persepolis

cowgrrl and i saw Persepolis on Sunday, and found it to be engaging and moving. The flow of storytelling has been tweaked a bit from the graphic novels on which they are based, but the substance of it is still the same.

I'm not really sure how to comment on it. It doesn't really require much comment; the movie (and the autobiographical graphic novels by exiled Iranian Marjane Satrapi on which they were based) speak well and plainly for themselves.

What struck me most was the way the movie illustrates, by giving anecdotes of day to day life in an authoritarian society, how irrelevant ideology really is to the practice of authoritarianism. It is at its heart, at every level of interaction -- from the personal and interpersonal to the institutional -- a system that gives bullies almost free reign.

I think, too, in portraying the simple human desires of the people around her, she exposes the flaws in the common conception that the Iranian people are somehow fundamentally more barbaric than Westerners -- the underlying attitude that by having a more brutish nature they subtly invite authoritarianism or prevent a more egalitarian society from taking hold. She invites the American or British viewer (without beating her over the head with a stick) to examine the ways in which her own governments have intervened in the political shape of Iran to push it towards authoritarianism. The name she chose for the work, "Persepolis," must have been chosen to invite us to contemplate the long history of Iranian civilization.