The other day, I read that Mehran Karimi Nasseri passed away at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport. Who is he, you may ask. Well, he was the person whose plight was dramati in Steven Spielberg’s film, The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones. As you can read in the article below, he left Iran in search of his biological mother, then came the revolution, became stateless and homeless, and banned from entering a number of European countries. After a few years of living at the Paris airport, because of immigration status, he lived outside for a while, but then moved back in the airport, because he had gotten ‘used to it’.
Now, you probably wonder what is this for and why? Well continue reading. You see, this post is not about him, nor his plight, but it is about Steven Spielberg and his act of turning the truth upside down and sideways in Terminal.
In the story, the main character (Tom Hanks) is not an Iranian, running away from the revolution in Iran, but he is depicted to be an Eastern European refugee, at the time where communism ruled there. So I beg to know why did he change so dramatically the setting and the character? Was it because an Iranian’s plight in Europe could not sell enough, compared to an Eastern European’s in New York’s JFK Airport? Or was he trying to send the subliminal message that the Iranian revolution was a coup d’Etat?
I understand that a movie is not a historical documentary, and creators could use an event symbolically for another story. But why did the Steven Spielberg who created Schindler’s list based on historical events choose to deform this story? Couldn’t he have done a good job at it with the real story, albeit modified?
I don’t have the answer, nor did I seriously seek to obtain it, but this issue has been bothering me, without it being a dramatic issue in my life, and now that the main real protagonist passed away it resurfaced in my Topographic Mind.
Paris, November 14, 2022
Zeejay