Bir Tahakküm Biçimi Olarak Oryantalizmin Sinemadaki İzdüşümleri: ‘True Lies’

Abstract

Hollywood cinema is a large industry that presents American ideology and traditional values to the viewer through representative policies. Films produced within this system, which has a vast production, distribution and screening network, are shown in many countries. The aim of this study is to reveal how American ideology and orientalist discourse are constructed in cinema. For the purpose of this study, the film ‘True Lies’ directed by James Cameron in 1994 was chosen as a sample. True Lies is a high-budget, box-office success with a well-known cast and a popular movie that has many counterparts in Hollywood cinema. The film selected as a sample was analyzed according to the method of critical discourse analysis and ideological film criticism. According to the results obtained from the analysis, the main rhetoric of the film is in parallel with the policies that America followed in accordance with the new world order adopted at that time. In the film, both visually and semantically, the orientalist discourse based on the distinction between I/Western and other/Oriental is reconstructed and the stereotypes related to this duality are repeated. In the analysis, it was concluded that the image of the ’East‘ was created in accordance with the ideology of Hollywood and represented as the ’other'.