Is this article aimed at discrediting the
filmmakers (who I met for the first time at the opening of the film on July
16 in Los Angeles), because larger studios are jealous of the attention this
tiny film has gotten? Thousands of fans online are absolutely furious at the lack of facts in
this utterly ridiculous piece. The only ones pointing fingers at
Haxan Films are other studios. The only spin doctoring that happened came
courtesy of people like myself who wanted the word to get out about this
film early.

How did we know about it so far in advance? The Independent Film Channel
ran pieces about three missing students who disappeared making a documentary
over a year ago. People looking for information on the subject found only
one source: the Haxan Films Web site. That is where we started the community,
where the buzz began. “The Blair Witch Project” got its first major
exposure before the Sundance Film Festival when I talked about the film on the syndicated Mark & Brian Show in October. They booted up the Haxan site on the air and got major
interest, both from new fans and industry insiders.

Directors Ed Sanchez and Dan Myrick have been very accessible to all of us;
that made us want to spread the word about the film. I can guarantee you that no one from inside Haxan Films used a single plant to help spread the word.

As for me, I have been fascinated with this whole film from the first
moment I saw a clip of Heather Donahue crying into a camera. Everything I
have done has been for the love of it, as a film fan. Haxan Films didn’t
offer me a cushy job or pay me for my services. After all the whole purpose of our actions was to draw attention to the film. Well, we did it, didn’t we?

– Jeff Johnsen

My daughter, Abigail Marceluk, is not a fake or a charlatan. She is a cum
laude graduate of Yale, with honors in Film Study and a graduate student in
Film and Media Arts at Temple University. She was investigating witches for a Masters thesis film project when she happened upon the Blair Witch. She became involved with Eric in the chat
room. They decided to create the fan site on their own. They are two very
talented people, I agree, and am flattered that you think their site is a
bit “too glossy” for amateurs.

Impressed with the site, the producer of TBWP invited Abigail and Eric to
the Florida Film Festival. They were so fascinated by the pair that they
invited them to their offices to hang out. That’s why Abigail and Eric appeared in the SciFi special.

Abigail has been ahead of the pack since she was a small child. It does
not surprise me that she is in on one of the first Internet fan sites. I
am sorry that you are so jaded that you cannot accept true youthful
enthusiasm when you see it.

– Robert Marceluk

Wilmington, Del.

Patrizia DiLucchio implied
that many of the reviews of Blair Witch were planted because Artisan
“was enforcing a strict no-tapes policy.” I suppose you are also going
to tell me that bootlegs of “The Phantom Menace” aren’t available either? If you had bothered to do your research, you would have found that many people had copies months in
advance. The movie was even downloadable over the Internet!

DiLucchio also implies something sinister in the fact that Harry Knowles mentioned
the movie before he saw it. In his mention of the pre-Sundance buzz it
was very clear that he had not seen the movie yet. He did see the movie
before he wrote his review, and was genuinely excited by it. The truth — that this movie is getting good reviews because it is excellent and innovative — is not sexy as a vast conspiracy.

– Andy Howell

Three’s company; so is four or five

BY JIM GERARD
(07/17/99)

What surprises me about this article is that anybody thinks polyamory is
anything new or different from open marriage, plural marriage, swinging,
marriage understandings or any of the other variants and names given
marriages with consensual infidelity over recent years — or that consent
somehow changes the lay of the land from secret philandering. The fact
is that infidelity hollows out the emotional core of any marriage, and
leaves an artifice of short-term practicalities and long-term
instability. I’m sure some of these marriages will survive in form, but
most will fail in form and fact. Polyamory is merely one form of
dishonesty replacing another. The victim this time is the illusion that you can separate the emotional, intimate and exclusive aspects of sex in marriage from the marriage itself.

– K. Bogdan

Toronto

Leanna Wolfe is quoted as describing poly people as “just too wacky, and they’re never going to go over in the heartland.” Now, I’m not sure what heartland she’s thinking of, but it must not be
the one that includes the Midwest. The very first alt.polycon
gathering (a convention for participants of the alt.polyamory newsgroup
on Usenet) was held here in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area; I chaired the convention. The first
polyamorous wedding or ceremony of commitment was held in Michigan, I
believe, at the church of the three people involved in the ceremony.
Many of us are lifelong Midwesterners,
and we’re already heartlanders in very good standing, thank you.

There is one caveat regarding resources
and definitions of polyamory that may explain Wolfe’s reaction. if
she encountered any of the unfortunate proselytizers who insist on
attaching their own religious, social or political beliefs to the
practice of polyamory, she may have been bombarded with their decrees
that polyamory must (or, in some cases, must not) include tantric sex,
libertarianism, joint living arrangements, neo-Paganism, creative
visualization, merged bank accounts, New Age philosophy, Mormonism,
California residency or condoms. (Condoms are one of the “must nots” for certain Christian swingers-cum-poly groups who believe, apparently, that good intentions are a barrier effective against HIV and other STDs.) If those admittedly loud voices are the ones she accepted
as characteristic of polyamory, then I’ll retract my statement about
inaccuracy entirely, and agree that they definitely won’t go over in the
heartland. That sort of “snake-oil cure-all” poly proselytizing has gone
over around here about as well as solid lead ice-fishing houses would.

– Elise Matthesen

Minneapolis

Ryam Nearing has never said that she started the polyamory movement in the ’80s. What she did start in 1984 was a newsletter covering the polyamory scene, and that has evolved into the magazine Loving More.

Jim Gerard’s feigned “oh my gosh, I’m so confused” approach might be cute enough to get an article published, but it contributes virtually nothing to understanding a very real and important social phenomenon. By focusing on the titillating and outrageous end of the spectrum, he casts an entire population into a fantasyland of a writer’s misconception.

– Barry Northrop

The article quoted an acquaintance of mine, Joel Spector, as saying, “Our condom contract about sex outside the group runs to six pages, and details what can be done with whom, when and under what circumstances. I’m not pleased with it.”
Joel assures me that this is not an exact quote; it gives the clear
impression that he doesn’t like the contract. Exactly the opposite is
true. Joel is very glad the contract exists; his only displeasure is with
how complex it can sometimes be. Hardly the same as what the article implied.

– Vincent M. Wales

Polyamory Awareness & Acceptance Ribbon Campaign

Ogden, Utah

Jim Gerard’s piece didn’t gain from gratuitous swipes at Mormons, especially since the church has disavowed the practice of polygamy for more than 130 years. In fact, practicing polygamy
is grounds for excommunication. I don’t know whether the writer knew this
or not; I prefer to think that he was ignorant of the facts, instead of the
alternative explanation: that he wanted to punch up his piece with some
cheap Mormon-polygamist jokes.

– Paul Robichaux

Son of hope
BY CINTRA WILSON

(07/16/99)

Of course, you’re right to be so offended by the “harried Christian
propaganda” video ‘The Choice is Yours — With David Berkowitz.” Why
bother trying to give today’s youth pause before having sex, drug
problems and criminal records? Like you, I’d much rather have a society
filled with teens in jail or dead rather than “walking through the
park in the sunshine, carrying Bibles and wearing big, glassy-eyed
smiles on their faces.” Man, that part about sunshine and smiles really
gives me the willies!

I mean, can you believe the stupidity of these Christians, trying
to make us believe that jail is a “dark and despairing, sin-filled place
you really don’t want to go”? What are these people on? Oh, I forgot. They’re “Jesus freaks” who
believe that “No matter how much wrong you’ve done, there’s a way to
have every wrong we’ve ever done be completely forgiven.” Puh-leeze!
Give me a serial killer any day!

I just wanted to thank Salon for taking such a brave stand
against obviously biased material. Too bad not everyone has the complete
impartiality you seem to possess. I, for one, feel much
safer knowing there are people like you warning us of such threats
as hope, remorse and redemption.

– Richard Keegan

I have really had it with the Christian-bashing that people like
Cintra Wilson continue to push on us. I have no idea whether or not
David Berkowitz is reformed or repentant, but frankly that’s not for me
or Wilson to question. Her attack seems much more squarely aimed at
Christians themselves. Although I find myself opposed to the views of a
lot of ultra-conservative Christian rhetoric, there simply is no place
for the vehement disdain that Cintra spews forth at Christianity.

Whenever a pro-choice advocate speaks out,
it’s free speech, yet when a pro-life advocate speaks, it is somehow
unacceptable. You don’t have to be Christian, you don’t have to
believe in God or forgiveness, but it is rather immature
and in very bad taste to pick on those of us who do.

– Christopher Pupillo

Sambos in the shadows
BY DEBRA DICKERSON

(07/16/99)

Debra Dickerson is simply wrong on the legal issue here, even though what she argues for (finally) is a symbolic gesture from Gov. Bush, or anyone else who owns, sells or buys real property with a racially restrictive covenant in the chain of title.

The restrictive covenant was not in Gov. Bush’s deed, it was in the chain of title, which means it cannot be “removed” — no matter what Gov. Bush did or failed to do. New language could appear in the chain, negating the language of the covenant, but the new language would not remove the old. Nothing can do that. So the effect of the actions would be just like Shelley vs. Kramer, which nullified all such covenants in 1948.

A chain of title records everything that ever happened to affect real property. Racially restrictive covenants are in many such chains for good; no amount of legal “scrubbing” will remove them. They cannot be enforced; neither can they be removed. “Land mines?” Not really. They are reminders of a racist past that is no longer visible in “whites only” signs or “colored” entrances and drinking water fountains. The land mines are our racist attitudes; they’re not “buried” in our real property records.

– Robert M. Jeffers

As someone who researches deed and titles in
Virginia almost every working day I can state for the record that it is
highly unlikely that anyone who owns a home is entirely cognizant of his or
her subdivision restrictions. These covenants rarely appear in deeds, or
even on the mortgage survey if one is required, but on the subdivision maps
themselves. These maps are rarely seen by anyone but the professionals
responsible for facilitating the sale, and race restrictions are so common
on pre-WWII subdivision plots that they lose their shock value quickly.
The task of striking the historic language from these documents would be
not only pointless but prohibitive in scale. It would be the bureaucratic
equivalent of hunting down and destroying every item of “Mammy memorabilia”
in the hands of private collectors such as Ms. Dickerson.

– Robert Wade Bess

Young heroes in an ancient land
BY CAROL LLOYD

(07/16/99)

Whereas students in the third world sometimes
function as a national conscience, their American counterparts are portrayed
as party animals who are more concerned with looking out for No. 1.
Maybe that comparison is fair, but there is a real reason behind it: America’s government works, and despite what seems to be an incredibly cynical view of our leaders, I think that most of us have faith
in the system if not the individuals who participate.

If we hate the president, we’re not going to riot in the streets; we’re
going to patiently wait and organize and try to vote him out in the next
election. This works. We feel as if we have a voice guaranteed by the
First Amendment, and we can express it through voting or letter writing or
even calling in on Larry King. One of the driving elements of a protest is
a sense of impotence within the system. Americans today don’t feel this.
Just because students don’t protest doesn’t mean they aren’t activists in
some sense of the word. Activism is more likely to be expressed through
participation, rather than protest.

– David E. Cohen

Thanks to her parents’ improbable marriage, Bahrampour lived the first part of her life sampling from the best of two worlds. Her mother, a rock singer from Los
Angeles, and her father, the son of an Iranian feudal lord, met at UC-Berkeley. During her childhood in Tehran, Bahrampour traveled daily between a
progressive international school and her father’s tight-knit,
traditional family, where children were adored and played in
interior gardens. She absorbed her
parents’ curiosity about diverse cultures and ideas, as well as
the Islamic traditions and intimacy of her extended family. In
America following the fall of the Shah, Bahrampour found another life amid a more complicated culture
in the suburbs of Northern California and Portland, Ore., where
her parents struggled with the loss of their careers. Even
though the sense of being foreign sometimes alienated her from
her roots, Bahrampour never lost the sense of belonging to Iran.

That sense of belonging took her back to Tehran six years
ago, after she began a career in journalism, despite the danger
of Islamic rule. Since that first trip to the city of her early
childhood, Bahrampour has made several visits to Iran, documenting the
changes that continue to take place in the aftermath of the
revolution. Last month, suspects were arrested for the murder of
five dissidents; a progressive new intelligence minister, Ali
Yunesi, was appointed; and Iranians turned out in record numbers
to vote for supporters of reformist President Mohammed
Khatami. The hard-line rule in Iran is beginning to give way to
a freer, independent country.

In “To See and See Again,” Bahrampour views the country and its culture,
as well as the culture of Iranians living in America, through the
filter of personal experience, family stories and sharp
observation. Tied both to the West and the Middle East, her
point of view achieves a balanced view of a culture often
misunderstood as simply repressive, and recovers the
intoxicating, often sensuous details of Iranian life. Bahrampour’s book tour recently brought her to San Francisco and Salon’s offices.

I was struck by the image of your house, the quintessential image of
Iranian houses, with these high walls around them and
gardens inside.

In Iran, there’s this huge separation between public and private. And
so from the outside the houses just look like these bare, dilapidated walls, but
inside it’s really another world. The doors are always closed, but if you
can slip inside … People love their gardens and they grow all kinds of
fruit. They usually have a little pool or a pond with goldfish.

Our childhood was a little different from that of “normal” Iranian children just because our parents were more free with us. You mention the wall as a symbol of the barrier, and my brother and I used to climb the wall and sit on it and
just watch what was going on outside — which was fine with our parents, but
our uncle, who was more conservative, would come and yell at us and tell us
to get down, because what if people saw us.

Do you feel like you were more free when you lived in America?

It was about the same. I was very sheltered from the restrictiveness of Iran, so I think probably someone who had grown up in a more traditional household would have felt that difference more.

One of my favorite episodes in your book is when you played Barbies, and you and your friend found some black cloth and decided to make a chador for Barbie so she could make the pilgrimage to Mecca.

A lot of little girls were playing Barbies and I think the
government wanted to have a more Iranian role model, so they created dolls that were based on characters in the school book all elementary
school kids read. They were brother and sister instead of being romantic
partners, and they dressed in traditional Islamic clothing. One
was dressed in kind of a chador and the other one was in colorful tribal
clothes. I’d read about the dolls on CNN and when I was there a few
months ago, I went to all these different toy stores and no one
had them. Finally this one guy said they’ve been outlawed.
Someone told me that there had been all this debate about what
they should look like and what their names should be and there
had been so much argument over it that it had been pulled — and
yet Barbies were still on the shelves.

- – - – - – - – - -

What do you think it would have been like if you had gone
through your teenage years in Iran? Do you think you would have come up
against more restrictions? In your book, you negotiated with your parents
if a rule seemed unreasonable to you and
you didn’t want to follow it.

I always wonder that. I always think that there’s this other
life I didn’t live. And yeah, that the restrictions probably would have
started to come as I got older. I left when I was about 12. Probably the
relatives would have said things. I think I would have gone on to lead a
pretty Westernized life as people in my school did. People had
parties and people had boyfriends and girlfriends. And I think I would have
gone that way. So it would have been interesting to see what my relatives
would have thought of that and how they would have dealt with it.

After the revolution, the rules didn’t make sense to a lot of kids and they didn’t make sense to the
parents either. Again it’s the private vs. the public lives. The parents maybe would still be drinking alcohol in the house and the kids at school would be hearing how they should turn their parents in if they ever see their parents doing anything from this list of bad things. And so the kids would have to, from a really young age, internalize this difference, where they see this at
home, but they can’t tell.

Are you glad that you didn’t have to go through that?

Well, I’m glad that I didn’t have to go through the war. If
we’d stayed my brother probably would have been drafted, and he would have had to escape somehow. But I’m mixed about leaving Iran. I always felt like it was this place that we’d left behind really abruptly. I missed it a
lot, while I was adapting here and trying to be really American. It always
felt like 1979 was this cut-off year in my life. It’s funny, when I was
younger, I would see coins and look at the date and if they were before 1979
they always evoked this special sentimental feeling.

Were you ever angry at either of your parents for waiting
until the last moment to leave? Did you ever feel that they had exposed you to unnecessary danger?

No. It was the opposite, in fact. I used to wish we had
stayed. There was this point during the revolution when
they evacuated the Americans who were living in Iran. So all the
Americans were calling each other and asking, “Are you going?” And my mom was like, “Yeah, they should go. But we’re not going, because we’re not American.” There was this unspoken sense that if you were tough enough, you would tough it out in the revolution. Whoever was staying was really die-hard, and the other people were kind of wimpy. So when we left, we kind of became the wimpy ones. I heard later that my school had opened up again, and the kids who went back were the ones who really made it through the revolution.

Despite the political unrest, your childhood sounds really
idyllic because your family was so close. You seem to have this
feeling of belonging to both worlds, and not feeling alienated
from either culture.

Yeah, I did. I think part of it was, my parents when they got
married were both kind of looking for something beyond what they had grown up in. My dad didn’t go back into the traditional way he’d been raised. He was really open to a lot of different things. We had a lot of the
good parts of being Iranian, the close family — and kids are just
worshipped there. People love kids. They spoil them rotten. We had all that
without the restrictions.

Can you talk a little bit more about the way kids are
treated in Iran?

There’s always someone home, which is different. There are no
latchkey kids. Even if the mom works, there’s a grandmother or an aunt.
It’s a lot more communal. And traditionally you grow up really close to your cousins. Our cousins either lived in the same building or
lived in the same neighborhood, so they were kind of like extended
brothers and sisters. Kids don’t have any responsibilities like they do
here. They’re not made to worry so much. Although school is hard, and they
have rules at school, once they come home, it’s a big playground. Here it’s
not so separated. Also, kids here watch a lot more TV, and that
probably affects them too, becoming grown-ups faster because of what they watch.

As the revolution became more and more real, it’s
remarkable how much your parents were able to shield you and your
brother and sister from the fear that they were feeling. How do you think they managed to do that? You wrote that you didn’t feel any real danger, even during the protests and gunfire on your own street. You said that you wanted to see the unrest.

My parents weren’t really afraid until the very end when
my dad got a threatening phone call because his office had stayed open during the strikes. And when they had heard that people were coming around
to doors and dragging people off in the middle of the night and we weren’t
sure why. But that was all really toward the end, and at first my parents
were similarly interested in the revolution and excited, and kind of
rooting for the people who were protesting.

They actually had to shelter us more when we moved to the
States. And then they did an incredible job. We ended up living in Portland in this kind of nice middle-class neighborhood with good schools. We were living
this double life where we’d go to school and seem normal and we lived in this neighborhood near school, but we had no money. My parents were
having a hard time. We were on food stamps, but my mom would have to hide it from all the neighbors at the supermarket. No one else used food
stamps. My dad was a carpenter at the time, and I was 12 or 13 and I was
really embarrassed by the idea — he would come home all sweaty and
dirty and muddy. I was so worried about keeping up appearances. If I wanted
the jeans everyone else had, or I went through this ice-skating phase and
wanted expensive ice skates and lessons, they sacrificed a lot to give
us what we wanted and not let us feel that we were being deprived.

When you found out years after you came to America that
your father had been in so much danger, that he had barely made it out of Iran before the airport closed, how did you feel?

I sensed the danger more than I understood it in my head.
Just seeing my dad suddenly being in this vulnerable position, where in Iran he had been this kind of superhero dad, because kids always think that when
they’re little, and then suddenly to be both at the age when you don’t think of your parents that way and also to see your parents really struggling
and almost falling apart. On one level I was really worried for him. He
had a dangerous job now, as a carpenter, and I worried when he would
leave the house. But on another level I was mad at him for being — I guess
what I felt was letting us down, which didn’t make sense at all — by
being Iranian, by being the one who made us foreign, by being a
carpenter instead of having a job where he went to work in a suit. It was totally unfair.

- – - – - – - – - -When did you decide to go back to Iran?

I started thinking about going back to Iran while I was at
Berkeley. I got some information about changing passports, because I had to get a new Islamic passport, and I went so far as to get my picture taken
with a scarf on — it was actually a pillowcase, because I didn’t have a
scarf. But I never actually went until after I finished graduate school.

And when you did decide to go back, everyone was worried
about you. They asked you, “Have you seen ‘Not Without My Daughter’?” In your book it seems that you had conflicted feelings about going to Iran. Part of you was
annoyed at that image of Iran that you thought was not true, but you still had to
be concerned about realistic dangers, and warning a boyfriend not
to write you romantic letters.

I think as much as I wanted to believe that Iran wasn’t this
scary dangerous place, on a certain level, I knew that it was. What
I’d heard was what most Americans had heard, which was that people get
stuck there forever and people get sent to jail for wearing sunglasses. I
was worried that there were little rules that I wouldn’t know about, and I
would suddenly go out with the wrong colored scarf on and be sent to
jail. I had heard horror stories like that from people who had been there,
and who knows how true they were? I think some of them were true and
some were exaggerated. But by the time I got there, it was 1993, and it
was more relaxed than it had been a couple of years earlier.

There were little things that I should have known. I ended up
getting in trouble a couple of times just for not knowing that you’re not
supposed to talk to foreign men, which has also changed a lot. That was the
first time I went back. I was in a mosque that was this big tourist site
before the revolution, but now of course, there were only about three
tourists there. Two of them were these two young guys who were speaking English and I got all excited because I hadn’t spoken English for weeks. So I introduced myself and kind of felt like the cool one
because I could speak Farsi and they were just traveling through for a
week. We decided to go to lunch and they said, “We’ve just got to pick up
our passports. They’re down at the passport office,” which turns out
to be the police compound. I blithely walked in and we’re joking
around in English with the guys who work there, the military men. I
suddenly realize that I need to call the aunt that I’m staying with to tell her
that I won’t be there for lunch, so I borrow the phone and,
completely oblivious, start to speak in Farsi.
I get off and the men are looking at me. They say, “Do you speak Farsi?
Are you Iranian? Are you a Muslim?” And the whole scene just changed.
They kicked out the guys I’d met and interrogated me and said, “What
right do you have to talk to foreigners? Why do you like foreigners so much? Why don’t you like Iranians?” And no matter how much I tried to explain that I’m half-American and I’ve lived in the States for 15 years, they
were really, really angry.

Is there a little bit of truth to the “Not Without My
Daughter” image, even though, as you said, it’s exaggerated? Have you ever met anyone who’s gone through situations like that, women in Iran who
weren’t able to have custody of their kids?

I have heard of situations with custody going to the father.
There’s a law there that allows the mother to keep the kids until they’re 7 and then they go to the father, which seems really disruptive. I know
[reformists are] trying to change the law and I’m not sure what stage they’re in. I’ve heard stories like that.

I think the problem that Iranians that I’ve talked to have
with that book is that the portrayal of Iranians is so one-sided. There was
this family of fanatical, unsympathetic people and that was the picture of
Iran and that was the only picture of Iran. Americans and Westerners
didn’t hear much else about Iran. A taxi driver I was talking to in Iran said,
“Oh, Americans must think horrible things about us now.” And you’d
think it was because of the hostage crisis, but he said, “No, it’s not the
hostage crisis. It’s this book. ‘Not Without My Daughter’ has taken
away our honor.” Now that there are more journalists going over from
the West and there are more movies coming out, hopefully Iranians will
feel like a better picture is being presented.

In some
ways being half-American and half-Iranian gives you more mobility than most Iranians have.

I think it does give me more mobility. Although, there are a
lot of Iranian women that I’ve met who do all kinds of things and are
very free in Iran. But I think, within my dad’s family, which is more
traditional, it was really good for me to have both perspectives. When I get
there, they’re very welcoming. They totally consider me Iranian. They
don’t see me as a foreigner.

What do they think of your freckles?

You know, they’ve never really mentioned them. My mom is
really the
freckled one. I used to draw freckles on with a magic marker.
Iranian women usually wear a lot more makeup than I do. And they
fix their hair up a lot. The first time I went they would kind
of cake it on after they got wherever they were going. But now
people wear a lot of makeup in the street.

There are so many things like that, which from an outsider’s
point of view seem like contradictions: that you would have to cover yourself in public but you would wear makeup.

Part of it is just, anything forbidden, you’re going to want
to do. And another part of it is that Iranian women were always big
shoppers and big dressers. They think about their appearance a lot. So for
me to come, having lived in Berkeley, and being less diligent about the way I
look, they were always asking me, “Why don’t you curl your hair? Why
don’t you pluck your eyebrows? And why don’t you put on more makeup?”
They were really baffled why I didn’t do that.

In “Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic
Women,” Geraldine Brooks talks about the women she met. They would be, say, activists or student protesters, and then Brooks would go to their homes and they
would take off the chador and suddenly transform. They would wear nice lingerie for their husbands. It reminds me of
the image of the garden behind the walls. These are things that might not
occur to Westerners.

It’s really amazing. You think of it as this dour religious
thing, yet even within the very religious groups, the women really do fix
their hair and they’re very into their beauty.

What I gathered from Brooks’ book is that Iran, in some ways, was
more progressive concerning women’s rights than almost any other
country in the Middle East.

That’s true in a lot of ways. People here have an impression
of Iran as being like Saudi Arabia. People ask me, “Can women drive there?
Are you allowed to work?” Women do all kinds of things in Iran. Women
drive. There are women lawyers, women journalists, members of
Parliament. So although there are some inequalities in terms of custody rights and inheritance rights, women are very vocal about changing
those.

The most progressive Iranian newspaper that I saw was called Women’s
Newspaper, and it’s run by a woman who’s the daughter of the
former president. When I was there last December, there were
these killers going after dissidents and writers and the paper
was calling openly for the killers to be caught and for
them to be investigated. I went to a couple of
student protests and the students were yelling for the
intelligence minister to resign, and just being very open about
being pro-Khatami [the recently elected reformist president of
Iran]. That kind of protest would have been unthinkable a
couple years ago, and even now it’s surprising for me to see.
In fact, the intelligence minister did resign a few
weeks
later.

Have you gotten any confrontational questions during this
book tour?

I thought I’d get a lot more. Especially in L.A., because
there are a lot of Iranians there. I thought I’d get a lot of people saying,
“How can you say anything good about this regime. My uncle was killed.”
There are so many people who’ve had so many tragedies. But no one’s been like
that. I’ve actually gotten a lot of positive reactions from
people my age who come up and say, “This is so much like my
life.” Which made me happy because I was a little worried
because I’m half-Iranian, so I thought people would say
“She’s only half-Iranian, how can she speak for us?” But a lot
of people of different ages too have thanked me for writing it.

There’s a line in your last chapter when you write of
being in Brussels right after being in Iran, that you felt shock seeing a man and a woman holding hands in public, and that you knew you would find “no silent bonds of solidarity, nothing of the watchful comforting community” in the
West. What is it about that public display of affection that
struck you in that way?

It wasn’t so much the public display of affection as that, if
someone were to be holding hands in the street [in Iran] and
there were a roadblock up ahead and they didn’t know about it,
someone would come down and warn them. I’d be walking down the
street and my scarf was a little too far back, which is
OK normally, but if there were morals police around the corner,
there was this woman who came up to me and said, “Look there are some
police around the corner, pull your scarf forward.” You really feel like
you’re being taken care of on a certain level by people who identify
with you. More than you might in a more diverse society where no one really knows where you’re coming from, so they’re not going to presume to tell you what to do.

Or maybe not. As the captivating documentary “Divorce Iranian Style” shows, Islamic law makes it almost impossible for women who want a divorce to get one without the consent of their husbands. And because men risk losing their financial security if they divorce, they often choose to stay married — even if their wives make their lives a living hell.

If, however, a woman can prove to the family courts that her husband is either impotent or insane, she stands a chance in the courts. It’s this provision that makes “Divorce Iranian Style” a fascinating and often highly entertaining film, as we watch these women use a combination of histrionics and shrewd tactics to demand rights they don’t have. One woman insists her husband is crazy because he won’t let her use the phone, crying to the judge at one moment and cheekily grinning at the camera the next. Another whispers to the judge that her husband hasn’t touched her since the wedding, and expresses her shame at having to admit this in public. There is a tragic dimension to each of their stories, though none of the women see themselves as victims. Nor do filmmakers Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini see them as victims, but rather as pioneers in a legal system caught between religious tradition and modern reality. Salon recently spoke with Longinotto and Mir-Hosseini at New York’s Film Forum, where “Divorce Iranian Style” made its East Coast premiere.

Are most women aware, when they first marry, of their legal status and rights?

Mir-Hosseini: It’s really difficult to generalize. In 1979, when the revolution happened, something like 68 percent of the population lived in villages. Now somewhere around 70 percent live in the city. So Iranian society has changed a lot.

But in my own marriage, my second marriage, I was 28, I had just finished my Ph.D. and I fell in love. I was very educated, and it was my choice to marry. But I wanted the right to divorce — a woman can stipulate in the marriage contract to have the right to divorce. My husband said, “No, no, how can you think about divorce now when we are so much in love? If you want a divorce, do you think I am the kind of man to refuse you?” I trusted him. That’s why I signed the marriage contract.

So many women like me start their life on the assumption that there is total equality and harmony. I thought, this law will not apply to us, we have a different understanding. But when the relationship broke down, he refused to give me a divorce — he just wanted to keep me in a state of limbo. At the time of marriage, I thought that it was based on equality. But when it came to the divorce, I realized it wasn’t there.

One of the most shocking moments in the film is when the judge orders a woman to win her husband back by making herself more attractive. It seems like such an absurd suggestion, and yet I’m sure her reply — “Why should I make more compromises; I’ve been compromising for 30 years?” — would resonate with plenty of Western women as well.

Mir-Hosseini: It’s always that way, everywhere in the world. The more women compromise, the more the other side expects. And yet women are very much valued in Iranian society. It might sound very strange and bizarre, but they are. Especially if they are professional women, they are very much treated with respect. Women are very much loved and valued as daughters — that is where they get their strength. After my mother died, and everything collapsed, I realized that she was the one who was holding everyone together.

In all the cases that we saw, the marriages broke down why? Because these men did not accept those strong women. They want to control them within the family. So these women [in the film] do not put up with that. When there is harmony and balance, I would say marriage in Iran is egalitarian in practice, though not in a legal sense. Women have different spheres of action, but they have a great deal of freedom within that. And that is where these women get their strength. There is a confidence, a soft and inner confidence, which comes from their religious belief, and from the way that the society sees them, and the way that they see their rights in Islam.

Why would a man want to stay in an unhappy marriage, when it’s clear the women who have been denied a divorce are determined to make their lives difficult?

Mir-Hosseini: Often the men also want divorce, but if they take the initiative and petition for a divorce, then they have to pay. So in order not to pay, they make life so miserable for their wives that they initiate the divorce and give up everything. It’s all about money and settlement.

If the wife takes the initiative to ask for a divorce, even if it is the husband’s fault, then she’s got to give up everything — her children included. A man has the right to divorce, he can divorce whenever he wants, but a wife can only have access to divorce with her husband’s consent. So that puts them into two different negotiating situations. So when they come to the court, they have their own strategies. Even if both sides want divorce, they are never straightforward about it in court.

The most heartbreaking moment in the film is watching Miriam try to convince the judge to let her keep one of her two daughters, even though she left her husband illegally. On the one hand, she is clearly trying to manipulate him with her tears — on the other, she is truly distraught, understandably so.

Mir-Hosseini: If you are a woman, once you have children, you must stay in a marriage for the sake of children. You don’t have the right to fall in love with another man and leave your husband. That is why the court secretary is so angry about Miriam. Miriam broke the ground rule. Her husband didn’t want to divorce her — she wanted the divorce because she didn’t love him. But she wasn’t abused, so according to the court’s perception, she didn’t have a terrible marriage. She should have stayed in a loveless marriage for her children. And if a woman does not put her children first, then the assumption is that whatever she does is for lust.

I suspect most parents feel they make sacrifices for their children, even if it’s not legally mandated.

Longinotto: I was just saying that last night. My mum used to say, countless times, “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the children. I’d have left your dad years ago.” That’s what we grew up with, and I’m sure it was true. When we left home, they got separate rooms, and eventually separate flats.

That’s one of the things that made shooting the film very hard, because you always look at these things through your own experience. I grew up in a very loveless marriage that was held together for the children, so I don’t really rate families very much. To me, the family’s a kind of suffocating, small unit. I always wanted to get out of my family as soon as I could.

But most people tend to see divorce as a bad thing. To me it means women have got more choice and more power. So if somebody says a society has a very low divorce rate, I usually assume it’s because women haven’t got any other options. Maybe that’s just me — I don’t know what Ziba would say to that.

Mir-Hosseini: What we really wanted to show in our film is how this universal thing is dealt with in a very specific cultural context. Marriage is a difficult institution, and when it breaks down, it’s painful. Different societies have different ways of dealing with it, but there is no ideal way, no ideal situation.

There are so many similarities and so many differences at the same time. I come from Iran so I come from a culture where divorce rates are low, where mothers keep the family together, and sometimes I think it’s very good. But I chose not to have a child, because I saw how children tie women. I knew that my first husband wanted a child in order to keep me under control, and I also knew I would never desert that child.

I couldn’t make up my mind about the divorce court judge. At times he showed such sensitivity — to both sides — while at others he seemed completely unsympathetic.

Longinotto: Well, my feeling of him is that he’s basically a good man — he’s got six kids and he’s happily married. But it’s a question of limitations. He can’t really … he finds it hard to visualize women’s position in an unhappy marriage. Remember when the 16-year-old Ziba comes to court and says about her husband, “I can’t live with him”? And he says to her, “Oh, you can live with him. He’ll make you happy, he’s a good man.” He can’t quite understand what women’s positions are. I think he’s trying his best, but at the same time he’s limited by what he can do within the law.

Mir-Hosseini: Also, he’s a very religious man, so he operates on certain assumptions underlying the legal rules. One of these assumptions is that every woman wants to stay in a marriage. And he cannot conceive that a woman would not want that. When, in the first case we filmed, he tells the woman, “You’ve got to beautify yourself to get him back,” in fact, he’s talking about a legal rule. Because whenever the husband asks for a divorce, this divorce is suspended for three months, during which time he’s got the right to take the wife back. It is seen as a favor to women, because traditionally women have always been dependent on marriage. But that condition has changed, and so he’s operating on certain assumptions that no longer correspond with the reality.

Also, because he is an Islamic judge, he does not see his role as making a decision. He sees his role as putting the two parties on the path of negotiation. He tells them what the law is, but he never comes out with a decision. He doesn’t take positions like that.

Were you surprised to find that these women were willing to fight so aggressively for rights that they weren’t afforded under Islamic law?

Mir-Hosseini: The sense I get from the women, particularly when I sit and watch the film again, is that they want the same things that everyone wants. They want love, they want happiness, they want to be able to work, to be out in the world. And what’s happening is, as more of these women are educating themselves, the sheer ground swell of it coming from below is forcing a change. So it’s not a question of the government making concessions to these women — it’s women forcing concessions from below. It’s women like young Ziba saying, “I want to go back to college, I want to study.” Or Miriam breaking all the rules and fighting for her children. The effect of all this is that laws are going to have to change to accommodate these women, because they’re not going to put up with it. That’s what’s so fascinating to me.

The peace process stalled because Netanyahu was offering only a 9 percent withdrawal. Albright’s threat to go public meant that for the first time Netanyahu would have been forced to explain to Israeli voters — two-thirds of whom support continued negotiations — why the other 4 percent of territory was worth killing the peace process and straining relations with the country’s chief ally. It would have meant exposing the damaging role played by his obstinate coalition partners, most of whom refuse to relinquish one more inch of West Bank territory to the Palestinians.

The administration’s tactic struck a nerve, sending Netanyahu, his American Jewish supporters and their amen corner in Congress into a froth. On Netanyahu’s instructions, the powerful pro-Israeli lobby complained to members of Congress about the administration’s tone, with the lobby’s well-known ability to influence Jewish campaign donations for the midterm elections an unspoken but unmistakable threat. As a result, 81 senators signed a lobby-dictated letter to Clinton, warning him not to go public with his differences with Netanyahu.

Though Albright, at least publicly, stuck by her refusal to dilute the American proposal, Netanyahu’s tactic of facing down the administration through Congress was working. The first sign was an extension of the two-week deadline that Albright set for an Israeli response. Then the deadline was extended again as the Israelis played for more time.

Then, in a hopeful sign last week, senior Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met in Tel Aviv for the first time in 16 months. The Israelis agreed to a further 1 percent withdrawal in addition to their original offer of 9 percent, but demanded that the remaining 3 percent of territory under the American proposal be turned into a “national park,” upon which the Palestinians would be forbidden to build. The Palestinians refused, and the talks ended in deadlock, with both sides urging the Clinton administration to step in to help.

Then came the shocker. The Clinton administration, mediators of the Middle East peace process since the Oslo Accords of 1993, refused to mediate. “They should stay engaged, and they should continue to work,” said White House spokesman Michael McCurry. “There’s no progress to report, true. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t make progress. And they ought to try harder.”

The Clinton administration’s refusal to intervene masked a much more craven cave-in. According to American, Middle Eastern and European sources, Albright’s ultimatum to publicize its differences with Netanyahu has been dropped altogether, on order from the president himself. Undermined by her boss, the gutsy and sharp-tongued secretary of state now appears to be what Texans would call “all hat and no cattle.”

Why the cave-in? First of all, the Lewinsky scandal has so weakened Clinton that he is perceived by Israeli leaders as wearing an empty holster. Prominent Israeli parliamentarians from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party openly deride Clinton as “up to his neck in scandal.” Therefore, the reaction in Jerusalem to his “accept or else” bluster goes something like: “Or else what? We have 81 senators on our side. How many troops do you have, besides your loud-mouthed secretary of state? Moreover, at this — ahem — delicate time in your presidency, do you really want to get into a fight with Israel over our security needs? No? We didn’t think so.”

If the Lewinsky scandal has tied one of Clinton’s hands behind his back in the Middle East, his Democratic campaign finance concerns have tied the other. As Democrats prepare to recapture the House this fall, and as Vice President Al Gore gears up for his presidential run in 2000, the party depends heavily on a small number of wealthy Jewish donors. No one likes to admit that fact, but the nation may learn more about this dependence if Attorney General Janet Reno recommends an independent counsel to investigate campaign finance abuses during the 1996 election.

Their donations underscore the corrosive effect of money on politics. Despite recent polls that show 80 percent of American Jews favor more administration “pressure” on Netanyahu to move the peace process forward, the small inner circle of Democratic Jewish donors do not. Their message to Clinton is simple: Take your hands off Israel, or take your hands out of my pocket. Clinton, knowing where his bread is buttered, has withdrawn the ultimatum that led so many to believe that he meant business in the Middle East.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the right-wing policies of Israel and its U.S. lobby were met by firm American resolve. In 1991, President George Bush refused to give Israel $10 billion in loan guarantees until Jerusalem pledged not to use the money to settle Russian immigrants in the occupied territories.

Outraged, Jewish lobbyists swarmed over Capitol Hill, three quarters of the Senate signed a letter warning Bush to stand down and American Jews even branded the president an anti-Semite. But Bush refused to stand down, and in the end he prevailed. The tension in American-Israeli relations caused Israelis to think twice about their right-wing leaders, and in 1992, they elected Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister.

Clinton and his aides are fond of boasting how little the Lewinsky scandal has affected his job performance, how he’s able to “compartmentalize” and filter out the background noise of the scandal to focus on the important policy issues at hand.

If ever there was a need to demonstrate that ability, it’s now. If the Middle East peace process dies — and make no mistake about it: It is very close to death — renewed fighting between Israelis and Palestinians is as certain as the sunrise. This is not a good time to let things slip. Jordan’s King Hussein, 62 years old and perhaps the most moderating figure in the Arab world, is ill. Despite Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel, Hussein’s successor may not have the stature to prevent the country’s majority Palestinian population from joining the fight. The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty could snap as well, causing two decades of American peacemaking in the Middle East to unravel in an instant. And to punctuate that threat, Iran recently tested a medium-range missile capable of hitting Israel. For the United States, the consequences of such a war would be incalculable.

“Lame duck” is a term that doesn’t even begin to capture the result of Clinton’s Monica and money scandals. “The Cowardly Lion” would be more like it, accent on the lyin’.

After a quick nod, we speedwalk to the door, then make a mad dash to the corner and pile into Ali’s battered old Citroen.

In the car they explain that they could be arrested for being with a foreigner, particularly an American, and request that I lay low.

Swerving crazily through the traffic of Esfahan, where all cars bear scars of mercenary driving, Ali vibrates with an uncontrollable restlessness. Two years after finishing his military service, he’s 25, unemployed and desperate for fun and excitement — not an easy pair to come by in post-revolutionary Iran.

“If police find a boy and girl together, they beat us,” says Hamid, 17, an aspiring fashion designer. Like 50 percent of all Iranians, he was born after the revolution. And like Ali, Hamid is trying to get a visa to study abroad.

“I hate it here,” he says. “I just want to go somewhere else where I can be free.”

Sexual freedom is tough to find in a country where strict social codes have been in place since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Today’s youth, sick of being repressed and bored, have begun to take center stage with their grievances; their loud rumbling last year made it to the national political arena when their support helped moderate candidate Mohammed Khatami win a landslide victory in Iran’s presidential election.

But even if the new president loosens some of the social constraints, the secret social gathering Ali has brought us to would still be far from legal. Because behind the iron gates of this two-story house, there is a slice of Iranian life that could only exist behind doors in this culture. It’s a house party, Iranian style. Ironically, as I look around, I’m stung by the realization that, minus the black-hooded cloaks and the Armenian vodka, this could be any college party in America.

Swaying to the groove of banned Western dance music, young men and women,
all in their late teens or 20s, move on the living-room dance floor. Having stashed their cloaklike black chadors in the closet, the
women flaunt their bodies in sexy minidresses, treating the guys to a
spectacle of legs, necks, cleavage — and even bellybuttons.

The host’s parents are out of town, which gives these kids a rare
opportunity to let loose and get down. But parties like these also have a
more libidinous purpose. They provide a protected environment for boys
and girls to meet and socialize with one another without being accosted by
the Komite, Iran’s network of secret police.

“If you and I want to have a friendship,” explains Nobine, a 24-year-old female
university student, “we cannot meet and go to a restaurant. We must be
secret. We are … what is the word … oppressed.”

As a result, young men and women feel an intense pressure to begin a
relationship, and have sex, as quickly as possible because they never know
when they’ll have a chance to meet again. And both sexes complain about the
absence of romance from their furtive courtships.

Well, maybe the girls complain a little more.

“What do you think of love?” asks Chadab, a college student majoring in English. “I think love is a holy thing. Boys just want sex,
they don’t care about love.”

For their part, the boys say that it’s girls’ insistence on secrecy that
takes the fun out of flings. “They’re all pretending to be good girls,”
says Salman, 20. “I can’t handle it.”

Salman was born in Iran and grew up in Arizona, where his father was a
professor. After a family trip to visit relatives in Esfahan, he learned
that he would not be permitted to go back home. His parents had never
filed residency papers for him and the United States refused to issue him a
visa. That was three long years ago, and he’s been stranded in Iran ever
since.

A novice in the Iranian social scene, Salman had to learn a whole new set
of signals — fast. But when he tried to explain the gist of modern
Iranian courtship, it sounded vaguely familiar. “First you have to get
them inside,” he said. “Then you try to get them naked.”

On the dance floor, the men, drunk on black-market vodka, take turns
dancing in the center of a circle, imitating the sexy moves of the women
who cheer them on. A rivalry quickly develops between Nobine and Chadab
over the attention of Ali. Nobine, awkward and shy, can do nothing right.
She finally gets up the courage to ask Ali to dance, but as soon as they
rise the music cuts off and her chance is blown. By the time someone pops
in a new cassette, Ali is deeply engaged in Chadab’s research on the nature
of love and Nobine is sulking in a corner.

“Boys don’t understand me,” Nobine sighs.

When the clock strikes 2 a.m., everyone crowds together on the floor for the
host to take a picture. Then people gradually drift toward the door to
leave. Boys kiss boys goodbye and shake the girls’ hands.

The women put on their black chadors, which hides their chic
rebelliousness underneath.

Before we leave, Ali slips Chadab his phone number and offers her a ride home.

A few blocks from the hotel, Ali stops the car and tells me to get out.
“OK, man,” he says. “We have to leave you here to be safe.”

I watch them go, then feel a chill run up my spine as a police car with
flashing red lights drives off in the same direction.

They are just kids driving a beat-up old car. But they are outlaws.