Caliente!

The husband and I were reluctantly stuck in Dubai for Christmas Eve and Christmas on our way back to Afghanistan because the Kabul airport was closed due to snow. My husband was recuperating from a nasty bout of food poisoning brought on by some questionable pork fried rice consumed in Thailand, but we decided to venture out to the Diera City Center mall anyway. (Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I fucking HATE Dubai. There is nothing to do but troll the malls while trying to suppress the DTs brought on by the lack of alcohol, save for the $8 cans of Heineken at the overpriced hotels).

Bored, with nothing but a spirit-free hotel room or more mall, we decided to go see a movie. I chose Babel, not because the hottest man in the world is in it, but because I supposed it would be a thought-provoking drama about bridging cultural differences between the “developed” North and “underdeveloped” South. Boy, was I wrong.

Now, I saw the toned-down “Arab version” which left out a lot of nudity, but kept in the scene where the 12-year-old Moroccan boy beats off to his 10-year-old sister and where the estranged couple reunites over a bed pan, and what was the relevance of the deaf Japanese girl trying to have her dentist molest her? It just seemed way too long, too sexualized and too—vapid. The movie just reinforced streotypes. There was no real look at issues, no examination of why the North African police beat suspects or why Americans automatically assume that any act of violence in a Muslim country is assumed to be terrorism, it was just three hours of filler with no point.

(However, I do have a point.)

As we left the theater, I asked my husband, “what did we learn from this?” He replied, “never to let you pick a movie again?” No. The lesson is: brown people get fucked, while white people with the right passports will get their stupid asses saved in any situation.

And being in the Dubai airport brought this all home. While my husband and I could hop in a cab and head to the Sheraton for the night, the Afghans waiting on the same flight had to sleep on the concrete floor of the airport. They had no visas, no money, no food, no family in UAE to help them. The airline (Kam Air, you fucking bitches!) only gave these 150-plus Afghans food coupons on the THIRD DAY after the flight was cancelled. Most of them were being deported for being in the Emirates illegally.

When will the media really look at how the rest of the world lives? When will films examine all the things that we white, privileged folk take for granted? Probably not soon, and Hollywood has just shown us that. While critics rave about the “serious drama” about “real issues” in movies like Babel, I just roll my eyes.