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This paper investigates the public discourse surrounding the representation of cultural and ethnic groups in U.S. entertainment media by examining movie reviews of a specific film. It examines the types of arguments and support that popular film critics used in their evaluations of the 1998 action film The Siege. The film was publicly criticized by activist groups before its release and reviewers found it necessary to address the issue of whether the film contained stereotypes or could contribute to prejudicial understandings in their evaluations of the film. Three types of arguments that consistently appeared in the reviews' evaluations of the film are described and explored: the film's relationship to real-world events, the intentions of the film's creators, and the constraints of the genre. Implications of the consistent use of these criteria for audiences' decisions to see the film, their evaluations of the film, and their understanding of the role of the media in maintaining or challenging racism and ethnocentrism are discussed.

The significance and implications of the representation patterns within specific media texts have often been subjects of debate in both public and academic discourse. Groups and individuals have struggled over the meaning of parocular texts and over the appropriateness of that meaning. For example, one of the more visible of these dialogues concerns the popular 80s sit-com, The Cosby Show. Some scholars praised the program for its representation of a loving, functional, African American family headed by professional parents (e.g., Downing, 1989; Merritt & Stroman, 1993). Others argued that representing a successful Black family without directly addressing issues of race functions to elide racism that continues to limit the opportunities available to many African Americans (Carter, 1987; Gray, 1989). Other films and television shows have been the subject of controversy. In the popular press, debates have arisen about the representation of minority or disempowered groups in texts that range from John Singleton's recent remake of Shaft to the hit television program The Sopranos.

Researchers have investigated how different audiences respond to specific controversial or contested media representations. Much of this work suggests that audiences are likely to vary in their reaction to and interpretation of these texts depending on their previous attitudes and on the relevance of particular components of the text (e.g., Bird, 1996; Cohen, 1991; Cooper, 1999; Shively, 1992). Using quantitative measures, Vidmar and Rokeach's (1974) seminal study of audiences' reactions to the TV show All in the Family found that viewers' established beliefs and attitudes influenced their interpretations of the show's representation of issues of race and ethnicity. Less prejudiced viewers tended to interpret the program as making fun of bigotry, whereas more prejudiced viewers tended to interpret it as an endorsement of their own ideas. Other studies have used interviews or open-ended questionnaires to investigate different audiences' responses to a particular text's representation patterns. Many of these works have also found evidence of interpretative or evaluative variation across groups. Lewis (1991), for example, found sharp differences in the way African American and White viewers responded to The Cosby Show.

Theoretical bases of the potential for diversity in interpretation have been developed in a variety of areas. One of the better known is Barthes' (1986) definition of a text in his description of the "death of the author." He describes a text as an incomputable object that is constantly being created in the reading. A text, he writes, cannot be reduced to a single meaning. It exists only in discourse with the reader and with other texts, distinct from the author as an individual and his or her intentions. Some scholars have applied these principles to the analysis of popular media texts and explored how they are polysemic, or open to be interpreted in different ways by different viewers (e.g., Fiske, 1986). Other types of potential variation in audiences' readings of a text have been suggested. Condit (1989), for example, argues that the most appropriate conceptualization for most of the variation in audiences' interpretation is not polysemy, but rather polyvalence, or different evaluations of the same perceived meaning. Rhetorical scholars and critics have examined specific texts to describe how conflicting themes, character types, or ideologies are integrated into a coherent rhetoric that can serve to maintain or re-articulate existing power structures (e.g., Cloud, 1992; Rushing, 1989). The varied ideologies present in the text contribute to the maintenance of the ideological status quo.

Audiences, however, often do not consume television programs, films or other entertainment media in isolation, which suggests that neither the variety in interpretation nor the constraints on the range of that variety are located exclusively in the text itself. Popular-culture materials like films and television programs are often supplemented by other texts such as reviews, news stories, and advertisements. Conglomeration in the media industries and the stepped-up attempts by media corporations to cross-promote their products suggests that the intertextual net that surrounds individual representations is only likely to become denser. Even many years ago, survey and interview research indicated that film audiences were heavily exposed to trailers, reviews, and advertising and that these messages influenced their decisions to see particular movies (e.g., Austin, 1989; Custen, 1980). However, the materials that surround controversial or contested texts and the role they play in audiences' interpretations have received relatively little attention.

One aspect of the discourse that surrounds movies or TV programs is newspaper, television, and Internet reviews. These reviews can function to help the audience decide whether they want to see a film or not and provide frames and background information that is likely to shape how at least some viewers interpret and respond to the films they choose to see. This paper seeks to explore how these materials may contribute to the interpretation and evaluation of texts by identifying trends in the way reviewers assessed the appropriateness of a text's representations. It does so through a qualitative survey of movie reviews of a particular film, Edward Zwick's 1998 thriller The Siege.

The Siege is particularly well suited to this type of analysis because of its content and the circumstances surrounding its release. Although the director argued that the film took an explicit stand against ethnic and racial prejudice, it was protested by Arab and Muslim groups throughout its filming and at its release. The film's plot features an Islamic terrorist network that carries out an escalating series of bombings in New York City. The U.S. government eventually declares martial law and turns the city over to a megalomaniacal Army general who imprisons immediately most of the male Arab Americans in the city. The groups protesting the movie argued that it stereotyped Arabs, associated Islam with terrorism, and had the potential to increase antipathy towards Muslims and people of Arabic heritage. The publicity was such that most critics felt it necessary to address issues of the film's pattern of representation. More than three-fourths of the broad sample of reviews that were considered in this analysis mentioned protests or objections by Arabic or Muslim groups explicitly, and only a handful failed to address some aspect of the appropriateness of the film's representation patterns.

The film took on added resonance on September 11, 2001. These events made The Siege seem eerily prescient in some ways and brashly naive in others. The film anticipated a large-scale terrorist attack on a major U.S. city. However, the number of real lives lost in the attack on the World Trade Center was more than four times the number of fictional lives that the film's scriptwriters felt sufficient to define the culminating tragedy of the film and to bring about the imposition of martial law. New York has proved to be both more vulnerable and more resilient than even Hollywood was able to imagine.

The way these events changed the sense of the meaning and worth of the film on the part of the public and the filmmakers is still difficult to gage. Video rental outlets described renewed interest in the film after the September 11 attacks (Nichols, 2001; Schaefer, 2001). However, there is no way to know how the viewers responded to the film. The filmmakers themselves seem to have made no explicit comments about the movie after the attacks. However, on September 23, Ed Zwick, The Siege's director, published a commentary article with Marshall Herskovitz in the Arts and Entertainment section of The New York Times. Although The Siege is never mentioned, the article can be read as both an apology for and a defense of the film. In the article, they discuss what the events of 9/11 mean for the film industry, which has historically traded on "big budget mayhem," and what the role of film should be in the post-- attack environment. They describe the industry as seeming to feel "some inchoate sense of shame" and they wonder whether "violent spectacles like Armageddon or Independence Day... [can] still expect the kind of lavish embrace they have counted on." "Perhaps what this event has revealed," they speculate, with its real bodies blown to bits and real explosions bringing down buildings, is the true darkness behind so much of the product coming out of Hollywood today." They conclude, finally, that "a great film can be made about the most recent events" and that "it is not the subject but rather the intentions that determine the moral possibilities of a film."

As will be discussed below, The Siege itself has elements that could be seen to support the contention that the film is stereotypical or will promote prejudice, as well as those that could be seen to undercut it. There was no clear consensus on the part of the critics as to the appropriateness of the film's representation. However, as they grappled with this issue in the face of the contradictions within the film, many critics were forced to articulate expectations and evaluations about fairness, responsibility, and the role of the media in shaping viewers' perceptions of social groups. Although similar issues are likely to apply to other works, these expectations are more often left implicit. Reviews of The Siege offer a particularly broad range of explicit arguments relating to issues of the film's representation patterns.

FILM REVIEWS IN THE SOCIAL CONTEXT

Other researchers have considered popular critics' interpretations in examinations of the reception of media texts. Reviews are often used as evidence of the tenor of public reactions to a particular text (e.g., Cloud, 1992; Cooper, 1999; 2000). Semati (2000) used reviews to ground his analysis of the portrayal of the Middle East in three recent action films, including The Siege. Both Griswold (1987) and Ellsworth (1986) compared reviews that were associated with different audiences in order to investigate differences in interpretation and evaluation across groups. Ramsey, Achter, and Condit (2001) looked at audience responses to book reviews of the controversial Bell Curve to investigate whether the reviews contribute to the perpetuation of racism.

One way to conceptualize the social significance of film reviews is through Gramsci's (1971) conception of the intellectual as a role with the primary function of organizing, administering, or managing information for others. Since work within a society is divided so that intellectuals tend to come from empowered social classes, intellectuals' work as mediators of information helps maintain the existing hierarchical power relationships within a society. The body of texts constantly produced by the Hollywood movie industry has been found to reflect a variety of ideological perspectives (e.g., Fiske, 1986; Prince, 1992). The controlled inclusion of this type of variety allows for the existing power structure to maintain control. Diversity allows the existing system to absorb and counter resistance from society members. In this context, reviewers, in the role of intellectuals, can help organize these varied perspectives for the audience and contextualize their consumption. To the extent that film reviewers, as an example of a society's intellectuals, contribute to audiences' managing of the varied perspectives implied by the images and information embodied in film, they have the potential to contribute to the media's role in maintaining existing belief systems or encouraging social change.

This contribution could be manifested in the reviews' influence on both the audiences' exposure to and interpretation of a film. Audiences use reviews to help them decide whether a particular film is worth the investment of time and money to see. Reviews, in combination with promotional materials, also provide summary and background information that also contributes to the ticket-buyers' decisions to see the film by indicating whether the subject matter is interesting to them and whether the film is potentially offensive. This information also provides clues as to whether a film is appropriate to a particular mood or viewing context. It can suggest, for example, whether the film is appropriate for a date or for an evening with friends. The information and opinions audiences encounter in reviews also has the potential to shape how they interpret and respond to the films that they choose to see by shaping the expectations or by marking aspects or elements of the film as particularly important.

Prince (1997) divides film criticism targeted toward non-academic and non-professional audiences into two general types. The first is newspaper and television reviewing, the primary function of which is to help the reader decide whether they should see the film or not. The emphasis is typically on the reviewer's independent and emotional responses to the film. This type of review also typically provides a summary of the film and a discussion of the cast. Newswriting handbooks suggest some of the expectations and constraints that newspaper and television reviewers work under. Hohenberg (1987) suggests that art or media reviews have two purposes: to inform about the subject of the review and to evaluate that subject. His and other manuals (e.g., Stein, 1985; Ward, 1985) emphasize the need for a writer to meet deadlines that can come within hours of seeing a work and the imperative to write clearly. These writers have little time to create their reviews and are forced to make them brief. They are unlikely to be able to assume either that the audience has more than a minimal level of interest in film analysis itself or that they have a great deal of background knowledge.

Prince's (1997) second category is general-interest journal-based criticism, which has a longer format, is less directly consumer oriented, and puts a greater emphasis on situating the film in a historic or cultural context. For Prince, the clearest embodiment of this type of criticism is Pauline Kael's reviews for The New Yorker. These reviewers are able to assume the audience has more familiarity with other films and with film criticism, and that they are more interested in film analysis for its own sake.

Prince's distinction makes some meaningful observations of the range of differences one can find in writing about new films targeted toward a general audience. In practice, the distinction between the two categories is not always clear, nor is it always clearly based on medium. Among the reviews of The Siege, for example, there were substantive differences across newspaper reviews. Articles that appeared in prestige papers published in large cities, such as Robert Ebert's (1998) for The Chicago Sun-Times or Janet Maslin's (1998) for The New York Times, generally devoted more consideration to the potential social impact of the film and its representation patterns than those in lesser-known papers published in smaller, and perhaps less diverse, cities.

Space or time limits, the imperative of timeliness, and the genre expectations of the audience constrain the number of perspectives through which a film can be evaluated. These constraints mean that certain aspects of the film's implications and meaning are usually absent from film reviews, especially those whose primary purpose is to be a guide for potential ticket-buyers. Unless prodded to do so by the extremity of the subject matter or outside controversy, reviewers rarely consider how the representation in a particular film may serve to reify or to challenge existing social patterns such as racism, patriarchy or ethnocentrism. To some extent, this makes the critics' evaluations of The Siege's representation patterns particularly valuable, as the controversy forced the consideration and articulation of expectations to which other texts may be implicitly held.

Furthermore, reviewers writing for general-interest publications are attempting to reach a large audience with a broad range of political and social beliefs. Reviewers are unlikely to take an explicit political stance in their reviews in order to avoid alienating part of their potential audience. Although academic critics have explored how portrayals of the Middle East in entertainment media can reflect and parallel contemporary political rhetoric, policies, and interests of the U.S. government (e.g., Nadel, 1997; Prince, 1993; Semanti, 2000), these aspects are rarely considered in reviews.

Finally, according to the conventions of both types of film reviewing, the author is not dead, as Barthes (1986) would have it, but rather remains the guiding force behind a film. Most reviewers rely on the auteur concept. Especially when a filmmaker has a track record of consistent or distinctive work, many reviewers tend to describe particular aspects or elements of a movie as something a filmmaker did in order to send a message or create an effect.

THE FILM

In order to contextualize the discussion of the film reviews and to support contentions that the film is open enough to support varied interpretations and evaluations that are partially guided by the reviews, this essay will first briefly describe the film itself. The emphasis is on the elements or sequences that were frequently mentioned by film reviewers or which could be read to either support or refute the argument that the film as a whole is racist or ethnocentric.

The film opens with a montage of television news images of the 1996 terrorist attack in which a fuel truck was detonated outside a U.S. military compound in Dhahran, killing nineteen people. Inter-cut with this footage is a scene shot for the movie of a bearded man in robes and a turban. The attack, the voice-over announces, is thought to be the work of the (fictional) Sheik Ahmed bin Talal. The film cuts to an excerpt of a press conference of then-President Bill Clinton, condemning a terrorist attack. From Clinton, the image changes to a wide-screen, filmed aerial shot of sand dunes under a blue sky. A luxury car driving directly over the sand moves swiftly into the frame. Another cut reveals that Sheik bin Talal is in the backseat.

The rest of the sequence combines portions of Clinton's press conference, in which he vows that those "who committed this act will not go unpunished," with scenes from the desert. The sound track of these scenes begins to feature military-sounding radio communications. The aerial footage of the car is inter-cut with black and white satellite-like imagery tracking its progress. The car coasts past a pair of camels and enters a small village, only to be held up by a flock of goats in the road. Soldiers disguised as herdsman ambush the car, the driver is killed, and Sheik bin Talal is captured. The final scene of the prologue shows the Sheik sitting on a cot in a bare cell. Also in the cell, observing the prisoner, is a well-groomed man in a business suit (Bruce Willis). There is no dialogue between the two and the man in the suit soon walks around the Sheik and leaves. He will later be identified as General Devereaux.

The prologue is the only part of the film that takes place outside of the U.S. In his 1978 book, Orientalism, Edward Said argued that Western representations of the Middle East and India are constructed in ways that support the West's vision of itself and justify Western control over these areas. The implied supremacy of the Western tradition has been argued to be denoted in texts portraying non-Western societies in at least three ways that are relevant to this portion of The Siege. First, since the nonwestern societies' primary purpose within the films is to be a foil or contrast to Western society, the divisions within the non-Western societies are irrelevant. Americanmade media are argued to portray the Middle East as a single block without any intemal variation or individuality. In this sequence of The Siege, the visual markers that Hollywood film associates with the Middle East-sand dunes, camels, robed shepherds-are present, but the specific location is only mentioned much later in the film, and then only in passing. The lack of specificity of the location and the reduction of the entire region to a few salient markers can be seen to imply a lack of distinction across Middle-Eastern settings and peoples. No matter where in the Middle East this takes place, it is all the same.

A second means through which power relations are denoted in the text is by portraying the non-Western society as perpetually the subject of a Western gaze without presenting the "other's" perspective on the West (Shohat & Stam, 1994; Shome, 1996). This sequence, both thematically and visually, can be seen to comport with this pattern. No permission is necessary for the Sheik to be captured, no matter whose soil he is on. The satellite that tracks the car cannot be seen by the men inside, and the identity of the voices that track his entry into the village is never clearly established.

A final means through which ethnocentric or orientalist perspectives are thought to be instantiated in film is through the representation of Whiteness or Westerness as a race-less, cultureless, category. Western texts often feature White, North American or European characters that come to be able to move comfortably within societies other than their own, whereas characters from non-European or non-North American societies are portrayed as inevitably culture-bound (Hall, 1981; Shohat & Stam, 1994; Shome, 1996). The ease with which the extraction team makes themselves invisible could be read to comport with this message.

At the conclusion of the prologue, the image in the cell brightens to the opening credit, the film's title on a pale-blue background. The camera pans to the left to reveal a close-up of an olive-skinned, bearded man issuing a call to prayer. A brief montage of worshipers kneeling in prayer-a family in a private home, crowds of men in a mosque-follows. The montage concludes with another close-up of the muezzin and then the camera pulls back to reveal the Manhattan skyline. The mosque is in Brooklyn. This sequence serves, of course, as a transition. As the prologue occurs in the Middle East, the viewer is likely to assume that the muezzin, the families and crowds of worshippers, and the mosque are also in the Middle East until the final shot reveals otherwise.

This sequence can also serve to illustrate, on a small scale, the potential for contrasts in the way different viewers understand the film. The association of the Middle East location, the mosque and its worshipers, and New York City is accomplished through visual juxtaposition. The meaning of images linked through this technique is inherently indeterminate in that the same film grammar is used to communicate a variety of propositions including causality, analogy, and contrast (Messaris, 1997). The nature of the relationship between the images must be inferred by the viewer from the content and context of the images. The reliance on inference leaves a large share of meaning construction to the viewer, suggesting that individual audience member's interpretations of this sequence are likely to vary.

In fact, two reviews cited the meaning of this transition as evidence of fundamentally opposed conclusions about the tenor of the film's representation. Charles Taylor (1998), in a positive review for the on-line magazine Salon, describes the scene as exemplifying the film's strong pro-social stand: "Near the beginning of the film, we see a Muslim man in a turret of a mosque beginning his daily prayers. The camera pulls back to reveal that the mosque is located in Brooklyn. The message of that shot couldn't be clearer: The people whom we think of as 'the other' are our fellow citizens." The message could, perhaps, be clearer. Janet Maslin (1998), writing for The New York Times, describes the same sequence as conveying a different message. "Among the film's most ominous shots is one panning from a New York mosque to the Manhattan skyline, which looks like one big tempting target in the context of this story." Just as interpretations of the implication of this sequence reveal contrasts in perceived meaning, viewers' interpretations of the meaning of the film's message as a whole may vary.

The plot of The Siege itself subsumes two conflicts. The first half of the movie proper focuses on FBI agent Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington) and his task force's hunt for a group of the Sheik's followers who are carrying out a series of bombings in New York in an effort to force his release. As the team pursues the bombers, they encounter Elise Kraft (Annette Bening), a White female CIA operative with experience in the Middle East who seems to be operating a covert, parallel investigation into the incidents. She is also the lover and "case officer" of Samir Nazhde, a Palestinian who has previously informed on or served as a go-between for terrorist groups. She and Hubbard enter an uneasy alliance. Despite Hubbard's competence and dedication, the FBI is unable to identify and capture enough of the highly dispersed group to bring an end to the bombings. The final attack destroys the FBI headquarters in Manhattan, killing over 600. In an atmosphere of rising panic and with the FBI in disarray, the U.S. president declares martial law and turns the city over to the military.

One component of the complexity of the film's representation is the range of social groups that are featured in the film. The FBI task force is considerably more diverse in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity than is typical of the supporting casts of Hollywood adventure films. Highly visible members of the group with speaking roles include an African American man, an Asian American woman, and an African American woman. Furthermore, although it is only obliquely addressed in the dialogue, the character of Hubbard, the task force leader and primary hero of the film, is African American. Hubbard's partner, Frank Haddad (Tony Shalhoub), is Lebanese-American and a practicing Muslim.

Although there is not and cannot be a blueprint of a non-stereotypical character, Hubbard differs from previous characters that have concerned academic critics in substantive ways. A media stereotype is a set of specific attributes that have historically been used to describe members of a particular group within a society's discourse (Hall, 2000). Adherence to these models of representation is seen as objectionable because portrayals that do so are expected to have greater resonance in the minds of audiences than singular negative portrayals. In films that are made for largely White audiences, African American characters are often portrayed as tame, pliant, and largely sexless (Bogle, 1996). It is not uncommon for them to be paired with a White buddy or co-star (Ames, 1992).

Hubbard, however, is the leader of the task force and the hero of the film, not a supporting character, a sidekick, or half of a buddy team. Although Hubbard is committed to working for the law-enforcement establishment -Kraft describes his perspective as "change the system from within, rah, rah, rah"-he is never submissive, never played for laughs, and is never at a loss for dignity. He is less violent and more restrained than most of those around him, but is able to act decisively when necessary. When the early arrival of news helicopters endanger a classroom of children that are being held hostage, it is Hubbard, for example, who storms the room where they are being held and kills the terrorist before he can detonate his bomb. In contrast to many other African American media characters with similar roles or occupations (Ames, 1992), Hubbard is not obviously domesticated or emasculated. No family is ever mentioned and on the few occasions he is seen at home he his surrounded by a litter of folders and papers from work. Hubbard is not completely asexual either. His confrontations with Kraft often have a flirtatious tone. For example, they slow-dance in a bar to celebrate an early, fleeting success while his co-workers look at each other significantly.

The scripting of the initial villains as Muslim and Arabic, however, was the source of many of the objections to The Siege. The terrorists in this film were seen as problematic, in part, because they were examples of the negative characters that tend to be the most visible image of Arabs or Muslims within the entertainment media. Although the positive character of Frank Haddad represents an unusual departure from formula in some ways, as will be discussed below, The Siege followed several other films that featured Arab villains, including Aladdin, True Lies, and Executive Decision. In a commentary article for The New York Times, Ibrahim Hooper (1998) of CAIR writes, "The producers say the film makes it clear that the terrorist images and associations reflect only the lunatic fringe of the Muslim world. This 'fringe', however, is about the only segment of the Muslim population that most moviegoers have seen for decades." This particular representation became objectionable within the context of Hollywood's representation, or lack of representation, of Arab or Muslim characters in other films.

The threatening, largely faceless terrorist characters can be also be seen as problematic in more qualitative terms, as a representation of an established media stereotype that would seem resonant and familiar to the audience because of their previous experience with the media. The terrorist is a common Arab character type in modern U.S. entertainment media (Prince, 1993; Shaheen, 1989; 1994). The objections to The Siege included the charge that by reproducing the cultural stereotype of the Arab terrorist, the film reinforces established cultural understandings and intensifies audiences' tendencies to see all individuals who are Arab or Muslim as threatening and duplicitous ("Fall Guys," 1998).

In the second half of the film, the primary conflict of the narrative shifts. The Army becomes the subject of the most visually potent images as exploding Metro buses and blown-out office buildings are replaced by armored personal carriers and ranks of combat troops marching over an otherwise deserted Brooklyn Bridge. Devereaux becomes the most visible enemy. He seals off Brooklyn to contain the Arab American population and troops go house-to-house, rounding up and forcibly detaining any males of Arabic heritage who even vaguely meet some aspect of a wideranging profile. The General himself blithely tortures and shoots a suspect he deems uncooperative. When Haddad's 13-year-old son is included in the roundup, Haddad resigns from the Bureau in disgust and frustration.

Haddad is portrayed as a proud and involved father. At work he is a loyal and knowledgeable agent, if one that is excitable and voluble. He will follow through in helping Hubbard throughout the film. As the Muslim and Arabic cast member that the audience comes to know best, Haddad is the most visible counterweight to the villainous terrorist characters. With the exception of an Arabic community leader who briefly appears at a meeting to voice support for the FBI's efforts, he is the only speaking Arabic or Muslim character clearly shown to be on the good side. Furthermore, his plight can be seen as a means of personalizing the injustice of Devereaux's methods and the anguish that those methods cause.

However, Haddad's excitability, which serves as a foil to Hubbard's unflappable composure, could be read as yet another example of an excited, irrational, individual from a "primitive" culture who requires guidance. This set of characteristics has become a stereotype of its own when applied to characters associated with non-Westem societies (Shohat & Stam, 1994). Haddad is the half of the team that is more likely to bend the rules by knocking around a suspect or fudging the evidence, only to be overruled or reprimanded by Hubbard. When the task force's attempts to tail a suspect go awry, for example, Haddad curses and expostulates and drives the car screeching around corners and scrapes against parked cars. Hubbard sits in the passenger seat and, without raising his voice, juggles the tasks of instructing the other agents by walkie-talkie and requesting a search warrant from a judge by cell phone.

Under surveillance by the Army, Hubbard and Kraft struggle to continue their investigation in the midst of the chaos of the city's occupation. Eventually, Kraft reveals that Shiek bin Talal and his followers were trained to make bombs by the U.S. to help overthrow Saddam Hussein. Samir Nazhde had helped recruit trainees into the program. They were then unceremoniously abandoned, more or less to be slaughtered, after a government "policy shift." In an attempt to absolve herself of her role in this betrayal, Kraft helped get the group's members into the U.S. despite their being on the terrorist watch list. She asks Hubbard to let her "make right" a situation that she helped cause. This sequence makes The Siege relatively unusual in that it provides some sort of context or reasoning to account for the terrorists' actions. Although it is unclear whether Kraft's primary transgression was her state-sanctioned involvement in the original operation or her individual action of securing visas, the film makes some effort to explain the bombers' anger.

A plan is formulated to lure out the final cell of the terrorist organization by suggesting that the Sheik could be released. Hubbard, Haddad, and the remains of the FBI task force distract the Army surveillance teams while Nazhde brings Kraft to a bathhouse where he claims he has set up a meeting. It turns out, however, that the final terrorist is Nazhde himself. He pulls a gun on Kraft and screams at her for kidnapping the Sheik, "a holy man," for "preaching the word of god." He is preparing to attack a multi-ethnic, multi-racial march protesting the internments. Kraft tries to convince him to back down as he completes a cleansing ritual, dons a shroud, and straps on a vest of explosives. When Haddad and Hubbard arrive at the "meeting," Nazhde uses Kraft as a human shield and demands that the agents step away from the door. In an act of self-sacrifice, Kraft pulls away from Nazhde, causing Nazhde to shoot her and allowing Hubbard a clear shot. Kraft dies in Hubbard's arms on the bathhouse floor.

A consistent charge to which The Siege was held was that the movie links Islam with terrorism (e.g., Barnes, 1998; Ghomeshi, 1998; Kutty, 1998). As is the case in Nazhde's final sequence, the terrorists are shown to be carrying out the bombings in what they perceive to be a holy cause. They feel they have, Kraft expostulates at one point, "a warrant from God." Early in the film, Hubbard and his team are able to infer that the terrorists who died detonating the first bomb had put on shrouds as the final step of a "ritual of purification" before starting on their suicide mission. The destruction of FBI headquarters is depicted through a series of images of the terrorist's actions inter-cut with a portrayal of Hubbard's testimony before a Washington committee. The terrorist's sequence starts with a ritual cleansing and concludes with a van crashing in slow motion though the lobby windows of the building.

After Nazhde's and Kraft's deaths, Hubbard returns to Devereaux's headquarters to remove the General from command, release the prisoners, and prosecute him for torture and murder. Devereaux refuses to accept that the terrorist threat has been eliminated. The FBI raids the headquarters and a standoff ensues between the FBI swat team and the Army soldiers. Hubbard stands his ground, daring Devereaux to "give the order" to fire and "make murderers out of" the young soldiers under his command. Finally, Devereaux yields and orders his soldiers to stand down.

A final relevant component of potential meanings of the film can perhaps be best explained in terms of Barthes' (1972) conceptualization of the use of cultural myths as a means of inoculation. He argues that the cultural discourse of a society can admit to the secondary evils of a social institution in order to conceal its principal ones. "One immunizes the contents of the collective imagination by means of a small inoculation of acknowledged evil; one thus protects it against the risk of a generalized subversion" (p. 150). He offers the example of a means of resuscitating images of an army.

.. [S]how without disguise its chiefs as martinets, its discipline as narrowminded and unfair, . . . Then, at the last moment, turn over the magical hat, and pull out of it the image of an army, flags flying, triumphant, bewitching, to which ... one cannot but be faithful .... A little 'confessed' evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil. (pp. 41-42)'

One can apply this pattern of criticism to The Siege in terms of its portrayal of the Army and the FBI. By making the character of Deveroux the mastermind of both the "extraction" that immediately initiates the wave of terrorist incidents as well as the later civil rights abuses, the film avoids challenging the fundamental fairness and benevolence of either U.S. society or law enforcement agencies as an institution. One can read the film to mean that, a few psychotic megalomaniacs aside, both systems are fair and just to all their constituents.

Although the film can be said to have serious themes, the action components dominated the film's promotional materials. One of the taglines used to promote the movie's release, for example, was "On November 6h [the film's release date], our Freedom is History." The poster art was martial and nationalistic. It featured troops in olive fatigues marching over the Brooklyn Bridge with armored personnel carriers. The lettering spelling out the title of the film featured the stars and stripes of the American flag.2 The blurbs on the cover of the video described the film as "exciting and compelling" and "action packed." The cover art included the Brooklyn Bridge image, emergency vehicles in front of the wreckage of the FBI headquarters, and the skyline of Manhattan lit by a fiery explosion.

This promotional material is almost exclusively focused on physical threats rather than abstract or ideological ones. The prominence of marching armies and explosions suggest that the threat to America's freedom is not the suspension of civil rights, as it can be argued portions of the movie itself suggest, but rather an invading army. Furthermore, the nationalistic imagery and the confrontational slogan are more conducive to emotional investment in the vanquishing of a clear enemy than the thoughtful consideration of the nature of freedom. By featuring these elements in The Siege's promotion, the studio ensured that most of the viewers who chose to expose themselves to the movie on the basis of the ads or the video's cover art are likely to have intended to see an action film. The promotional materials are also likely to have served to suggest implicitly that the film was most appropriately judged by the standards of the action film.

ANALYSIS

In order to investigate how the representation patterns in the film were presented to audiences, a qualitative survey of approximately 40 reviews of the film that were targeted to the general public was conducted. Reviews published in a wide range of sources were sought in order to allow for the investigation of a variety of different reviewer arguments. All the reviews of the film that were published within a month of its release in North American, English-language publications that could be retrieved from Lexis/Nexis database and reviews in magazines targeted to general readerships that could be retrieved through the Academic Index database were examined. Also included were the North-American-based, English-language, on-line publications that could be accessed through the Internet Movie Database's entry on the film.

The inconsistency of the source lists forestalls claims that the reviews are representative of North American, English-language reviews of the film. However, the goal of this analysis is to detect a portion of the range of arguments that were offered to viewers in evaluations of the films, rather than to create a typology or to track the relative weights of varying perspectives within the discourse. Identifying the criteria that reviewers use to evaluate this film may contribute to understandings of the ways in which audiences interpret and respond to debates about media texts' representations of social groups.

To carry out the analysis, the reviews were read in their entirety, noting the overall evaluation of the film. Portions of the review that either mentioned objections to the film or which otherwise described the appropriateness of the film's representation of Muslim or Arabic groups were marked and subjected to closer examination. The tenor of the review's evaluation of either the objections to the film or of the appropriateness of the film's representation itself were considered and any evidence or arguments related to the evaluations were identified. Once tentative findings were formulated, the relative proportions and the tenor of the confirming examples were compared to the rest of the reviews in order to ascertain which patterns presented themselves consistently and were not contradicted by the other examples. The findings presented below are organized by the types of arguments that the reviewers used to arrive at their conclusions rather than by the direction of evaluation of either the film as a whole or of the film's pattern of representation.

THE REVIEWS

Reviews of The Siege itself ranged from glowing endorsements to scathing condemnations. However, the most common sentiment was that although the movie starts off as an enjoyable and tightly paced thriller, it ends up handling its weightier themes in a muddled and obvious manner that ultimately functions as neither good drama nor good action. For example, USA Today's verdict is that, "[The Siegel is, for maybe 80 minutes, a fairly efficient FBI thriller about Brooklyn-based terrorists who paralyze New York City. Then ... the story degenerates into second-rate melodrama in its final third" (Clark, 1998). Similar evaluations are apparent in a wide variety of reviews, as the following examples indicate:

The Arizona Republic: The story begins on sure ground with the FBI battling terrorists in a tale of intrigue ... but director Ed Zwick has big plans for his movie. He ventures into uncharted territory: what happens when terrorists force the U.S. government to declare martial law. At this point The Siege not only loses steam, it abandons credibility ... (Fenster, 1998).

The Atlanta Constitution: The verdict: A well-made paranoid thriller that ultimately reduces a hot-button issue to standard Hollywood action cliches (Murray, 1998).

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch: It doesn't take real long for The Siege and its promising beginning to fall apart (Holleman, 1998).

Washington Post: ... the movie, which is lean and tough and absorbing for the longest time, really seems to lose its identity and its conviction when paratroopers occupy the Bronx (Hunter, 1998).

Of the reviews that addressed the issue, about half dismissed objections to the film, often with the argument that the movie was actually about threats to civil rights or that the stereotypical terrorists were counterbalanced by positive Muslim or Arabic characters (e.g., Dudek, 1998; Keenan, 1998; O'Sullivan, 1998; Taylor, 1998). Most of the rest of the reviewers either presented both arguments and counter-arguments as to whether the film was appropriate and withheld a specific judgement of their own (e.g., Clark, 1998; Johnson, 1998; Persall, 1998), or concluded that the film as a whole was problematic and that the complaints were justified (e.g., Carr, 1998; Denby, 1998; Maslin, 1998). Across these different evaluations, three different kinds of support were used repeatedly: the film's relationship to real-world events, the intentions of the film's creators, and constraints of the film's genre.

Relation to Real-world Events

One form of support that was used to advance reviewers' evaluations of the film and its representation patterns was the relationship of the film's plot to real-world events. The release of The Siege and the controversy that accompanied it took place several years before September 11, 2001. However, five years before the film a bomb had been detonated in the parking garage underneath the World Trade Center by members of an Islamic fundamentalist group. Three years earlier Timothy McVeigh, who was associated with a White militia group, bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building. During the days immediately after the Oklahoma City bombing, there were reports that individuals of Arabic or Middle Eastern heritage were harassed in connection with the incident. These two events helped define the public's understanding of terrorism within the U.S. at the time The Siege was released. When reviewers or others who were commenting on the film discussed its relationship to real-world events, these incidents were a primary basis of reference.

Several features of the film emphasized the topicality of the plot and played up the plausibility of Arabic or Muslim-initiated terrorist attacks within the United States. For example, the film opens with real news footage of President Clinton and links the character of Sheik bin Talal to a real event.

In defending the film, Zwick cited the topicality and the realism of the plot about Arab terrorists working inside the U.S. to protest U.S. foreign policy. In an article for Entertainment Weekly, he is quoted as responding to requests that the terrorists be changed to White militants by saying that "I didn't make the world. This is the reality of what radical Islamic groups do" (Pener, 1998). He expressed similar sentiments in The New York Times. "I didn't invent the world," he is quoted as saying (Weinraub, 1998), "I'm an artist presuming to look at the world and write what I see and what I fear." Reports of interviews with Zwick in both The Seattle Times (Hartl, 1998) and The New York Times (Weinraub, 1998) describe the film's relevance by citing a contemporary news story about the possibility that the terrorists responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing were based in Brooklyn. The Seattle Times article reports that "The [1993 attack on the] World Trade Center was always in the back of [Zwick's] mind while he was creating the script."

An issue repeatedly considered by the reviewers was the impact of the film's relationship to these current events on the appropriateness of its casting and plot. Multiple reviewers either mentioned a specific incident of terrorism, made a general reference to real-world terrorist activity, or issued an evaluation of the plot's plausibility when evaluating the appropriateness of the film or its representation. Among those who considered this evaluative criterion, the most common response was to see the film's events as inherently plausible or to see the film as having framed the premise as plausible.

However, even critics who saw these events as realistic differed as to whether the real world correlates of the plot invalidated complaints about the film's use of Arabic Muslim villains or made it more problematic. Several critics advanced a position and an argument similar to Zwick's. Real incidents of Arabic or Islamic terrorism allowed for the casting of Muslim Arabs as fictional villains. For example, Kenneth Turan (1998) of the Los Angeles Times writes, "The terrorist organization in The Siege is an Arabic one, and while Arab American organizations are understandably upset at this, the choice has a basis in fact. . . ." Similarly, James Verniere (1998) writes,

Although at least one rights groups has been critical of The Siege ... it is, in fact ... thoughtful, unexploitative and ultimately sympathetic ... As anyone who was in the World Trade Center a few years ago knows, terrorists could strike in the United States and those terrorists might be Muslim (we also know from the bombing in Oklahoma City they might not be).

Other critics, however, cited the recent events associated with Arabic or Muslim terrorists as a reason that the film's representation is inappropriate. They argue that these highly publicized incidents primed audiences to accept the Arab villains uncritically and made people who are Muslim or Arabic particularly vulnerable to prejudice and to unwarranted attacks. For example, Roger Ebert (1998) of the Chicago Sun-Times, writes,

What if the movie was a fantasy about the Army running rampant over the civil liberties of American Irish, Poles, Koreans? Wouldn't that be the same thing as rounding up the Arab-Americans? Not really, because the same feelings are not at stake .... The vast majority of Arab-Americans are patriotic citizens who are happy to take the plunge into the melting pot with the rest of us (a point the movie does make), but a minority have been much in the news, especially after the World Trade Center bombing in New York City. . . Many Americans do not draw those distinctions and could not check off on a list of those Arab countries we consider hostile, neutral, or friendly. There is a tendency to lump together "towelheads" (a term used in the movie). Arab-Americans feel vulnerable right now to the kinds of things that happen in this movie,and that's why it's not the same thing as targeting other ethnic groups... Given how vulnerable our cities are to terrorism, and how vulnerable Arab-Americans are to defamation, was this movie really necessary?

Frank Gabrenya (1998) of The Columbus Dispatch suggests a way the same point could have been made though a plot with a real world parallel that has less risk of strengthening stereotypes.

... Zwick argues that the real point of The Siege is a warning about how excessive reaction to a reign of terror can result in the obliteration of the rights and processes on which the United States was founded. Zwick is right, but that part of the film comes only after a long series of terrorist acts that prove the anti-defamation groups have reason to complain. ... The point might have been better-served by beginning in the aftermath of the most horrific crime and placing all the focus on ... the Army. For that matter, why couldn't the script mimic those responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing: home-grown terrorists who escalate their dissatisfaction with U.S. policy into a full-fledged war that would bring the same response?

A smaller proportion of reviewers take a different tack and suggest that the implausibility of the events of the second half, of the Army's take-over of New York, lessens the effectiveness of both the film as an action movie and its warnings against intolerance. They suggest that the film is so exaggerated and so excessive that it is impossible to take the rhetoric about prejudice and civil rights seriously. David Denby (1998) of the New Yorker suggests that "The Siege offers a far-fetched set of circumstances and then gets all hot under the collar as it criticizes the impossible situation the movie has set up". Similarly, Owen Gleiberman (1998) of Entertainment Weekly writes,

Arab-American protests to the contrary, it's not a racist screed. It's a cautionary tale about the excesses of jingoist paranoia, and the folly of it all is the more the film descends into somber liberal chest thumping, the less engrossing it becomes. The scenario The Siege imagines is simply too extreme to be treated with this much self-importance ...

Some argue that the simplistic solution presented by the film, rather than an exaggerated premise, robs the film and its more sober themes of credibility. This perspective is illustrated in the following excerpt from The Baltimore Sun.

Zwick and ... [his] co-screenwriters are asking: Can a free society exist when it's under attack by a group pledged to destroy it? The answer is ultimately ambiguous, because the film turns on one of Hollywood's favorite cop-outs: people who do the right thing, even when doing so is totally out of character. (Kaltenbach, 1998)

A lack of realism, of plausibility, is seen to weaken the film. In a more tongue-incheek tone, Bob Fenster (1998) of The Arizona Republic writes,

... at one point Zwick conjectures the formation of a spontaneous coalition of Blacks, Jews and Arabs in New York City to oppose the Army in a protest for civil rights during a state of war. In New York City? Wouldn't happen on a holiday, much less during a state of war.

Filmmaker Intentions

The second type of argument that the reviewers' used to support their evaluations of the film's representation dealt with the intentions of the film's creators. Many academic cultural critics, of course, see the intent of a message's producers as largely irrelevant to the meaning of the message itself (e.g., Barthes, 1986; Hall, 1980; 1981). Not only are the creators' intentions seen as fundamentally unknowable, but also Hollywood film making is recognized as a collaborative process that is tightly constrained by the industrial structure. No single person or group of people can determine the nature of the final product. Furthermore, much of the work in this area conceptualizes sexist, racist, or xenophobic attitudes as intrinsic to Western society. These values and attitudes are therefore manifested in the content produced by the industry or society regardless of the positions of the specific individuals that create the message (Hall, 1981).

However, as is the convention of film reviewing, meanings of The Siege tended to be attributed to the filmmakers, particularly to director and screenwriter Ed Zwick. This trend made the intent of the filmmaker regarding representation issues relevant to the debate. In evaluating the film, many reviewers considered what Zwick intended to do or tried to say through the film.

Although a few reviewers concluded that his intentions were ultimately irrelevant to the film's meaning, for others the derivation of the intentions of the film's creators became a means of evaluating the film itself. Some sought evidence of the intent of the film in Zwick's previous work. His record does not suggest that he would intentionally create an insensitive or defamatory movie. He has a reputation for making serious, thoughtful films from a politically liberal perspective. His earlier films include Glory, a generally well-received Civil War drama about a Black regiment, and Courage under Fire. The nature of Zwick's intentions, if not the limitlessness of his perspective or his invulnerability to market pressures, seems well established. Others found evidence of his intentions in the film itself. Reviewers most commonly referred to ways in which he blurred the association between Arabs or Muslims and villainy, either by the inclusion of Deveraux as a villain (e.g., Kendrick, 1998; Levy, 1998; Persall, 1998), the inclusion of Haddad as a good guy (e.g., Clark, 1998; Strickler, 1998; Weskind, 1998), or dialogue that identified the terrorists as extremists (e.g., Kendrick, 1998; Levy, 1998, Persall, 1998).

Some reviewers seemed reluctant to condemn the film outright because they believed the filmmakers' intentions were honorable. For example, John Keenan (1998) of the Omaha World Herald writes,

Despite the protests accompanying its release, The Siege fairly drips with good intentions .... Certainly there are episodes that followers of Islam may find offensive. But Zwick does try to show sympathetic Arab-Americans ... Zwick undoubtedly meant well, and he has a commendable track record of mixing action with social criticism.

Others remarked that the film's representation is problematic despite its explicit themes of tolerance, but are careful to suggest that this represents a failure of ability or skill rather than impure intentions. For example, Phillip Booth (1998) writes that, "Zwick obviously intends to take a conscientious political stance, decrying abrogation of individual rights at home in the face of threats from abroad ... and rallying against secret U.S. involvement in overseas coups.... But he inadvertently summons up more than a few stereotypes."

A few reviews explicitly call the director to task. For example, Jack Mathews (1998), writing for News Day, calls The Siege "an uncomfortable mix of paranoia and selfconscious butt-covering." He writes: "Zwick and his staff of writers are exploiting anti-Arab sentiments aroused by the fear of encroaching Middle East terrorism, while at the same time lecturing us against prejudice."

A few reviewers evaluated the film's appropriateness by considering the racial and ethnic composition of the cast. The film is Zwick's third collaboration with noted African American actor Denzel Washington. It also features Lebanese American actor Tony Shaloub, to whom the film offered a rare opportunity to play a Lebanese American character. The constraints under which performers operate and the limitations of the control actors of color can exercise over the texts in which they appear have been described elsewhere (e.g., Bogle, 1996). However, for a small number of critics, the association of actors of color with the project may have functioned to allay concerns about the text or primed them to read its representation positively. After defending the film from charges of reproducing stereotypes, for example, one critic begins his description of the film by introducing Washington's character, who, he interjects, "probably knows a thing or two about being judged unfairly" (Verniere, 1998).

Genre Limitations

As noted above, The Siege's publicity materials, if not the statements of its director, described the movie as an action film. This is not, however, a genre whose form is generally seen to be conducive to handling serious or complex themes. Action movies are often highly formulaic (Brown, 1993; Sobchack, 1988). They typically have a brisk pace, briefly drawn characters, and little exposition. The ostensible genre of the film impacted the reviewers' evaluations of the representation of Arabs and Muslims in several ways. Multiple reviewers discussed the constraints of the action film as something that contributed to either the standards to which they held the film's representational patterns or to the expectations of the audience that would shape the film's likely impact. All of those who did so considered the weighty themes to be at least somewhat incompatible with the lighter genre. However, they differed in terms of whether they privileged the genre or themes in their evaluation of the film.

Of the reviewers who saw the film principally as an action movie, some suggested that the difficulty of addressing abstract issues within the genre necessitated that different standards be applied to this type of film than would be appropriate for a standard drama. The action film requires greater leeway. Despite the film's final shortcomings, attempting to communicate a message of restraint and tolerance through a form more often geared towards concrete action and violent models of heroism was described as praiseworthy. Its genre both explains and justifies the films' failings. For example, Time's Richard Schickel (1998) writes,

Which poses the larger threat to democratic institutions: terrorism or the hysterical response to it? This is not the sort of question you would normally expect to be addressed in a big-budget action movie. Nor do you expect it to be answered ultimately with a ringing endorsement of the Bill of Rights .... Let's give director Edward Zwick and his fellow screenwriters ... credit for complicating their material, and therefore our responses to it, in ways that go beyond the demands of the genre.

Steve Murray (1999) of, ft Ad-tW a beta journrnt ina Co to a skr conclusion.

The movie has sparked controversy because of its Arab villains, but it takes great pains to point out the patriotism of Brooklyn's Arab-American community and gives Hubbard a Lebanese-American partner .... Unfortunately, the film can't do justice to its disturbing, topical questions within its two-hour framework. As it heads for its final reel, it settles for standard Hollywood chases and convenient revelations .... But if The Siege disappoints in its follow-through, director Zwick deserves credit for taking on such an ambitious subject.

Others who evaluated the film principally as an action movie were less enthusiastic about the value of the incorporation of these themes. They saw the film as a potentially good thriller weakened by pretentiousness or by an attempt to be politically correct. After dismissing arguments that the film is racist or stereotypical, Charles Taylor (1998) writes, "If The Siege frustrates anyone, it should be the moviegoers who turn up expecting the kind of clean resolution that action movies thrive on." Other reviewers came to similar evaluations. For example: "Perverse as it may sound, Zwick doesn't get enough nerve-zapping fun out of the hot-button threat of terrorist mayhem" (Gleiberman, 1998), and

The picture derails. The fault [is] an amazing strategic blunder in the story. Here's a movie about people blowing up. The villain should be whoever is setting those bombs. Instead, The Siege concentrates on the crimes of the general, who uses the imposition of martial law in New York as an excuse to deny citizens their constitutional rights. (LaSalle, 1998)

Other reviewers acknowledged the way in which the genre, with its emphasis on action, rapid pacing and exciting images, constrained the film, but had a different perspective on the tension between the demands of an action movie and serious issues such as racism, the tension between safety and freedom, and the power of the state. They evaluated the film as a potentially thoughtful issue movie whose points were lost because of its action components. This is perhaps voiced most explicitly by New Yorker critic David Denby (1998) as he describes how the themes could have been handled in an effective and responsible manner:

... such tangled, morally dangerous material can best be dramatized on a very small scale .... Once you conceive of the movie as a big-budget spectacle with explosions and mangled bodies, . . . your chances of getting anything straight become smaller, if not infinitesimal. Edward Zwick the liberal has become Hollywood's fool: moving his tanks and crowds through Brooklyn, spending tens of millions, Zwick, I imagine, became desperate for huge, powerful effect and simply lost control of what he wanted to say. But his intentions no longer matter. What's on the screen is hysterical opportunism presenting itself, nauseatingly, as a stem cautionary tale.

A similar view can be discerned in Butler's (1998) review for The Kansas City Star.

Director Ed Zwick ... is out to teach us a lesson about civil liberties, government oppression and the dangers of prejudice. Of course, he's also making a big-budget Hollywood action film, so expect to have the movie's good intentions diluted by the dictates of the blockbuster mentality.

These critics suggest that the scale and form of the action film overwhelm The Siege's message.

Other reviewers made similar points, but ascribed the failure of The Siege to other attributes of the action genre. For example, Janet Maslin (1998), reviewing the film for The New York Times, suggests that the script itself balances the need to present a plausible villain with the imperative to avoid confirming stereotypes. However, she claims that another element of the film, the visual images, serve to present the Arab villains as uniformly threatening and to emphasize the terrorists' violence.

New York's Arab-American community [has] raised understandable objections to images seen in The Siege. Though the screenplay . . . is strenuously even-handed and even incorporates a nice-guy, Beirut-born sidekick for [the leading protagonist] Hub[bard] ... the film's stark images of scheming Arab villains often speak louder than its diplomatic words .... Well-intentioned words don't change either the film's visual demonizing of Arab characters or its way of titillating the audience with terrorist stunts.

The images are seen to dominate, to undercut and undermine, the positive messages of the script.

Roger Ebert (1998) also found the script itself appropriate and the complete film problematical, not so much because of what it puts on the screen, but because of audiences' expectations and probable orientation toward the movie. He writes,

. . the filmmakers can truthfully say they tried to balance out the villains. But most audiences won't give it that much thought. They'll leave the theater thinking of Arabs (who are handled as an anonymous group), not of dangers to the Constitution-which can be dismissed as the fevers of one man ... Most people will not be watching a political movie, but a popcorn movie. They may even be a little restless during the speechmaking towards the end. They'll be comfortable with the Arab villains because that's what they've been taught on the news.

Whereas Maslin suggests that the script is undone by the visuals, Ebert suggests that the script is undone by the audience. The viewers, Ebert implies, will enter the theater attuned to explosions and chase sequences and are unlikely to attend to the moral lesson that the director argued is the film's primary point. Dave Kehr (1998) makes a similar argument and presents some striking anecdotal evidence in support of it.

The action format Zwick uses to teach his lessons ends up subverting them. Hollywood films have long encouraged audiences to cheer for no-nonsense tough guys like the Willis character, and he becomes the inadvertent hero of The Siege simply by acting where Washington and Bening hesitate and moralize. It takes the audience a while to catch on to the fact that the general is the bad guy. At a recent preview screening, the public cheered Willis almost to the end, even as he tortured a suspect and then calmly shot him.

In summary, this analysis suggests that the relationship of the film's plot to realworld events, the intentions of the filmmakers, and the constraints of the action-film genre were frequently considered by popular-press reviewers evaluating the appropriateness of The Siege's representation of social groups.

CONCLUSION

Current events have overtaken this film and, to a certain extent, this analysis, all but the final draft of which was completed before September 11. The events of that day laid to rest, definitively and tragically, the debates about the plausibility of a large-scale, terrorist attack in a major U.S. city that animated much of the discussion about The Siege. However, the questions about the role of the media in shaping audiences' perceptions of members of social groups and about how the media can appropriately represent these groups have become, if anything, more pressing.

Several avenues for further research are opened by this analysis. This investigation explored the evaluations that were made of one film. An important remaining question is the extent to which these kinds of arguments are unique to the groups being represented in The Siege or whether they also characterize evaluations of media portraying different ethnic, cultural, or religious groups. The extension of the use of these criteria to representations of groups that have also been portrayed problematically, but which are defined by other attributes, such as women, gay men, lesbians, or the elderly would require yet further investigation. One can easily imagine parallel arguments being used in relation to other social groups. Representations of African American men as criminals, for example, have been defended by reference to the real-world parallel of higher crime rates among African Americans. However, certain aspects of the text or of the cultural context may make some aspects of these issues more prominent than others across different texts, different groups, and different situations.

Also valuable would be the exploration of how different critics enacted their role as a film reviewer. Since the ethnicity, background, and religion of the critics cannot be determined from their reviews, this analysis does not address how these or any other factors may have affected the ways they engaged the film. However, further investigations into whether there are systematic differences in how reviewers working from different perspectives presented the film would be informative.

When considering how the reviews interact with the audience, it is worth remembering that most moviegoers are unlikely to read more than one or two reviews before they see a film. Although the contrasts between the reviewers are apparent when they are seen together in an analysis like this one, most audience members are unlikely to have this perspective. Although viewers make meaning from a film within a network of supporting materials, for each individual viewer that network will include only one or two reviews. Much of the time, which review an audience member reads is driven by which publication is available to him or her, not by the identity of the reviewer. Audiences rarely have the opportunity to comparison-shop to select which review is the most thoughtful and often have only limited potential to choose a reviewer whose perspective is likely to support their own tastes. This means the perspectives in whatever reviews they are exposed to are unlikely to be challenged by others.

Furthermore, certain features are likely to characterize almost any review an audience member finds. Intensive ideological analysis, for example, is not a big part of any general-interest reviewer's job, and there are a variety of structural reasons that keep it from being so. This does not mean, however, that the reviews have no effect on audiences' understandings of ideological issues. There are several mechanisms through which reviews could shape audiences' responses to the film. Film reviews may be a means through which selective exposure is carried out. Reviews that suggest that elements of the film could be troubling or offensive, for example, may contribute to a pattern in which those who are sensitive to issues of representation or who are members of the groups represented tend to stay away, whereas those who are more likely to accept potentially prejudicial representations are more likely to attend. In this way, the reviewers could help maintain existing perceptions.

Reviews may also act as primers that shape the audiences' interpretation of films when they decide to see them. In the realm of politics, media coverage has been found to affect the types of criteria that audiences use to evaluate politicians (e.g., Domke, Shah, & Wackman, 1998; Krosnick & Kinder, 1990; Mendelsohn, 1996). By emphasizing different issues or types of criteria over others-affective over issue-based criteria, for example-news coverage can shape what audiences consider when they make judgments and thereby influence their voting decisions. If film audiences adopt the criteria used by the reviewers in their own evaluations of a film, it can shape how they ultimately evaluate the film. Over time, the use of these criteria may influence the degree to which they consider media representation to be a problem and effect what initiatives, if any, they favor to address the issue.

One of the functions of research in the area of media representation is to help make audiences aware of some of the problematical implications of media texts. In order to do this, it is important to be familiar with the factors that shape these conceptualizations, including supporting materials like film reviews. By evaluating the discourse surrounding a controversial popular culture text, this paper has sought to contribute to understandings of these elements of audience interpretation.

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[Author Affiliation]

Alice Hall (Ph.D., Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 2001) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, MO 63121-4499. A version of this manuscript was presented at the 2000 meeting of the National Communication Association in Seattle, Washington.