, we change our mind and stop face to face with Hollywood movies.’

Another writes:

‘Yes sometimes, but something always pulls me back to reality. I like to dream about it though, its harmless’

This idea of dreaming, or imagining here, echoes Harindranath’s (1998) suggestion that identities have public and private faces. The female students are quick to assure the reader that these are temporary states. An anonymous student admits:

‘Yes, but only for a very short period of time. I’m the kind of person who likes to dream and imagine things, so I enjoy dreaming.’

Freedom to imagine is celebrated by a third student:

‘Yes, I always feel that. Sometimes I imagine myself in place of the actress, and guess what I enjoy it, coz we can’t do these things in real life. I have a wide imagination. I love imagining things.’

For Hamda this issue spills over beyond the imagination into social life:

‘It happens all the time, especially when we see something we don’t have here. One example is the mix school, but because of our beliefs and faith we know it’s something wrong. Most of people are now arguing in this point because they have been influenced by Hollywood movies.’

For some male students the issue of being in ‘two minds’ is something they readily admit. Ahmed writes:

‘ I personally agree with that 100%. I justify that by one fact, which is that the majority of excitement resources for Hollywood movies come from pornography, sex, crime, extravagant action and violence. Therefore I feel guilt whenever I watch a movie that is overwhelmed by one or more of these characters, especially sex or what’s paraphrased as romance and love. So, honestly, it’s very rare that I watch an American or western movie that lacks at least one of the previous contents, which opposes strongly with my religious beliefs.’