Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Iron
Maiden in Tehran
(Persepolis, 3/3/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
The
Iron Curtain is long gone, but the theocracy in Iran has stood in well
as the West's latest, forbidden "other." In 2004, as some
read Lolita in Tehran, and others wouldn't flee without their daughters,
Marjane Satrapi published Persepolis, the acclaimed graphic novel
about growing up before and after the Islamic Revolution. The French-produced
film version—an animated feature that replicates the spare, almost
iconic style of the book—tells a deceptively powerful tale that
may be the most enlightening yet about what it's like to come of age
in modern Persia.
Not that this writer wasn't skeptical
at the outset. In the wrong hands, the film's graphic simplicity and
mostly black and white palette might have come off as a full-length
version of some smart-alecky New Yorker cartoon. The benefit
of visualizing this story in a style worthy of Charles Schultz is not
so clear, except perhaps insofar as it suggests that events were so
ghastly the horror should only be broached discreetly, in schematic
form (e.g. Art Spiegelman's Maus). But that is nonsense—plenty
of books, films, poems etc. have expressed much about, say, the Nazi
Holocaust, without reducing the victims to cartoon mice. One suspects
the unfolding, comprehensive tragedy of modern Iran might also be well-served
one day by flesh and blood actors.
What is best about Persepolis
is not the contrivance of its visualization, but the lacerating honesty
of Satrapi's writing. As we follow her from her childhood under the
Shah, through the false dawn of the 1979 revolution and her exile to
Europe during the dark days of the Iran-Iraq War, Satrapi captures all
the confused emotions of living through catastrophic times. Her first
heroes are Bruce Lee and the guys in Iron Maiden, until events compel
her toward Karl Marx and punk rock. The constant bullying by ignorant
thugs enforcing the mullah's dress code was bad enough ("Fix your
head scarf, sister!"), but Satrapi knows that the worst damage
was self-inflicted, in the thousand different ways the regime made her
a coward. In Iran, the adult Marjane (voiced by Chiara Mastroianni)
opportunistically denounces a male bystander to escape punishment for
wearing lipstick in public; in exile in Vienna, she's not sure she wants
to confess to being Iranian at all.
Unvarnished as it seems, Persepolis
is peculiar for the things it doesn't want to talk about. No one ever
breathes the name "Khomeini," or chants "Death to America";
the drama of the US embassy hostages, which was at least as significant
an event in Iran as it was here, doesn't figure in the story. Neither
Islam nor sharia nor Shiism are ever mentioned. Instead, someone
remarks that nationalism and generic "religion" are often
handy to unite ignorant people—as if Methodism or Unitarian Universalism
would just as easily served the regime's purposes. The Western arms
dealers who sold weapons to both sides in the war are explicitly denounced,
but not the Iranian authorities who sent waves of unarmed "martyrs"
into a barrage of Iraqi chemical weapons.
Of course, a clear indictment of
the mullahs might have landed Satrapi on a list more dangerous than
The New York Times bestseller list. Picking enemies is as much
a prerogative of a writer as picking his or her subject. As it is, Persepolis
is sharply observed, but fails to stick its point in the eyes of those
who deserve it most.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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