The first Hollywood film I watched in a theater was “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” in 2017 in Tunis — the movie in which Disney definitively ruined the franchise forever. Before that, in Libya, I used to buy pirated movies on CDs, or download them from illegal websites. Even the Libyan government got in on the piracy racket, illegally packaging the Arabic-speaking Disney channel along with 19 others and selling it just for 150 Libyan dinars. I say “just,” but 150 Libyan dinars was around $100 U.S., which for some Libyans in the 1990s was a month’s salary. Even in Libya’s “state of the people,” stolen entertainment wasn’t for everyone.
On occasion, those 20 channels would suddenly disappear and be replaced by 20 identical versions of the state-owned Al-Jamahiriya TV channel whenever our “Brother Leader,” the late dictator Moammar Gadhafi, decided to speak to the people. Kids like me would be annoyed by the change from their favorite cartoon to footage of Brother Leader speaking for hours. It wasn’t until much later that I began to see this as part of how the state controlled what we saw, knew and even thought.
My friends who grew up in the center of Tripoli have told me how, in the 1990s, they could occasionally persuade their fathers to let them rent a videocassette of a Disney film from particular stores. Living on the outskirts of the city, as I did, I never had that pleasure and only discovered them in the mid-2000s when, as a teenager, I started buying pirated CDs.
From then on, I watched almost all the classic Disney movies. Around me, Libyans were buying satellite dishes for their homes so they could access the Egyptian Nilesat, with its hundreds of free-to-air channels. In 2005, I bought my first computer and began watching pirated movies in earnest: I became hooked on Hollywood films — “The Godfather” series, “Lord of the Rings,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” even older films like “12 Angry Men,” “Taxi Driver” and “Back to the Future.”
Although “Back to the Future,” made in 1985, was my least favorite of them all, I had a certain relationship with it, as it was the first time outside the “Libya universe” I saw Libya presented in a film. Well, to be exact, it was a mythical version of Libya. It was the first time I realized how little the world knew about us, even in a film with a multimillion-dollar budget.
You know the scene I’m talking about. It’s when Doc finally demonstrates to Marty that his time-traveling DeLorean works, only for the people he stole the plutonium that powers it to show up. “Oh, my God,” says Doc. “They found me. I don’t know how, but they found me.” “Who?” asks Marty. “Who do you think?!” says Doc, “The LIBYANS!”
Two armed men show up, driving a Volkswagen camper van, beloved of American hippies. One, silent, wears a keffiyeh in the Gulf Arab style. The other, for some unknown reason, is wearing a beanie and shouts in an eastern Arabic dialect. Neither actor, from their IMDb page, appears to be Libyan or Arab.
I never understood why “Back to the Future” would depict Libyans as a terrorist group, until I managed to link the production and release date to the Reagan era Libyan-American conflict, which we used to call “The American Barbarian Aggression.” The movie was released a year before the infamous West Berlin discotheque bombing of 1986, which our Brother Leader’s henchmen were responsible for. Ten days after the bombing, the U.S. Army bombed Libya in what Reagan called “Operation El Dorado Canyon.” A lot of things have happened since then, and a lot of movies have been produced, but America and the world’s picture of Libya haven’t changed.
Later, I learned that “Back to the Future” wasn’t the first film that portrayed Libya. There were Italian and English films from the 1940s to ’60s that featured the country and its people, films such as the “Black Tent” (1956) and “Ali and the Camel” (1960). None could step out of the Orientalist vision that films set in my country should feature camels, an endless desert and belly dancers, with white men and women playing Arab people. Even in the Italian fascist propaganda promoting tourism in Libya in the 1930s, the Italians portrayed Libya as an oriental heaven where you could just chill, smoke shisha and watch some semi-naked girls dancing around.
I also learned that “Back to the Future” wasn’t the last film to portray Libya in cinema. However, the films that did focus more on the Brother Leader and his personality rather than the country itself. In the 2012 Hollywood film “The Dictator,” General Aladeen bears more than a passing resemblance to Gadhafi, and the fictional Republic of Wadiya is a deeply religious country where women are killed for fun. It was a comedy, I guess, and definitely not “woke.”
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