It’s fear that makes us lose our conscience. It’s also what transforms us into cowards.
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Deep in a apartment during the fundamentalist rise of
post-revolution Iran, a young woman headbangs to Iron Maiden.
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is a soliloquy on the all-too-often disregarded strength of a woman’s agency. With a childhood incubated by the brief euphoria and harsh conservative shift following the Iranian revolution of 1979, Satrapi’s path proved a struggle for freedom. The rigid bipolarity of the law rendered against Iranian women has been translated to film with visceral, sometimes to a horrifying extant like with Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow. However, the black-and-white animation wielded in Persepolis not only reflects the aesthetic of its source material, but also paints a portrait of the struggle to find one’s identity, literal color within the film’s context, amid cold spectrum of extremism and a removed society’s apathy.
A daughter of progressive thought living in Tehran, Satrapi (“Marji”) is a playful and outspoken dynamo her as her adult self recalls, fully-colored in the backdrop of her recollection. Her discipline is fueled by Bruce Lee’s Way of the Dragon, and such as with most children, her spirituality is a bit less nuanced than her parents. For instance, when her father is venting on the need to remove the Shah, she responds with confusion, asking why he would need to be removed if he was “appointed by God.” After her father explains the fallacy embedded within the myth, Marji quickly shifts to young revolutionary in a striking allegory of the homeland’s ideological metamorphosis.
As Marji’s individuality begins to burgeon, her community is overtaken by a zealous force. Everything that has influenced and become of her as young woman, is outlawed. Despite the barriers, her personality continues to flourish. To one degree she buys the prohibited tapes of international pop and rock music from curbside vendors, and to another she witnesses her mother mercilessly harassed. Every aspect of women are dictated, and Marji quickly finds the meaning behind such law is arbitrary. For many of her friends, compliance becomes the norm. Yet, the revolution that sought to end an overwhelming wave of violence only seemed to beget more of the same as the ramification of the Iran-Iraq War literally fall close to home.
When another bombing nearly obliterates her home, Marji is
quick to define survival for herself. To live is not defined by living the
longest. Rather, it is by living the truest version of herself, regardless of a
societal cage. This notion is embodied in an outburst during one of her
classes, and the regime quickly descends upon her. Though Marji voices the thought of what many
may think, the weight of her words fall on deaf, or rather colorless ears. Her
teachers and more overwhelming the men policing her home feel anything less
than the most rigid compliance is a cause for alarm and extermination. Thus,
Marji’s family resolve to send her to Vienna where, at the very least, her
tendencies may not be met with such abrasion.
In Vienna, however, Marji oppression leaps from sexual to racial oppression. One moment she is forced to stay at a Catholic boarding house over the holidays, and after opting to eat pasta straight out of a pot, the nuns consider her barbaric, and an exact image of what they would expect from an Eastern woman. In a motion similar to her prior outcry, Marji leaves the stringent, overbearing setting, moving from apartment to apartment before finding a room with Dr. Schloss. Here and as she moves to adulthood, Marji begins to lie about her ancestry, informing new acquaintances she’s actually French. The recurring thoughts of her grandmother remind her of the lie of her ethnicity, however, is veil easily pierced; cruelty will find its mark despite her best efforts to hide.
As if on cue, Vienna becomes the lens of the world’s harsh
perspective towards Marji’s plight. She overhears women ridiculing her
desperate attempt to fabricate her background. Later, she finds her boyfriend
cheating on her, an action compounded as Dr. Schloss accuses her of theft.
Homeless, Marji does not even receive the benefit of facelessness, as strangers
and public workers heckle her without end. It becomes ironic, she muses, that
Vienna of all places and the faithlessness of a man, may be her undoing. Before
she expires, she resolves to return to Tehran. Trying to find a better life
outside of the regime, Marji finds, is just as bleak as living within it.
Though cruelty’s face may have changed shapes in Vienna, it did not change its
color.
Upon her return, the harshness of the regime shifted from jarring to ingrained for many of Marji’s sisters. Similar to life under the Shah, any attempt at liberation are only crude emulations of the concept, as parties are thrown underground and even then, too often uncovered by a regime with too much time on its hands. Yet what Marji’s perspective has changed: there is no external revolution, and any meaningful change should be done from the inside. A montage feature her own rendition of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” echoes her determination. Marji attends university, improves her self-image, and in order to maintain her first meaningful relationship, opts for marriage.
Marji quickly discerns, however, the color will not emerge in her life via men. Though initially rebellious, her recent husband grows apathetic, his privilege allowing him to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger movies at his leisure and without concern. Again, Marji finds she cannot hope for her own agency to emerge through the relationship of someone else, even her partner. Her willingness to work through the routine of her predicament has not panned out; her forward-thinking friends are picked off one by one. After her grandmother suggests she too may be succumbing to the same vengeful justice perpetuating the regime’s hold, she opts to leave Tehran for Paris, resolved and divorced. For Marji, acquiring freedom, embodied with her color, is ultimately a painful, melancholy endeavor. Still, pain proves to be a melancholic nessescity.
Persepolis wrestles with catalysts for change, all of which are nearly prohibitive to Marji. If she is not hindered by the regime’s fear of a woman’s strength, she is restricted by the west’s presumption of Iran. Her color emerges as she has exhausted her voice to a point it can no longer be ignored. By the film’s onset, there are few options to address an Iranian women’s plight: Accept a waking death, or shout for as long as possible. The latter can only be muffled for so long.
