There was a time, not too long ago, when every villain in a Western film wore a fur hat and quoted Lenin. Badly. The Soviet Union provided Hollywood with a perfectly serviceable enemy: ideologically opposed, nuclear‑armed, largely white. There was no need for nuance, only menace. Cold War thrillers, spy novels, and action flicks revolved around this archetype. We had the inscrutable Russian, the KGB operative, the grey-faced apparatchik. The world was flat, divided neatly between East and West. Then the wall came down. Capitalism danced on the grave of history, and Hollywood needed a new monster.
Iran stepped in.
The transition wasn’t immediate. For a while, post‑Cold War cinema flailed. Latin American cartels briefly took centre stage. So did North Korea,1 before reality rendered the caricature laughable. After 9/11, the shift became more deliberate. Iran, with its black‑turbaned clerics and baroque revolutionary rhetoric, was ripe for the role. It had a ready-made script. The hostage crises, theocratic rule, nuclear ambitions, and a visual shorthand familiar to any studio exec: veiled women, burning flags, angry men chanting in the streets.
In Argo (2012), the Academy Award-winning caper about the 1979 embassy siege, the Iranian crowd is a blur of hatred. We do not hear from the people of Iran. Only about them. They are props, noise, the backdrop to American heroism. Homeland, 24, Not Without my Daughter, and even the animated Persepolis, each in its own way, depicts Iran as the unknowable other: either a medieval theocracy or a brooding nuclear threat. It is never quite a place where people live. Always a problem to be solved, a threat to be neutralised, a darkness to be bombed.
This is not just cinema—it’s ideology.
In the 1980s, as the Cold War entered its final phase, a rash of films imagined Soviet invasions of the US (Red Dawn), nuclear brinkmanship (The Day After), and spycraft saturated with existential dread. These weren’t documentaries—they were cultural psyops. They trained a generation to fear socialism, distrust diplomacy, and cheer for pre-emptive violence. Iran now serves a similar function. In today’s action thrillers, it’s never enough that a terrorist is a terrorist—they must be backed by Iran. The Revolutionary Guard, like the KGB before it, haunts every shadowy subplot.
The parallels go deeper. In both cases, the demonisation served a collapsing imperial logic. By the time the Soviet threat was routinely dramatised on Western screens, the USSR was already beginning to decay from within. The more hollow the ideological war became, the more vivid the caricatures grew. Iran too, while no beacon of emancipation, is riven with contradictions: a young, educated population, deep fissures in elite politics, and protests that flare up despite brutal repression. But these complexities don’t fit into the West’s imperial storyboarding. Instead, we are offered Ayatollahs and missiles. The visual vocabulary of the Cold War (ciphers, red star badges, end times) is simply refurbished with minarets and green badges.
Even the liberal imagination buys into the trope. When novelists write thrillers or journalists pen longreads about the “Iranian threat”, it is rarely the effects of sanctions that take centre stage, nor the civilian cost of escalation. Instead, we get the same tired moral geometry: Iran bad, West flawed but ultimately good. Exceptionalism survives by changing villains. The question is never “what has Iran done?”, but “how do we stop them doing what we say they might?”
Said saw it all coming. In Covering Islam, he noted how media, especially American media, constructs a vision of the Muslim world as inherently violent, unmodern, and irrational. Iran, in this schema, is not a state with interests—it is an ideology with weapons. It doesn’t negotiate, it deceives. It doesn’t evolve, it can never reach modernity. This is not analysis, it’s fantasy. And like all good fantasy, it sells.
And yet, there are films. Often made in exile, sometimes smuggled out in memory cards or shot under cover of darkness—that refuse this simplification. They tell stories not of geopolitical confrontation but of suffocation, resistance, ordinary horror. Holy Spider, directed by Ali Abbasi, offers a vision of Iran not as a nuclear menace but as a haunted, misogynistic society where the state and the serial killer serve the same patriarchy. What’s most disturbing isn’t the violence but its familiarity: the way it’s justified, normalised, even sanctified. It’s not a clash of civilisations. It’s the brutality of one’s own.
Then there’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Rasoulof’s clandestine masterpiece. It’s a film of locked doors and broken daughters, filmed during the real uprisings that the West largely ignored once they didn’t fit the regime-change fantasy. Rasoulof doesn’t give us CIA intrigue or Quds Force villains. He gives us a father unravelled by state paranoia and a family breaking under the weight of it. Even Law of Tehran, a relentless police thriller about Iran’s drug war, offers more insight into the machinery of repression and the contradictions of modern Iranian life than any Pentagon-approved narrative. These are films that do what Western narratives refuse to: they treat Iranians as people, not problems.
The contrast couldn’t be starker. In Argo, Iran is not a country but a backdrop—a heaving mob of rage and islamic flags, a setting for American ingenuity to shine against. There’s no space for politics, only peril; no people, only threats. Homeland, for all its Emmy polish, does something worse: it renders Iran a chessboard of deceit, populated by suicide bombers and suave nuclear negotiators, none of whom appear to eat, breathe or believe anything not drawn from Langley’s fear-mapping. In these dramas, Iran is not written, it is coded: irrational, duplicitous, unknowable. A bogeyman in 1080p.
Compare that to Holy Spider or The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which drag the viewer into the viscera of Iranian life. The domestic, the moral, the unbearably personal. There are no Marines on rooftops, no dossiers handed around conference tables. Just fathers, daughters, courts, crowds. Where the Western spy thriller flatters imperial reason, these films expose the irrationality of repression. They do not ask us to bomb the country, liberate it, or fear it. They ask us to see it. And in doing so, they indict not just the regime, but the world that props it up or only ever pretends to oppose it.
What we’re dealing with is not just misrepresentation. This is cultural warfare, waged through narrative. Empire doesn’t merely conquer with bombs and sanctions; it scripts the enemy in advance. Iran, like the USSR before it, has been cast as a set-piece villain not because it poses an existential threat, but because the spectacle of threat is existentially useful. Films like Argo and series like Homeland aren’t outliers—they’re auxiliary weapons, shaping public consent for policies already in motion. But in the fissures of this narrative. Through exiled auteurs, forbidden cinema, courtroom dramas smuggled past the censors, a different story keeps pushing through. It’s not always hopeful, but it’s honest. And for that reason alone, it’s dangerous to those who would rather we fear than understand.
What we’re dealing with is not just misrepresentation. This is cultural warfare, waged through narrative.
Footnotes
- Even the Red Dawn remake had swopped out Russian paratroopers for North Koreans. ↩︎
