{"id":123837,"date":"2018-04-05T09:00:31","date_gmt":"2018-04-05T13:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=123837"},"modified":"2018-04-05T11:36:15","modified_gmt":"2018-04-05T15:36:15","slug":"franny-and-zooey-in-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/05\/franny-and-zooey-in-iran\/","title":{"rendered":"Franny and Zooey<\/i> in Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I had a bad experience in Hollywood once. <\/em>\u2014J.\u2009D. Salinger<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To understand J.\u2009D. Salinger\u2019s opinion of Hollywood, one needn\u2019t look much further than his stories. Holden Caulfield launches into an invective against the industry on the second page of The Catcher in the Rye<\/em>. Of his brother D.\u2009B., Holden says, \u201cNow he\u2019s out in Hollywood, D.\u2009B., being a prostitute. If there\u2019s one thing I hate, it\u2019s the movies. Don\u2019t even mention them to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Salinger\u2019s own profound aversion to the industry began when he sold the film rights to his short story \u201cUncle Wiggily in Connecticut\u201d to the producer Samuel Goldwyn. The story, first published by T<\/em>he<\/em> New Yorker<\/em> in 1948, offers a scathing portrait of upper-middle-class American society. In Salinger\u2019s opinion, Goldwyn missed the point entirely in the campy and hyperromanticized 1949 Hollywood feature My Foolish Heart<\/em>.<\/p>\n

From that moment on, Salinger vowed to never have his work adapted to the screen again. He refused to sell any more film rights, and he successfully fought a series of copyright-infringement lawsuits over the unauthorized adaptation of his works in film and in any other medium. The current trustees of the Salinger estate include his widow, Colleen M. Salinger, and his son, Matthew R. Salinger, who have been just as unyielding as the author himself. The infamously litigious estate has fought off the many Western filmmakers who have wanted to adapt Salinger\u2019s work and likely will continue to do so for some time: U.S. copyright law ensures that intellectual property is protected for the lifetime of the author plus an additional seventy years. Yet in the nineties, a gap in international copyright laws enabled one unlikely director to slip through the cracks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The virtually nonexistent relations between the United States and Iran extend to their copyright relations. While many countries have agreed to international standards such as the Berne Convention, which affords foreign artists the same copyright protections countries offer to their own artists, Iran has not. And this is how the Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui\u2014one of the premier auteurs of Iran\u2019s New Wave cinema\u2014seized the opportunity that no Western filmmaker could.<\/p>\n

In 1995, Mehrjui released his film Pari<\/em>,\u00a0a composite of Franny and Zooey<\/em> and \u201cA Perfect Day for Bananafish,\u201d from Salinger\u2019s Nine Stories.<\/em> Mehrjui, who was educated in the United States and studied at UCLA, no doubt read Salinger throughout his schooling there, if he hadn\u2019t already done so in his homeland. In Iran, certain Western artists are exalted to mythic proportions. It\u2019s almost impossible to find any one of the small smoke-filled Tehran coffee shops that hasn\u2019t played Pink Floyd\u2019s Dark Side of the Moon<\/em> at least once this week. And at any given bookstore, one would be likely to find translations of Salinger, Steinbeck, and Sontag nestled among Iran\u2019s own literary giants\u2014Forough Farrokhzad, Sadegh Hedayat, Hafez, Ferdowsi, and Rumi.<\/p>\n

In classic Iranian New Wave fashion, Mehrjui\u2019s visual retelling of Salinger\u2019s stories is allegorical and poetic. He uses symbolism to translate the incisive and dialogue-heavy characterizations for which Salinger is famous. Due to the Islamic regime\u2019s rules about the expression of modesty, Mehrjui could not shoot his Zooey character steeped in a bathtub, as he appears in Salinger\u2019s work, and so the director explores the symbolic potential of water and submersion elsewhere. The film opens with a waterlogged dream sequence in which Pari, the Iranian Franny, is forced underwater by a band of her classmates. In the book, Franny only mentions the dream in passing. In the film, it sets the tone, and the perpetual symbol of murky water recurs throughout.<\/p>\n

Mehrjui\u2019s film projects Salinger\u2019s original postwar narratives onto an Iran still reeling from the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War. Mehrjui\u2019s version of Zooey, here known as Dadashi, is an aspiring actor who for much of the film is dressed for the part of a soldier wielding a gun\u2014a sober reminder of a not-too-distant past. The film\u2019s final scenes culminate in a metanarrative in which Dadashi, acting on set as a fallen soldier who lies dying on a hill, cranes his neck to see women carrying jugs of water up and over the other side.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from\u00a0Pari<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yet there are also scenes that seem almost directly lifted from the original stories, with just a touch of Iranian flair. In Salinger\u2019s original, Franny sits across from her boyfriend, Lane, at an upscale restaurant in New Haven, where she\u2019s barely touched the chicken sandwich she ordered, and tells him about the book she is reading, The Way of a Pilgrim<\/em>, about\u00a0a monk in Russia who finds solace in a prayer. In Mehrjui\u2019s rendition, Pari does the same opposite her fianc\u00e9 (lest the Islamic regime come down on the film for its depiction of extramarital relations), telling him about a Sufi book while her chicken kebab grows cold.<\/p>\n

Pari struggles with the same critical questions of identity and belief as Franny, only within a much different sociopolitical and cultural milieu. In fact, Salinger\u2019s stories provide Mehrjui with a strange but fitting framework through which to depict the condition of the modern Iranian woman, which in the nineties was rapidly changing. By the year 2000, more women in Iran were attending universities than were men. Pari, like Franny, is depicted as educated and outspoken and vehemently challenges the academic patriarchy. Even her fianc\u00e9, who speaks highly of his own work, is bent on getting Pari\u2019s approval. He is visibly injured when she does not sufficiently stroke his ego, but Pari could not care less.<\/p>\n

Conversations about belief and spirituality function as a through line in Franny and Zooey<\/em>. In Pari<\/em>, the Iranian city of Esfah\u0101n provides an idyllic and sacred backdrop for that negotiation. Pari imbibes the silence and space in Esfah\u0101n\u2019s most beautiful, iconic mosques.<\/p>\n

Child protagonists are as much a key feature of Iranian New Wave cinema as they are of Salinger\u2019s stories. In \u201cA Perfect Day for Bananafish\u201d and in Mehrjui\u2019s adaptation, Seymour\u2014Assad in the film\u2014has encounters with a little girl, who acts as the dulcet foil for the adult tragedy to come. The narrative builds to Seymour\u2019s\/Assad\u2019s psychological undoing and eventual suicide. In the story, he shoots himself; in the film, he self-immolates.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible that Salinger might actually have liked Pari\u00a0<\/em>had he watched it. The Iranian film industry is decidedly not Hollywood, and Mehrjui\u2019s sensibilities are subtle and self-aware. But Salinger never did. He was oblivious to the film\u2019s existence until 1998, when Lincoln Center planned to screen the film during a three-week festival celebrating Iranian cinema. Publicity around the event brought the film to Salinger\u2019s attention. Representatives of Salinger responded immediately with a letter, stating that the screening would constitute a copyright breach. Though Lincoln Center might have contested the warning, they decided instead to cancel the screening, perhaps wary of the legal track record of past Salinger adaptations.<\/p>\n

In a New York Times<\/em> article published in response to the controversy, the Iranian director expressed bewilderment over the decision. \u201cI don\u2019t want to distribute the film commercially,\u201d Mehrjui said. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of a cultural exchange. I just want to let the film be seen for the critics and the people that follow my work.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added, too, that he had written the reclusive author seeking permission to use the material for his movie and, when he hadn\u2019t heard back, decided to move forward with the project. \u201cIn our country, we don\u2019t have copyrights,\u201d he said. \u201cWe feel free to read and do whatever we want.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is, of course, not entirely true. Iran does indeed have domestic copyright laws in place, though they are nearly half a century old, and in many ways, they have failed to provide artists and businesses with the protections they require. These laws, however, do not extend to any work produced outside the country, and Iran boasts a bustling market of pirated films. In busy corridors of Tehran, young boys sell stacks of pirated DVDs in plastic sleeves, their cover art badly photocopied, for less than a dollar. Truth be told, I\u2019ve probably seen more Hollywood blockbusters during my stints in Iran than I have in my lifetime in the United States.<\/p>\n

The so-called intellectual freedom Mehrjui described has come at a major cost for Iran in recent years\u2014most especially for Iranian software developers, who, because of the country\u2019s abstention from these international copyright standards, have struggled to target an international market. Recently, Iran has been forced to reconsider and reconfigure its laws. In November 2017, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology announced that it would draft a new copyright bill for submission to Parliament, which could bring the country one step closer to joining the Berne Convention. Even if Iran does enter these agreements, U.S.-based artists will still likely have a hard time reaping their royalties thanks to ironclad economic sanctions that have made financial transactions with the country impossible.<\/p>\n

But were it not for the lack of copyright relations between the United States and Iran, this oblique dialogue between two major artists from seemingly disparate cultures would not exist at all. A couple of years ago, the film was available in its entirety on YouTube, though that\u2019s since been taken down. At Columbia University\u2019s library, an uncirculated copy of Pari<\/em>\u00a0has an aggressive-looking FBI sticker slapped across the front that warns of copyright infringement, an offense punishable by up to five years in prison and\/or a $250,000 fine.<\/p>\n

If you really want to find the film, though, you just have to look. But I won\u2019t tell you where. With all due respect to Mr. Salinger, I, for one, would like to live in a world where both the stories and the film they inspired can coexist.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sasha<\/span> von Oldershausen is an Iranian American journalist writing about the Texas-Mexico border and Iran. Her work has appeared in <\/em>the<\/em>\u00a0Nation,\u00a0the<\/em> Guardian, and <\/em>Texas Monthly, among others.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  I had a bad experience in Hollywood once. \u2014J.\u2009D. Salinger To understand J.\u2009D. Salinger\u2019s opinion of Hollywood, one needn\u2019t look much further than his stories. Holden Caulfield launches into an invective against the industry on the second page of The Catcher in the Rye. Of his brother D.\u2009B., Holden says, \u201cNow he\u2019s out in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1455,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[23983,33587,33594,33591,9091,33593,33588,910,33589,33592,19701,33590,1818],"class_list":["post-123837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-a-perfect-day-for-bananafish","tag-dariush-mehrjui","tag-ferdowsi-and-rumi","tag-foroogh-farrokhzad","tag-franny-and-zooey","tag-hafez","tag-iranian-new-wave-cinema","tag-j-d-salinger","tag-pari","tag-sadegh-hedayat","tag-samuel-goldwyn","tag-terhan","tag-the-catcher-in-the-rye"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u2018Franny and Zooey\u2019 in Iran<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"J. D. 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