Argo

Argo is a competently made historical thriller that concerns itself primarily with narrative momentum and technical craft rather than the deeper implications of its subject matter. The film treats the 1979 Iranian revolution as a backdrop for an American rescue operation, a framing that inevitably centers Western agency and CIA heroism. The Iranian characters exist almost entirely as a threatening mass, their revolution and political grievances rendered as mere scenery against which the real drama of American ingenuity unfolds. This is not necessarily a moral failing of the film, but it is a choice that reveals the limits of its cultural awareness.

The cast is uniformly white and male in its principal roles, reflecting both the historical reality of the CIA in that era and a certain indifference to questions of representation in ensemble storytelling. Clea DuVall appears in a minor role as one of the hostages, providing the only significant female presence in a cast otherwise dominated by men playing bureaucrats and spies. The film contains no engagement with gender dynamics, LGBTQ themes, climate concerns, economic critique, disability representation, or any revisionist interrogation of American foreign policy. It is a film about a CIA operation that treats the CIA as the rightful hero of its narrative.

What progressive sensibilities the film might be said to possess are entirely incidental to its design. It is fundamentally a procedural thriller, and one that happens to have been released in 2012, a year when certain social awareness was beginning to enter mainstream cinema. Argo resists such considerations. It is interested in the problem of extraction, not in the problematics of extraction.