GagWatch

The Guardian (via The Melon Farmers) reports that the latest film to become targeted by Iran’s long running paranoia about its negative portrayal is Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler.

Newspapers and websites in the country have objected to a scene in which Mickey Rourke’s character, Randy “the Ram” Robinson, violently breaks a pole bearing an Iranian flag across his knee, after his opponent tries to use it to put him in a stranglehold. No mention was made of the fact that Rourke’s antagonist in the scene is called the Ayatollah.

The pole-breaking scene occurs against the explicitly nationalistic backdrop of an animated crowd chanting, “USA, USA”. It is intended to represent the final triumph for Rourke’s character, who comes out of retirement following a heart attack for one last confrontation with the Ayatollah, a rival from his wrestling heyday.

While there is virtually no chance of The Wrestler being given official screening permission in Iran, many Iranians have become familiar with it through promotional trailers shown on broadcaster, Voice of America’s Persian-language satellite television channel.

The political undercurrents have gone unnoticed by western reviewers, some of whom have hailed the production – which won the golden lion award at this year’s Venice film festival – as marking a return to form for Rourke, who is also seen striking up a love affair with a stripper.

But Farda, a fundamentalist website, said it contained anti-Iranian sentiments similar to those allegedly exhibited in the film, The Stoning of Soraya M, released this year about a woman stoned to death under Iran’s sharia legal code, after being convicted of adultery.

Last year, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government accused Hollywood of “psychological warfare” over the depiction of Iranians in 300, a commercially successful film distributed by Warner Brothers about the battle between Greeks and Persians, at Thermopylae in 480BC. Iran’s representative to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, filed a complaint accusing the film of racial stereotyping.

Other Hollywood productions to have provoked outrage include the 2004 film, Alexander, directed by Oliver Stone, which was slammed for its sympathetic depiction of Alexander the Great, a figure reviled by many Iranians for the destruction of Persepolis, the seat of Persian imperial greatness, after his defeat of Emperor Darius III in 330 BC.