September 21, 2014
When MBC
Misr cancelled
Bassem Youssef’s El Bernameg in June
2014, it demonstrated that satire was not an effective cover for politically
subversive themes. However, in Egypt today, satire is also being used to
express ambiguity toward, or even disdain for, public challenges to the
security state.
Ever
since former President Mohamed Morsi’s ouster, the media has lambasted both
Islamists and other activists, even amidst government killings and arrests. A
recent zombie film illustrates how such pro-regime messaging is making its way
into commercial entertainment; it satirizes Islamists and leftists and glorifies
the military. By zombifying the Muslim Brotherhood in the wake of bloody
government dispersals of pro-Morsi protest camps in the summer of 2013, the
movie demands viewers to leave any sympathies or lingering doubts at the door.
El-Dassas (2014) is an Egyptian haunted
house film in the genre of Scary Movie
with clear political undertones. The director, Hany Hamdy, describes El-Dassas as the first Egyptian
horror-comedy since the days of Ismail
Yassin, an iconic comedian who appeared in films from the 1940s to the 1970s.
It depicts the Muslim Brotherhood as zombies aligned with the April 6 movement
(they rise from the dead on that date every year). In the film, four
trivialized and belittled representatives of Egyptian youth are recruited by
text message to participate in a reality show in which they have to spend the
night in an abandoned house (haunted, of course). Locked in for the night, the
characters learn the identity of the demonic owner—Hassan El-Dassas, a parody
of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Banna. Dropping limbs and drooling
blood, the zombies paw at the contestants. Hurled together, they learn they are
blood relatives, decedents of a military officer murdered by El-Dassas. With
the help of the police officer brother of the only female contestant, the
youths defeat El-Dassas. The people and the police unite, and together save the
day as they realize their common military heritage.
In Egypt
over the past year, debates about censorship have often happened in public view.
Aggrieved artists and producers appear on talk shows to accuse the censors of
inappropriately cutting or postponing the release of their work, and censorship
officials frequently respond live on air. The makers of El-Dassas employed this tactic, perhaps using the censorship
process as a publicity stunt. However, while defending the appropriateness of
their own work, they have argued against broad freedom of expression and in
favor of strong government control. They called for censors to only approve
work that is morally, artistically, and politically pure, as if the three are
clear-cut criteria that can go hand-in-hand.
In April
2014, the makers of El-Dassas went on
a media campaign when the censors delayed releasing the film, under then head
of censorship, Ahmed
Awad. They accused the censors of stalling the release of their film
because the censors wanted to weaken the film’s political message. Additionally,
they complained that the censors were politically suspect and not cultured
enough to appreciate artistic value or discern what content is dangerous to the
public. On talk shows (here
and here) and on a Facebook page, they focused on
Awad. They accused him of playing into Islamists’ hands, and of being
unqualified to serve as chief censor, given his work as a director of
commercial films purportedly of low artistic value.
When the
Prime Minister, Ibrahim Mehleb, went over Awad’s head on April 16 to ban
the film Halawet Roh (Sweetness of Spirit) starring Lebanese bombshell Haifa Wahabi, the El-Dassas Facebook page applauded this decision. The sit-in
announced on the El-Dassas Facebook
page called to save the public from morally dangerous material and from work of
low artistic value. Rather than defending their own film by calling for less
censorship, the administrators of the El
Dassas Facebook page called for purging the censorship office to bring it
in line with their own political and moral standards. They cheered Awad’s resignation
on April 18 following the controversy over Halawet
Roh. A few weeks later, the new head of censorship, Abdul Sattar Fathi,
gave final approval for El-Dassas’
commercial release.
Political
satire is often portrayed as inherently liberating and subversive towards the
powerful and their institutions. However, the case of El-Dassas illustrates how satire can sometimes express pro-regime
messages. El-Dassas is an example of
how callousness over security crackdowns is making its way into mass media comedy
and fictionalized narratives about political conflict. Political comedy may be
inherently transgressive, but it can embrace oppression as well as revolt
against it. Satire is not always revolutionary.
Meir R. Walters is a doctoral
candidate in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. From 2012
to 2013, he was a Fulbright fellow in Egypt and a fellow at the Center for
Arabic Study Abroad at the American University in Cairo.