An Analysis of the American Educated Reader's Mode of Dealing with Hollywood Anti-Islam Movies

This paper is an attempt to indicate how the educated audience in the US re-reads and interprets the anti –Islam movies produced by Hollywood. We will use the reception approach of Gadamer along with Edward Saeed's Orientalism approach to offer a theoretical synthesis that includes concepts such as 1- lived experience, 2- intercultural communication and 3- digital literacy among American audience. Our theoretical claim is that these three concepts are elements that enable the audience to take position when encountering the anti-Islam content of some Hollywood movies. We organized our research around provision of answer for two hypotheses: 1- the more the knowledge of the audience increases in the field of media effects, the less tendency they show towards accepting media messages, and; 2- the more the lived-experience of the American educated with Muslim culture is, the less effective the anti-Islam movie's propaganda against Muslims would be. Some of the findings, although not capable of being generalized, indicate that media effect only takes place in some particular circumstances. The audience tries to increase his/her digital literacy, their lived experience with Muslims and their intercultural experiences, so they come up with interpretations about the content of Hollywood movies that would create different meaning for them compared to the meaning intended by the producers of the anti-Islam movies. The results of our research also indicate that Hollywood is not considered by the American educated audience as a legitimate and reliable source that would offer them any knowledge about Muslims and/or Islam. If there should be any relationship between the audience's lived experience and movie's effects on them, then our findings indicate that there are two groups of audience as follows: 1- There are people who have lived-experience in Muslim's world. Their characteristics usually consist of; their tendency to resist against meaning of the movies, their inclination to connect with Muslims, their objection to chauvinism and rejecting religious discrimination. Members of this group reject most of the anti-Islam movie's messages except some elements. These elements include religious ceremonies, religious rituals of the Muslims and some cultural elements of the Muslims. They tend to criticize the content of the movies as being discursive. They believe these movies try to introduce Muslims as negative and dangerous individuals. They showed a high tendency towards changing modes of representing Muslims in movies and providing a more realistic picture of the Muslims. 2- There are people who have not had lived-experience in Muslim's world. The major characteristics of this group rely on the fact that its members perform chauvinistic tendencies, and they fail to show any resistance against content of the anti-Islam movies. They, in fact, believe the anti-Islam movies contribute to consolidation of patriotic ideas of the American society. Also they are very loyal to American cinema and show no tendency towards establishing contacts with the Muslims. The follow the dominant discourse of the movies which is based on representing Muslims as negative characters. The paper's approach can be applied to similar situations where the discrepancy between text and the audience's reading style creates controversies.