by Jonah Shepp
In case you missed the meme, young people around the world have taken to making videos of themselves dancing around their cities and countries to the tune of Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” and posting them on YouTube. Anyone who isn’t already sick of the song can watch kids dance and lip-sync to it in Paris, in Okinawa, in Amman… Cute and eminently harmless, right? But apparently not in Tehran, where some kids got arrested for it:
Iran‘s state-run national TV on Tuesday broadcast a programme showing men and women, apparently Pharrell fans from Tehran, confessing on camera. They were supposedly involved in a video clip based on Pharrell’s song. The original has been viewed almost 250m times on YouTube and has inspired people from all over the world to make their own version of the video, which shows people dancing in the street to the song.
Human rights activists have repeatedly condemned what they see as the state TV’s common fashion of airing confessions made under duress, usually misrepresented as interviews. It was not clear if Pharrell’s fans in jail in Iran had access to their lawyer before appearing on television. They have not yet been tried. In recent years, many activists and political prisoners have appeared on the Iranian national TV making confessions.
John Allen Gay notes that the reaction to the video is part and parcel of Iran’s culture war:
Many had noted the risks taken in the original video—women without veils (though wearing wigs), men and women dancing together. And while the Rouhani administration has tried to strike a conciliatory tone on the culture front, full openness has not been forthcoming. A very active band of conservative agitators has been busy pushing against any sign of change. Just this week, Iranian actress Leila Hatami (star of the Oscar-winning A Separation) was in hot water after she shook hands with, and then was kissed on the cheek by, the president of the Cannes Film Festival. Senior Iranian leaders regularly speak of the central importance of culture in the Islamic Republic’s survival. That’s a perpetual source of friction in a country with thousands of years of rich civilizational history (stretching back long before the arrival of Islam) and a strong literary tradition. Iranian art once plumbed the depths of the mind and the soul. Now it’s risky to make a music video whose message is simple, almost childish: that joy is still possible in Iran.
Jason Rezaian examines how this squares with Rouhani’s professed desire to give a little on freedom of expression:
By making these arrests, other centers of power could be sending a reminder to Rouhani that controls on media are likely to stay in place and are not under the executive’s power. According to his own words, if it were up to Rouhani, social media and other communication outlets that are currently blocked would be opened up. But it is not up to him. While many think of Iran’s power structure as a monolith, it is anything but, with many checks and balances, some of them official and some blurrier.
While the video seems innocuous enough, several laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran were apparently broken. Among them: women appearing without hijab head coverings, dancing to Western pop music, and using an illegal Web site to disseminate an unlicensed video. All of these offenses regularly go ignored in Iran. But this time around, it could be the fact that the video is part of a global pop culture trend and it that it had taken off, with tens of thousands of views, that prompted Iranian authorities to take action.
Recent Dish on censorship in Iran here.
The Dish 