March 21, 2008 9:00

A Bogus Baghdad on the Atlantic

Long ago, I shared a house near Morocco’s capital, Rabat, with a French geologist named Olivier. From his expeditions, Olivier brought back desert roses, crystal geodes and a Parisian girlfriend who paraded around the swimming pool in a bikini bottom and high heels. “To protect from zee scorpions,” she’d say. The house was near cliffs devoured by Atlantic storms, next to the grave of a Muslim holy man, Sidi Moussa.

I was recently back in Morocco and asked a local if she’d heard of Sidi Moussa. “Yes, of course. Only now we call it Mogadishu,” she replied. “The movie ‘Blackhawk Down’ was shot there.” Slums had engulfed the house, and no longer was there any French redhead in stilettos. Like I said, that was years ago.

It was Ridley Scott who directed ‘Blackhawk Down’, and he was back again. This time he was turning my old neighborhood into Baghdad. The arrival of his movie crew was quite an event in Rabat; my friend Rick was hired as an extra to play ‘Man in a Bar’, a job for which he says he was perfectly suited. There were posters of Saddam, American soldiers jumping from Humvees with their make-believe guns. It was quite surreal, but having being in Baghdad, I have to say, my old neighborhood looked the part.

Many Hollywood movies, from Crusader epics to noirish spy thrillers, have colored the west’s impressions of Islamic culture. Nearly all were actually shot in Morocco, pretending to be someplace else. Morocco is, after all, way out in the far west of North Africa. Morocco was even a stand-in, a clumsy one, for parts of ‘Charlie Wilson’s War”, set in Pakistan. But Morocco has so little to do with the Middle East --Gaza’s grittiness or Cairo’s chaotic grandeur-- these films could easily have been shot on a back lot in Burbank. The reason why Alejandro Inarritu’s ‘Babel’ was so realistic: for once, Morocco played itself.

But Hollywood and Morocco were made for each other: they both value illusion and storytelling above substance. For centuries, Morocco has been a fantasy destination for artists –-Matisse loved Tangier, as did the late great writer Paul Bowles—and it was only a matter of time before Hollywood caught on to the kingdom’s weird tolerance for the fantasies of others. One diplomat in Rabat told me: “In Morocco, symbols, sometimes count for more than reality.” We were talking about how Moroccans, many of them, anyway, can hold in their minds the conflicting image of the modern, jet-skiing monarch King Mohammed VI as also being a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed and thus imbued with special, almost divine, powers.

I was glad to see that the king exhibited this tolerance in a way that his grim and suspicious father King Hassan II never would have. On March 18th, the current monarch pardoned one of his hapless Moroccan subjects who was clapped in jail last month for having masqueraded, as a joke, on Facebook as the king’s own brother. After all, the guy was only pretending to be something he wasn’t, like Sidi Moussa turning into Mogadishu or Baghdad.
---by Tim McGirk/Rabat