I recently watched the new bro-flick Wolfs. In my defence: I was sick and therefore lacking in imagination. I didn’t fall for the Brad Pitt-George Clooney combo, though, doing proper bro stuff – walking around in leather jackets, driving cars (fast), cracking egomaniac quasi-ironic jokes. If it wasn’t for the portrayals of “Albanians” and “Croatians” and their rival mafias, I might have fallen asleep.
The Albanians enter the film as a bunch of hefty guys with guns; they’re done away with swiftly, in less than a minute. The Croatians, on the other hand, are presented more elaborately, in a longer scene of a Croatian wedding party.
Held in a kitschy club, the party features heavy drinking, lots of dark-haired smiling men in light-coloured suits, a short dialogue in Croatian between Zlatko Burić’s mafia boss character and his fictional daughter and lively string-based music. At a certain point the men in light coloured suits hug and begin to dance – jump – in a circle, while repeatedly yelling “hey hey hey”. The dance ends with one of the American bros cursing in Croatian, or something resembling Croatian.
The film is completely forgettable, yet it displays something as old as Hollywood itself and that should certainly not be overlooked. After Hollywood othered the Native Americans, African Americans, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Mexicans, the Russians and others (pun intended) in its early films, the westerns, as well as in the action and crime movies of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, it has now obviously decided to explicitly other people from the Balkans.
Albanians and Croatians were chosen because to Hollywood they’re non-white or not-white-enough. What is considered not-white-enough has to do with either the history of colonialism or the history of communist regimes; sometimes, as is the case with Albanians and Croatians, their history meets both conditions.
I suspect that in Hollywood the history of the Balkans is understood as the Canadian psychologist and conservative thinker Jordan Peterson understands it. At an event in Ljubljana in 2018 he declared that it was his first lecture in a country that was once locked behind the iron curtain. Apart from being egregiously false – Slovenia was never behind what was called the iron curtain – Peterson’s declaration was a symptom of western perceptions of the histories of communist and socialist systems. To the west, whose most effective megaphone is Hollywood, communism and socialism are synonymous with the cold war and Stalinism.
The history of Yugoslavia, the federation Slovenia once belonged to, is therefore rarely understood correctly. Yugoslavia was socialist, but it wasn’t Stalinist. In fact, Yugoslavia broke away from the Soviet sphere of influence in 1948 and became a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. But this is of no importance to the US movie industry, as communism and socialism are the two phenomena it simply loves to hate.
This ideological basis – and the western belief that former communist countries have all been hijacked by criminals – made it easy and logical to portray Albanians and Croatians in Wolfs as unpredictable savages and therefore utterly dangerous terrorists/enemies/villains.
Somewhere along the way, however, the chosen ethnicities needed to be defined. Therefore, all available half-baked prejudices about people from the Balkans – which lump everyone from the region together as essentially Slavs (even Albanians and Kosovans who clearly aren’t) – were gathered up and inserted into the screenplay, costume design and set. In the eyes of Hollywood, Slavs are usually seen either squatting or circle-dancing, are either loudly or melancholically drunk, either verbally or physically aggressive and, of course, are obnoxiously corrupt.
What’s more, in Wolfs the othered people are people of the past, people of – again half-baked – traditions. Hence, in their wedding it will only be men who will circle-dance, the father will be a true patriarch and the bride a frail woman in need of protection. I’m glad none of the wedding guests waves a Croatian flag; the viewers are at least spared the prejudice that on top of it all Slavs are quintessential nationalists.
Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t anger that kept me watching Wolfs, it was amazement. It is not only a typical Hollywood product, but also one that generously displays how Hollywood’s neoliberal political correctness actually works.
The US movie industry affords recognition and non-degrading representation only to those groups who have managed – via political or social activism – to put themselves on its western map. It will then sell that representation back to those same communities and boast of its progressiveness and inclusivity. If a community – such as Albanians, Croats, Slovenes or Macedonians – doesn’t have a strong enough voice in the west, Hollywood can do whatever it wants with it. Noone will hear the inaccurately portrayed community scream.
Neoliberal political correctness is not an expression of critical thinking, but an expression of fear of looking bad and alienating your audiences, customers and voters. It’s purely transactional and to Hollywood we, the people of the Balkans, are not part of that transaction. If Hollywood’s antipropaganda wasn’t so powerful, I would actually consider ourselves lucky. On second thoughts, maybe we are indeed lucky. Maybe because Hollywood has not ingratiated itself with us, we can still see the US movie industry for what it is.
Ana Schnabl is a Slovenian novelist, editor and critic
• This article was amended on 1 November 2024 to clarify that Albanians and Kosovans are not Slavs.
