Religious Intolerance And Ideological Questions In Persepolis

Persepolis is a straightforward story told in a simple way, much like Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel on which the film is based. Directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, both the novel and the film are basically a series of monochrome drawings which retell Satrapi’s account of her adolesence in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. Young Marjane is naturally inclined to rebel, much like her grandmother, and takes her freedom as a right but is soon challenged by her environment. Because her parents are liberal intellectuals, her family suffers initially under the Shah’s Western-supported dictatorship, in which “opposition to the Shah was centered in urban communal enclaves where autonomous and solidary collective resistance was possible.” (Skocpol 271) Later under, Satrapi’s family faced similar conflict under the rule of the mullahs after the Islamic revolutionaries turned on their secular allies. Satrapi relays the dense political history of Iran, including all the war and torture with brevity and wit. For example, many of the beards of the male religious zealots and the chadors of the Marjane’s teachers, are solid black, void of any light.

In the face of religious intolerance, Marjane takes a stand as an advocate of political liberalism. Despite the fact that Marjane is confident in herself and even a little bit self-righteous, the adult Marjane refrains from painting herself as a hero. Because her parents are concerned for her safety in a time of war and political repression, they send Marjane to school in Austria, but the alienation and loneliness she experiences there is a melancholy alternative to the constant fear and anxiety in Tehran. Marjane loses herself for a while in the world of punk rock in Europe, but is not easily sustained by the consequence-free lifestyle of European alternative culture. In Vienna her predicament becomes clear: she can either be politically and culturally free but give up her heritage and her family, or she can return home to Tehran but give up her own individuality. Satrapi manages to dramatize this choice without forcing it into a simplified conclusion.

This film poses important questions concerning revolution though it does not always answer them. Nevertheless, these questions trigger curiosity and demand analysis. In one scene, a member of Marjane’s extended family is sick and in desperate need of surgery, an operation that was not available in Iran at the time. To preserve his life, he needs permission to travel abroad, and so his wife goes to the administrator of the hospital to ask for permission to leave the country. However, she discovers that the new head of the hospital used to be a janitor in her building before the revolution. He has become a strict Muslim, refrains from looking women in the eye. and ultimately denies the patient permission to leave. His health, he claims, “is up to the will of God.” Satrapi uses this scene to highlight how little power the public wields in the face of a new reactionary authority, as well as the rule of superstition and ignorance against reason and the best interests of the public.

This ill relative highlights one of the ideological questions that every revolution must face. Revolution upsets the old relationships and paves the way for developing new relations. However, when the political authority is in the hands of forces, much like those forces in Iran, who are interested in maintaining the old order in a new form, traditionalist tendencies among the people can be reinforced and turned into a tool of the new ruling class. Skocpol observes, “all sectors of urban Iranian society were coalescing under the rubrics of Shi’a Islam and were following the direction of…Khomeini.” One of these tendencies is to use the opportunities provided by the situation to pull oneself up and try to get to a position that was not previously attainable. At times such a tendency among the lower classes can be linked with a feeling of revenge against those who had privileged positions in the past; and the violence that follows can target not the ruling classes, but the educated middle classes. Without a significant change in the existing relations, only a handful of people manage to get anywhere, and the great majority continue to be suppressed. The Islamic Republic, which has used numerous ideological tactics, primarily religion, to control the public and establish and maintain its rule, took advantage of this traditionalist tendency to keep a populist image and maintain its base (“albeit a traditional part fitting in new ways into a steadily changing modern socio-political scene”). (Skocpol 275) The result was a political suppression of intellectuals and the public masses.

Persepolis tries to expose the crimes of the Islamic Republic. But despite what some might assume, Satrapi does not ignore the role of the West in bringing political puppets like the Shah to power and suppressing opposition. We learn via a humorous storybook sequence of the role of Britain in the coup that brought Shah’s father to power, the theft of Iran’s oil, and the sale of arms by Western powers to both sides in the war against Iraq and prolong the conflict. These all serve to remind viewers that Iran does not exist in a world unto itself but is instead a product of a system spread throughout the world. Consequently, the struggle in Iran is part of the fight against the entire global structure.

The minimalist animation style of the film seems to be the most effective means to tell a story so densely filled of events and complicated issues. Her brevity, her simplicity in her drawings, and her withstrained use of color combine to tell a complete story full of humor and nuance in only 90 minutes. What in other animated films could be considered artistic weaknesses (like the simplicity of the lines, the lack of color and the bluntness of the dialogue) are all strengths in Persepolis. Explaining why she created the film to resemble her original graphic memoir with individual animated drawings instead of more modern computer-generated graphics, Satrapi says, “Lines in computer-generated graphics are flawless. This takes the personalities out of the characters, human beings are not perfect, and the lines drawn by hand better reflect their souls.”

Satrapi and Paronnaud have taken the complex life of a girl in a country shaken by revolution and war, a world full of love and walls, and turned it into a cinematic work, trying to bring people on both sides of the divide between the oppressed and oppressor countries closer. In an interview Satrapi remarks, “If we don’t look at people as humans, we can bombard them and nothing happens. Every day hundreds of people are killed in Iraq and we have not even observed a minute of silence.” For years, Western media—aided by the policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran —have been portraying the people of Iran specifically and the Middle East in general as Islamic fanatics, a false image that prepares Western minds to anticipate mass murder. Today, this black and white animated film paints the Iranian public more realistically and holistically than other articles and discourses that are available. We see that despite the constant presence of death in the country, people still find joy in life in many ways, even if it means they will face criticism, like Marjane did, for putting on lipstick, or lose their life for drinking alcohol like one of her friends did.. Empathy and understanding of another’s experience, problems, and aspiration can unite us all together. Satrapi, in her interview, adds, “If people come to the film and say these people are humans like us, the film is successful.”