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LogisticsLaborandLandFinancializationviatheGlobalizedFreeZoneStudio.pdf

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Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, !$$%), !e Kingdom (Peter Berg, !$$&), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Oliver Stone, !$#$), Dabangg (Abhinav Kashyap, !$#$), Mis- sion: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, !$##), !e Bourne Legacy (Tony Gil- roy, !$#!), Dabangg " (Arbaaz Khan, !$#!), Happy New Year (Farah Khan, !$#'), Star Wars: !e Force Awakens (J. J. Abrams, !$#%), Furious # (James Wan, !$#%), Welcome Back (Anees Bazmee, !$#%), Housefull $ (Sajid and Farhad Samji, !$#"), Star Trek Beyond (Justin Lin, !$#"), Airli% (Raja Krishna Menon, !$#"), Independ- ence Day: Resurgence (Roland Emmerich, !$#"), Ki & Ka (R. Balki, !$#"), Gong fu yu jia (Stanley Tong, !$#&), and Mission: Impossible—Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie, !$#()—these are some of the most recognized of the now-hundreds of feature )lms shot in the United Arab Emirates this century. All were made, at least in part, and, as their titles evidence, by largely non-Emirati enterprises.

It would be improvident to dismiss the occasions when big budget cinema stops o* at sites like these as merely their producers’ quests for a precise plot-determined mise-en-scène. Instead, we urgently need to grasp how such itineraries explicitly mean to exploit a global division of labor through practices of o*shoring. O*shor- ing the world over is eased into place—speci)c places—through local governments’ engineering of legal, )nancial, and infrastructural systems. It requires a particular architecture that conforms to the circuitry and ideologies of global supply chains. Film o*shoring is no exception. Proliferating, yet extremely vulnerable to replace- ment, o*shore centers must maintain a competitive edge. As Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson note, “studio bosses and producers have made it clear that they intend to keep scouring the globe for lower labor rates and less regulated environs . . . playing o* one place against another in a never-ending quest to secure the most

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“Make It What You Want It to Be” Logistics, Labor, and Land Financialization via the

Globalized Free Zone Studio

Kay Dickinson

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favorable conditions for their bottom lines.”5 6e interchangeability of these sites therefore renders the study of one of them relevant to the comprehension of not only others but also the abiding capitalist structures that arrange and hierarchize the world’s production thus and that bear consequences for us all. 6is essay seeks to expose the cost of these maneuvers to human life.

As a dry desert state, the UAE tenders the reliable light and weather that )rst helped inaugurate Los Angeles as a )lmmaking heartland. Similarly, the “blank can- vas” appeal—as political in its obfuscation of real territories and their people’s con- cerns as it has been in Hollywood history—repeats. While Dubai’s trademark Burj Khalifa assumes a leading role in, say, Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol’s climactic scene, the country just as readily stands in for other locations: Iran in Syriana, Saudi Arabia in !e Kingdom, Kuwait in Airli%, the )ctional futuristic Yorktown of Star Trek Beyond, and even a galaxy far, far away in Star Wars: !e Force Awakens. Such are the demands for anonymity, disguise, and 7exibility within contemporary multi- sited )lm production, where narrative prerogatives meet practical and budgetary priorities beyond most audiences’ recognition of actual locale. As the Dubai Film and TV Commission tagline beseeches, “Make it what you want it to be.”

6is potential is nowhere more achievable than within the multidimensional blank canvas of the )lm studio itself. As a controllable, manipulable cocoon primed for transformation into whatever is technically possible, a studio aims to shut out the real world’s messy contingencies. Its erasure of not only the means, but also the sites, of production stands as a central pillar of )ction )lm entertain- ment. In this essay I endeavor to unfurl the outcomes of this double mysti)cation, as well as to re7ect on the systems that divide the manageable from the disorderly and logistically regulate the necessary movements between each. A8er all, the her- metic capabilities of the contemporary studio are only commercially attractive because of how looped they are into a larger worldwide grid, through the interna- tional roster of people and objects the studio hosts, through superior access to undersea and satellite connections, through the stories being told, and through the vast distances the )nished product will later traverse. Abetted by widespread glo- balization and deregulation, digital )nancial and data transfer technologies, and uncomplicated world travel for )lmmaking personnel and equipment, a movie can just as simply, and more cheaply, be (partially) shot beyond its historical cent- ers, if the conditions are right.

Nevertheless, while the portion of any )lm completed in a studio might disag- gregate from the geographical hub it is presumed to “come from” (Hollywood, for instance), mainstream cinematic output cannot materialize just anywhere. Unlike certain decentralized, post-Fordist )lm work, which might be undertaken in home o9ces, even co*ee shops, studio shooting calls for expensive equipment housed in structures purpose-built to industry speci)cations, ones that hook back, through all these means, to established centers.: Standardization cra8s requisite corre-

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spondences but also a pecking order that deputizes a circumscribed set of duties to more “peripheral” out)ts.

One such space is Dubai Studio City, a recent USE%$$ million entrant into this lattice of globalized )lm, television, and digital content creation, replete with some of the world’s largest soundstages, a backlot, water tanks, production o9ces, and operational support structures, including the on-site Dubai Film and TV Com- mission ()g. #!.#).F Although owned by the state, Studio City unusually slants itself less toward manufacturing media for its own country and more toward serving as a cog within a globally dispersed supply chain for an equally transnational cinema. While it once made great economic sense to keep everything in-house, fundamen- tal shi8s, such as those brought to a head by the Paramount Decree, helped trigger the decentralization of, for instance, the Hollywood majors, which have increas- ingly either sold o* portions of their studio complexes or rented them out to other companies. A situation has thus arisen whereby independently owned studios— unattached to transnational entertainment corporations and subsisting by renting amenities, rather than generating their own movies from scratch—could assert themselves into nonlocation shooting schedules.G With )lms like Star Trek Beyond

H/I-23 JK.J. Dubai Studio City free zone, administered by the Dubai Creative Clusters Authority. Photo by Kay Dickinson.

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deciding not just to shoot on location in the UAE but also to avail themselves of Studio City’s facilities, the emirate aims to capture a sizable portion of the )lm industry’s o*shored activity.

Studio City’s primary allure, however, derives from its genesis within an intricate and highly planned matrix of legislative, logistical, service-oriented, and labor capacities that, although unseen in the end result, can recommend Dubai as a des- tination and nodal point for Hollywood, Bollywood, Chinese, and other interna- tional productions. Attention to these architectures (not just the buildings but a more pervasive in7uence over design) opens us out onto the broader systems that govern o*shoring and vice versa. If, for Mark Shiel, “movie studios prioritized util- ity, e9ciency, pro)t, and methods and materials speci)c to industrial and commer- cial construction”L or, in the words of Brian Jacobson, sought “accessibility, control, and [again] e9ciency,”M Dubai Studio City recalibrates these persistent requests to the current norms of split location production, drawing on dispersed capabilities aided by sectors that dominate now even more than they did in the past: logistics, real estate, and )nance capital.N As a stronghold of all three, the UAE has con)gured a studio complex that advertises these industries’ substantial streamlining of the )lm production process. While the country cannot claim a long history in movie- making, it can de)nitely peddle, and with appreciable reason and purchase, other long-honed skills to the advantage of globalized cinema. It is these predispositions that the Emirates mobilize in order to confer “)lm friendliness” upon themselves, much of it driven by an autocratic form of governance that controls land, resources, and services to the advantage of external demand. Lodging movie business foreign direct investment in terrains like these begs political analysis of the histories, geog- raphies, and lived outcomes of the policies and activities they encourage.

“ L O G I S T I F Y I N G ” T H E G R E E N F I E L D W H I L E T H E G R E E N F I E L D A M P L I F I E S L O G I S T I C S

Studio City deviates from traditional destinations for o*shored production such as Rome’s Cinecittà or London’s Pinewood in that it has not evolved out of an infrastructure built for and in tandem use by a well-developed national industry. For Ben Goldsmith et al. places like Studio City fall into the category of “green- )elds locations,” built quickly from scratch, o8en with the aim of supporting a range of di*erent scales of production, serving anyone from immediate local cli- ents to international ones. Studio City can adaptively accommodate the full range of productions, in reality settling for and catering with ease to lower-budget enter- prises, from lucratively long-term television runs (it is home to the MasterChef franchise’s Arab world iteration) to commercials and digital content.

Staggeringly speculative and entrepreneurial impetuses guide large-scale devel- opments like Studio City, ones that in Dubai are simultaneously centrally planned

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and administered by the state.O Anyone familiar with the mythologies, stereotypes, and substantiated facts about the emirate will recognize this hallmark modus operandi, a strategy of “build it and they will come.” To endow a measure of the import given to construction itself, it should be noted that the very )rst Strategic Objective listed by the Dubai Creative Clusters Authority, which manages Studio City, is “Ensure world-class infrastructure.”P Studio City’s sheer scale and top-of- the-range facilities have emerged briskly from the ground up rather than, as has been the case elsewhere, incrementally, as updates over many years to meet needs. 6e big splash has ever been Dubai’s hook, as its luxury showcase hotels and biggest-ever malls attest.

Uptake of Studio City, however, cannot depend on the mere fact of superlative facilities, particularly when it comes to big budget cinema. Although Dubai is leaping forward within other realms of audiovisual media, it remains an outlier in )lm production. Studio City needs to convincingly establish the sort of trust from clients that would inspire them to make the journey there rather than anywhere else in the world. 6rough comprehensive measures, the UAE devotes copious ideological and geopolitical energy to avowing its image as a safe, stable, and wel- coming locality within the otherwise turbulent or quarantined region of the Mid- dle East. Targeting the media industries more precisely, the government has stepped in, as is typical the world over, to establish the Dubai Film and TV Com- mission (DFTC), which is dedicated to swi8ly issuing shooting and work permits, providing location services, and assembling incentive packages.5Q Concomitantly, the DFTC spotlights the bene)ts to )lmmaking of the sectors in which it already excels and that, with enough foresight on behalf of producers, should furnish sig- ni)cant reductions in overheads.55

6e )rst of these is the most general: expertise in transshipment or reexporta- tion, in essence, the splitting up or coordinating of 7ows of goods geographically so as to take fullest advantage of cheaper costs, be they labor-, transport-, or tax exemption–related. Very few of the vast array of products that pass through Dubai’s port—one of the world’s largest—begin or end their lives in the UAE, and plentiful revenues accrue from Dubai’s workforce e9ciently routing them else- where. If further pro)t can be generated in-country without diminishing this highly saleable synchronization and rapidity of transit, so much the better. 6us inclined, the Emirates are well poised to carry out competent plug-ins to goods— here )lms—already in motion down the supply chain. Split and partial produc- tion, however, require more than a ready mind-set. 6e ensuing working practices and infrastructure to support it demand our scrutiny, not least in terms of the added burden they place on the humans and environments involved.

In Dubai, much of this is taken on by and funneled through a sector in which the emirate is enormously globally competitive and that, in turn, advertises Studio City as worthy of cinema’s attention: its logistics industry. Logistics is the

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management science of coordinating supply chains so that they run as e*ectively, promptly, and cheaply as possible. For Jesse LeCavalier, logistics “concerns the entire life of a product and works to 7atten, connect, smooth, and lubricate as it organizes material in both space and time.”5: Such attention has begotten the ascendency of some of the world’s richest transnational corporations, from Wal- mart to Amazon. Logistics trades on being fully cognizant of how fast information and data now travel in comparison to people, goods, and equipment—a fact that patently demarcates the transmission of )lmed content in relation to the workers and material needed to make it. Films are notoriously slower and costlier to make than other goods; logistics promises to up that pace and axe those outlays. Accord- ingly, within the promotional literature, videos, and press generated by both the DFTC and Studio City, the term “one-stop shop” recurs persistently. In actuality these services are drawn in from the DFTC’s database of hundreds of ever-ready independent companies, including local and international crew.5F Logistics helps articulate all these disjointed moving parts. Moreover, it o*ers to animate split location production as a means of saving on salary, securing the speediest routes to bring all the necessary components into alignment and then disperse them in a trouble-free fashion. If the people involved assume a secondary role in an elabora- tion of logistics, then this should be read as testament to logistics’ own suppression and pressurizing of the humans that invisibly and perforce uphold its race to the )nish line through a less noticeable, but distinctly more painful, race to the bot- tom. 6e accent typically falls instead on spaces of 7ow rather than those manag- ing, sustaining, or re)ning them.

From the onset, it must be stressed that, within Dubai in particular, “logisticiza- tion” reaches far beyond scouting out the fastest routes and cheapest inputs. An abundance of wide-ranging policies and lawmaking boosts and is inspired by the ambitions of logistics. In !$#" Dubai apportioned a staggering D% percent of budget spending to infrastructure expansion (from roads and ports to telecommunica- tions), in comparison to D percent in the US and Saudi Arabia.5G At the industry end of the spectrum the government’s installation of the DFTC serves as a ready example of logisticization, working not only to service industry needs but also to put in place regulations that rationalize the production process, including pushing for the issuing of multiple location shooting permits within a mere seventy-two hours of application and crew work permits within twenty-four (although political a9liation or history have become an increasingly preclusive sticking point in this equation).5L 6e speed on o*er most adamantly exacts tremendous toll on those employed to uphold such promises, though they are not justly credited for their assumption of these ever-escalating duties. 6ese workers advise on suitable loca- tions across the emirate and negotiate deals on hotels, personnel transportation, and shipping, squeezing countless others along the way, all adding to the co*ers of the government-owned enterprises such as the Emirates airline, the Jebel Ali con-

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tainer port, and the Jumeirah luxury hotel chain. 6e top-down command govern- ance that stewards all this also enacts, as will become apparent, comprehensive labor legislature that drives costs down considerably further and across the board rather than purely in relation to the entertainment sector.

A macro attention to logistics concurrently and purposefully cra8s Dubai’s built environment, including Studio City. Situating itself as a hub powered by logistics’ managerial priorities is exactly how Studio City intends its ascendency. 6roughout its history the )lm studio has always been pragmatic in design, form following function. In the Fordist era its centralization made for exactly these sorts of e9cien- cies along a production line by force of proximity to the other elements to which it connected in order to minimize lags in the movement of people, sets, and equip- ment. With these objectives giving way to cheaper production possibilities else- where, the stripped-down functionality of the studio in the Dubai context renders it 7exible and mutable (just as its ever-changing interior sets are) to the needs of a dispersed supply chain. 6e studio’s a9nity is now less with the factory (to which it has been regularly compared) than with the newer architectures of logistics, such as the similarly bland, windowless design of the warehouse, the distribution center, and even the big-box store ()g. #!.!). Unsurprisingly (and as was the case histori- cally in Los Angeles), Studio City dwells right next to a largely warehouse district, Al Quoz. 6ese days increasingly repurposed by the creative economy for galleries and art studios, Al Quoz’s proximity renders it a pleasing segue into activities in

H/I-23 JK.K. Studio City’s warehouse-like architecture. Photo by Kay Dickinson.

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Studio City, freighting companies cheek by jowl with cultural production in ways that reconcile the two activities, compelling us to acknowledge the shared dimen- sions of each. All three building types—the warehouse, the distribution center, and the big-box store—grease the machinations of logistics. Barely noticeable, inte- grated rather than discrete, their con)guration favors what LeCavalier categorizes as the principles of “control, predictability, measurement, division, and manage- ment.”5M Considering them analogous to the modern studio therefore fruitfully dis- closes a number of intended, but o8en concealed, outcomes.

6ese structures return us to logistics’ roots in the same etymology that brings us “lodging,” or temporary housing.5N 6eir success rests on moving goods in and out at maximum velocity. 6is premise, it should be noted, shapes the signi)cant yet perhaps less conspicuous topography of the Dubai cityscape, its planning attuned to several centuries of port activity. Distribution centers and warehouses have played a quiet yet central role in Dubai’s economy. It is not hard to imagine the emirate, this powerhouse of transshipment, as one large distribution center. 6is proclivity adheres to what 6omas J. Sigler identi)es as a “relational city,” a metropolis that accrues prodigious income from the movement, rather than the start-to-)nish manufacture, of goods, its real estate acclimated to provide a transi- tory home, perhaps with minor inputs added, during a much longer journey.5O However nimble supply chains are, they still require points where additions can be made, new trajectories charted, and 7ows managed—hence the need to under- stand contemporary capitalism through the architecture of such spaces, of which the greater )lm studio complex is just one example. To draw on LeCavalier once more, here describing a Walmart store, but in terms that conform to the studio surprisingly well, especially its infrastructural ambitions, these built environments function “more as valves regulating 7ow than as reservoirs for capturing it; they are containers, but they are also conduits.”5P To make good on this attribute, Studio City boasts its clients’ a*ordable integration into )ber-optic networks and satellite services, courtesy of government-owned Samacom, itself now an investor in extra- territorial Smart City developments.:Q

All these buildings and infrastructures, it should be underscored, exist in con- crete local terms, eased into the landscape by intricate town planning and legisla- tive measures, feeding into and out of the greater world in a just-in-time fashion that belies the seemingly inward facing nature of studio design. To aid in this mis- sion, such buildings are also strategically situated. No more so than in their fre- quent placement within free zones. While free zones are typically understood as traditional industrial manufacturing precincts, Dubai has made it its duty to found scores dedicated to other activities. 6e Dubai Creative Clusters Authority, which also encompasses Internet City, Media City, Knowledge Park, Design District, and International Academic City, commands exceptional labor, ownership, taxation, and freedom of expression a*ordances, divorced from those of the state at large. It

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would be wrong to understand free zones as fenced o* entities purely because they sit at a certain remove from the city proper. It is no accident that we )nd them close to transport hubs, with Studio City a mere )8een minutes away from the international passenger and freight airports and near the docks. In this respect and many others free zones acquiesce comprehensively to the global market, which freely courses through all of them.

L A B O R C O S T S A N D T H E C O S T T O H U M A N L A B O R

Beyond a focus on the movement of product within and through such terrains, acknowledging a parallel tra9c in workers, brought in on nonpermanent con- tracts, is an even more urgent imperative. As Julie Cidell observes of distribution center employees, but in ways that seem strikingly pertinent to itinerant )lm per- sonnel too, “the temporary nature of employment means that workers are like the goods they move in more ways than one, as they 7ow in and out of the building on a time scale that di*ers only slightly from the freight, their own ‘workplaces’ dis- tributed over the range . . . [that meets the needs of their ever-changing] clients.”:5 Multisited production creates a transnational workforce, not only as the )lm moves from place to place but also as skilled recruits move in to contribute to it, an updating of patterns in migrations that have marked )lm history since close to its inception, rendering epicenters like Hollywood enormously demographically diverse. 6e ebbs and 7ows of these movements are exempli)ed in an observation tendered by Jamal Al Sharif, chairman of the DFTC and managing director of Studio City: “during the making of Star Trek I was very impressed with the fact that about "$ percent to &$ percent were local residents, not exactly national Emi- ratis, but I had Colombians, South Africans, etc. 6is is compared to )ve years ago where it was the opposite. &$ percent to ($ percent of the crew was imported, the rest were local crews. Today we have over '$$ di*erent types of production com- panies. I think these companies see the future of this market because of the regional situation and the connectivity.”:: 6is vaunted connectivity speaks less of the limits of a national workforce than of the facilitated choreography of a global one.

Legislatively, labor in the UAE has already been )ne-tuned to the just-in-time, partial, and easily dissolvable precepts of logistics. As I have intimated, the red tape required to bring in foreign labor is streamlined. Labor migration in the UAE subsumes migration in its totality, dependent as it is on company sponsorship; no other quotas, such as those responding to asylum claims, contribute to the in7ow of people. With a conservatively estimated (R percent of Dubai’s workforce believed to be nonnationals, the allowances for keeping people around for only the duration of a project are the extent of how work is con)gured contractually. As almost all employees are visitors or guests—even when they are employed for dec- ades by one or more sponsor—an acutely precarious relationship to work is

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enshrined. 6is forecloses the potential to challenge employment conditions, given how tenure in the city depends on such contracts. One is always replaceable, easily sent home, if one becomes “troublesome.”:F

Such dispensations may well function as a clear incentive to )lm here—more so in the free zone, where unionization is legally prohibited. 6is state of a*airs gov- erns not only those working directly in creative roles on any designated project; it also extends to those who maintain the buildings and those who have erected them and their constantly changing sets. As Human Rights Watch has stressed, sectors such as construction have adopted international recruitment strategies in poorer countries that border on indenture, workers bonded to employers in order to pay back their high recruitment fees; sometimes their passports are even withheld to deter them from absconding. In !$$" the average wage in this line of work was estimated to be around USE#&% per month, o8en before enforced company deduc- tions for food, and this salary rate does not appear to have increased in the interim.:G

6e signi)cant )nancial incentives on o*er for locating )lm production in the UAE blind those enticed to this real cost of the tightening of wages. At the time of this writing, in neighboring Abu Dhabi, another of the UAE’s emirates, interna- tional )lm companies were being o*ered a D$ percent tax rebate, one of the world’s most generous. Dubai itself is tax free but still o*ers various individually tailored support packages weighted in favor of how prominently the emirate features pro- motionally onscreen, how comprehensively the company draws on local resources and therefore injects into the economy. Figured as discounts, both these tax exemp- tions and the low cost of speci)c wages erase living labor conditions analogously to the way a )lm—and the convertible studio environment more particularly—diverts our attention from certain troubling elements of real-life circumstances. Insulated within this fantasy, an audience will rarely broach the (distinctive national) condi- tions under which their )lms come to life. Even less so if they remain barely con- scious of the policies at play in spaces like Dubai, departing as they do from our imagined sense of a pro7igate and lavish economy: Dubai’s, the )lm industry’s, and )lm’s narrative preoccupations alike.

To be sure, employees at the luxury end of all this contribute foundationally to the )lmmaking process, too. 6ese people’s roles therefore require examination in line with a logisti)cation of the industry, now in terms of how its hierarchies main- tain uneven access power and income. Hubs such as Hollywood still retain control and top-down design. 6e displacement of other worse paid, less prestigious sorts of labor, equipment, and resource provision, plus their coordination, can be handed over to a hungry o*shore site that is eager to get in on the action by coun- tenancing more abusive working conditions. Allen J. Scott notes that split location )lm production remains dependent on the reliable provision of adjunct services.:L For this reason I )nd it crucial to retain the nomenclature of o*shoring, given that

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the scattered contributors to any given )lm are not a*orded equal rights, dimin- ished, typically, by distance from any of the centers imprinting the primary stamp on an international production. Dubai’s economy runs to large extent on its serv- ice provision, as exempli)ed by the sorts of compliance and subservience that dis- tinguish its shopping and tourism as some of the world’s most hyped. 6e DFTC, we should remember, promotes itself as a time- and e*ort-saving enterprise, tak- ing on sourcing everyone from local crew and locations to )lming and work per- mits. It shoulders a lot of the thinking for the production company but from within what will be de)ned as a service rather than a creative capacity, the former garner- ing indubitably less cachet than the latter. In so doing, the DFTC knits into the broader economy of service that is perhaps more integral to split location produc- tion than is typically acknowledged in the study of the studio (or in )lm studies more generally).

6e material realities of competition in these )elds )gure crucially. For instance, while Eastern Europe was seized on as a comparable o*shore )lmmaking site a8er the demise of state communism (what with the sudden availability of previously nationalized studio complexes and well-established )lmmaking expertise), the region incited persistent critique because it lacked both an acquiescent can-do culture and suitable high-end hotels for above-the-line employees.:M Not so Dubai, whose service workers’ very residency hinges on them shining in their jobs. 6ey sustain, at undeniable human cost, the country’s luxury leisure facilities, its hotels, beaches, and plethora of expensive restaurants, the )rst-class indulgences of the Emirates airline that eases the journey there and away. As such, this site can mar- ket itself as a location for )lmmaking where, for some lucky arrivals, the experi- ence will feel “less like work,” more like an extravagant holiday.

Here the weave of interconnected local concerns bene)ting from international )lm spending, beyond the state-managed freight and airline giants essential to the sustenance of split location )lmmaking, is palpably tighter. 6e Dubai Creative Clusters Authority, the free zone group in which Studio City is nested, is managed by Tecom, a subsidiary of Dubai Holding, a government-owned holding company with a capacious assortment of assets, including the Jumeirah Group of luxury hotels and resorts. Dubai Holding’s sister investment company, Dubai World, is responsible for the famous reclaimed land megaprojects, 6e World and 6e Palm, while also managing the Jebel Ali port and DP World, one of the world’s largest marine terminal operators. Dubai Holding’s interest in mixed yet integrated prop- erty investment coordinates with another local giant, Emaar Properties, whose portfolio includes the famous Dubai Mall and the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa, along with Arabian Ranges, an exclusive gated community, replete with a golf course, that neighbors Studio City. DSC boss Jamal Al Sharif openly lays out how real estate interests drove the free zone’s inception:

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6e whole focus was to build the real estate, build the structure, prepare it as fast as possible because eventually down the road you will have to build the people, build the industry, build the knowledge and this is what’s happening. 6e approach is to change them, to build the future. 6e Dubai Creative Cluster was built to fund, sup- port and develop the local industry, which is going to drive the real estate. 6e real estate is done. Now it’s time for us to )ll up the studios, make more )lms, more TV, nurture our local )lmmakers.:N

6is statement exposes a “real estate )rst” policy, the bank accounts of construc- tion and contracting )rms, it must be emphasized, 7ourishing on account of migrant labor exploitation in the extreme. Braided into an associated economy of housing, hotels, and transportation, unpredictable 7uctuations in rental income for somewhere like Studio City are dampened.

T H E S T U D I O A S S E T L E V E R A G E D F O R F I N A N C I A L I Z AT I O N

By understanding Studio City within this vertical and horizontal web of proprie- torship, we can begin to grasp the free zone as not simply a spirited new entrant into global )lm production but also as part of a much more expansive and designed compulsion to make headway within real estate markets. If there is one thing almost everyone knows about Dubai, it is its unprecedented growth as a built envi- ronment, oil and gas wealth pumped into massive commercial developments. 6ese moves have concocted a modern city from almost scratch over a very short period, urbanization functioning as an engine for diversi)ed capital accumula- tion, transforming oil into property to accelerate further growth. As the UAE o9- cial free zones website vaunts, here speaking of private rather than public backers, Dubai Studio City presents (foreign) businesses setting up shop there with the “opportunity to channel the vast amount of untapped wealth from local investors for project )nance and long-term investment.”:O

Real estate has proven cheap, quick, and easy to build in the UAE, thanks to a poorly paid, subjugated workforce and a top-down governance structure that can formulate, coordinate, and )nance in a planned fashion. Legally, the ruling family (the very people in control of corporations like Dubai Holding) is the default owner of undeveloped land in the emirate. Accordingly, costs are low, and specula- tive ventures, like the green)elds entry into )lm studio rental and services, require less e*ort than they might elsewhere. Such endeavors )gure beyond immediate primitive accumulation in the Marxian sense, whereby a local population (along- side an equally resourceless international migrant workforce) is dispossessed of land and reduced to dependence on selling their own labor at whatever its market cost in order to survive. In the Dubai context dispossession actually congeals more as citizen dependence on a benevolent welfare state and a consequent disenfran-

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chisement from the job market because Emiratis expect higher salaries and are o8en less skilled than migrants.

Saskia Sassen condemns this drive to pro)t from land and its rami)cations. Although she concentrates on foreign acquisition, her insights remain just as per- tinent to rental and leasing in the UAE as they do to related Emirati purchasing overseas. Both speak to a long history of the enclosure of the commons as a motor for capitalism:

Acquisition of foreign land . . . requires, and in turn stimulates, the making of a vast global market for land. It entails the development of an also vast specialized servicing infrastructure to enable sales and acquisitions, secure property or leasing rights, develop appropriate legal instruments, and even push for the making of new law to accommodate such purchases in a sovereign country. 6is is an infrastructure that goes well beyond supporting the mere act of purchasing. . . . As it develops, this spe- cialized sector, in turn, depends on further acquisitions of foreign land as a source of pro)ts. We see the beginnings of a large-scale commodi)cation of land, which may in turn lead to the )nancializing of the commodity we still call, simply, land.:P

In keeping with these patterns, Dubai has increasingly recon)gured the legal and )nancial systems that sustain it so that capital can be further lique)ed and )nancialized via real estate. To understand how, it is )rst essential to fathom how Studio City, courtesy of the international currents of people, equipment, and commodities streaming through it, contributes to this distinct set of economic imperatives—less as a factory, more as a speci)c type of asset.

With real estate developments mushrooming, the emirate logically seeks to populate them on a largely rental- and leasing-for-pro)t basis. Who are their cli- ents? As workers throughout the world are denuded of what they need to make ends meet in home countries—in part by the forceful transfer of public land in countries from Egypt to India to private ownership and into the hands of foreign companies that include Emaar and Dubai Holding—they routinely try their luck as migrant workers in countries like the UAE, especially as doors slam shut across Europe and the United States. For cinema this tendency has been intensi)ed by the decimation of once-nationalized )lm industries in the region, such as those of Egypt and Syria, many of whose personnel have since moved to Dubai to work in the privatized media. Another advantage of the majority migrant population surfaces. As has already been determined, these inhabitants are inter- pellated wholly as temporary, in step not only with an elasticity and 7exibility recognized from logistics and neoliberal precarity at large but also with the expendability and replaceability on which a rental economy prospers. Under their conditions it is harder to buy, easier and more sensible to rent or lease. Wealth concurrently spawns from economic instability and primitive accumulation else- where.

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Yet another border-crossing vector interjects. As I have already pointed out, )lm workers attracted to the UAE contribute not so much to local productions as to those of transnational corporations. Some of these companies are short-term visitors, while others (cinema-based or media-focused more generally) have regionally headquartered in the Dubai Creative Clusters Authority. 6eir roster includes Fox International, STAR, NBC International, MTV, Endemol, the Korean Broadcasting System, Sony Music Entertainment, MBC, Dolby, and an incubator space for YouTube, to name but a few of hundreds with o9ces in these free zones.

Economists Piyush Tiwari and Michael White have observed that global and regional headquartering has, as of late, shi8ed increasingly and en masse toward what are known as “emerging economies.”FQ 6eir detractors see transnational cor- porations contributing to dispossession at the same time as amplifying their global reach over ever multiplying spaces of production, thanks, in the Dubai context, to an easy 7ow of equally transnational cheap labor that can service their (in Dubai tax-free) ascendency. As business school academics Vanessa Strauss-Kahn and Xavier Vives summarize, “Headquarters relocate to metropolitan areas with good airport facilities—with a dramatic impact, low corporate taxes, low average wages, high level of business services, same industry specialization, and agglomeration of headquarters in the same sector of activity.”F5 Dubai (and Studio City) o*er these advantages in spades, helping position the country at number sixteen out of #'( in terms of ease of doing business according to the World Economic Forum’s !$#"–#& Global Competitiveness Report.F: 6e UAE’s much-touted stability is enforced through extensive securitization, foreign policy agreements, and a stable currency pegged to the US dollar. And, most particularly, the appeal of headquartering here rests on no less than the globalization of property markets, buttressed by techno- logical innovations and legal and )nancial systems that make relocation or growth possible. 6e infrastructure and globalized network potential on which Dubai prides itself )nds its match in an assimilation of and into economic and business practices (see )g. #!.D).

Integration into regional trade blocs, such as the Gulf Cooperation Council, reduces or eliminates tari*s for headquartered businesses, easing entry to the vast markets of neighboring oil-rich nations. Dubai pro)ts, too, from its natural proxim- ity to the major markets of Russia, China, and India (who also stand as the United Arab Emirates’ major outside investors in real estate). 6e Free Zone Authority has itself striven to accommodate global capital’s imperatives through business-ready legislation. One major instance has been the license for foreign companies to lease- hold in spaces like Studio City (an opportunity blocked in most other parts of the emirate). Another allowance that reigns within the media free zones, yet not outside them, is that of freedom of expression, which stands as testament to how 7exible and acquiescent the now variegated Dubai legal system is in bending to the needs of transnational media corporations. If such laws and practices seem less conceivable

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within the traditional mores of the country itself, then the free zones function as realms of exception held at arm’s length from the laws governing the emirate at large, while also serving to forcefully globalize it. We might read this as the cultivation within sociopolitical quarters of the standardization recognized from less seemingly intrusive compliances, like those of studio design and technological conformity. 6e arrival of transnational corporations pushes the local market to further globalize via what the former demand of the latter.

In a sense the “any city” potential that the Dubai cityscape o*ers the )lmmaker (where it can even stand in as “the future” in Star Trek Beyond) spills over as an asset to the real estate market. Dubai is now a 7exible and almost identikit nodal point in a global economy it helps lubricate, as capable of representing a generic world onscreen as it is in contributing to one in actuality. Everything possible is done to connect Dubai with globalized free trade; a service economy ethos rolls out across politics and economics in a manner bearing consequences for those involved.

If Dubai presents itself and is consumed as a safe, according, and homogeneous environment in which to conduct global business (media or otherwise), there are

H/I-23 JK.S. “Film strip” bridges architecturally imply creative interlinkage and ease of movement. Photo by Kay Dickinson.

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repercussions down the scale. Smaller )lm companies, from equipment renters to digital e*ects companies, feel obligated likewise to set up shop here. A good number of these are run or sta*ed by people whose options in their homelands have been signi)cantly curtailed by political instability, warfare, or the privatization of their own media systems. Many are refugees, more still economic migrants. 6e rents that spaces like Studio City command are distinctly higher than those in places of origin, justi)ed largely by the competitive advantages, including the unbending legal framing of migrant worker rights, that Dubai pro*ers the transnational corpo- ration. All the while, Dubai accrues not only purchasing expenditure but also ground rents and maintenance fees for the free zones’ state managers.FF

6is feeds back into how the diversi)cation of oil money into real estate prom- ises a reliable way of generating ongoing income. But it does more than this; it allows for a transmogri)cation of )nancial systems that positions concerns like Studio City within a larger series of political and legal shi8s. As has been the case across the globe, real estate investment has enabled the rise within traditional banking of mortgages, debt, and securitization, the absorption of practices that are not only o8en dangerously speculative and dependent on )ctitious capital but that also allow, more than ever before, assets that had been considered concrete (bricks and mortar) to be lique)ed, rapidly traded, and thus enfolded into diversi)ed investment portfolios. Real estate is generally considered the main benefactor of augmented )nancialization, absorbing liquidity and allowing for leverage that can outweigh more traditional asset value. For sure, Dubai ballasts itself against some of these volatilities: it has built on government-owned land at low cost, its legisla- ture has reduced red tape and sluggish planning permission processes. Yet the aim, ultimately, as Michelle Buckley and Adam Hanieh argue, has been not simply to use real estate investment to lock into global supply chains, including )lm’s, but also to instigate real estate liberalization itself in order to drive “most fundamen- tally the formation of markets, regulatory mechanisms and class factions to facilitate novel capital circulation and accumulation activities. . . . 6e recent inte- gration of real estate and )nancial markets is not simply a by-product of property- market liberalization or growing access by global )nance capital to local real estate assets; rather, marketized urbanization has in part constituted a strategy of geo)- nancial re-engineering, in which materially tangible real estate mega-projects have provided a key mechanism for Gulf states to fuel growth and diversi)cation in the )nancial circuit.”FG

In this way Dubai Studio City helps conform to Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan’s assertion that green)elds studio complexes perhaps act less to actually make media and more to enable something else. For these two authors, enabling involves creating a sector, boosting a media economy, or developing a suitable infrastructure—one that enfranchises and coordinates governmental and private actors.FL In Dubai, what is being similarly empowered is the diversi)cation of the

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economy away from an ever-dwindling supply of oil to a present and future in rents and property trade whose pro)ts can then be reinvested globally, in property as well as other sectors. 6ese maneuvers serve as a direct response to the fact that access to )nancing is deemed the UAE’s second most conspicuous barrier to trade.FM Historically, cash payment has been the norm and direct debt against GDP stands at only #' percent, as compared to the US’s #$' percent.FN Tellingly, the two largest (and growing) contributors to this overall percentage are personal loans for business, at !# percent, and construction and real estate, at #& percent.FO 6e deploy- ment of logistical principles in reducing friction )nds its equivalents within real estate pathways through )nancial circuits.

To 7esh out Buckley and Hanieh’s assertions, the global rise of derivatives mar- kets allows spatially )xed real estate to be invested and traded almost as simply as more fugacious carriers of capital like stocks and shares, thanks to advances in information technology and the deregulation and harmonization of markets across the world. As a consequence, property, including in Dubai, epitomizes a plain relation of ownership, leasing, and renting, while also being parceled o* into diversi)ed investment portfolios from anywhere on the planet, largely undertaken and managed by insurance and pensions companies, mutual funds, trusts, and private equity funds.FP Many of us may have our )nancial futures invested in Dubai without even knowing it.

As Buckley and Hanieh further elaborate, oil money funneled into real estate that engenders foreign direct investment (FDI) acts as a pivot for these largely state-owned enterprises to distance themselves from regionally speci)c moral impediments that inhibit the UAE’s )nancial sector. 6ey stress how Islamic bank- ing, with its adherence to Shariʻa law, a mainstay for the citizenry of the region, forbids both the accrual of pro)t from interest and excessive risk (which is consid- ered akin to gambling).GQ As these are the lifeblood of the neoliberal economy— the very same one Dubai aims to link into and pro)t from—loopholes must be sought. Investing, via direct acquisitions, in concrete projects with lucrative returns has arisen as one advantageous get-out. Another strategy has been to nur- ture FDI whose provenance need not hang on Islamic code. 6e globalization of the real estate sector, with its readily available external loans for foreign investors, can then participate prominently in this )x, orbiting as it does at a distance from religious protocols. 6e encouragement is toward debt, from which such institu- tions pro)t and which, a8er centuries of minimal impact, is rapidly overtaking the UAE.G5 6e major contributing factor here is the rise in costs of living, a direct result of in7ation confected by overleveraging.

6ose bene)ting from these ballooning rents, including sovereign concerns like Dubai Holding, Emaar, and DP World, have since reached out into all the corners under global real estate’s dominion. From Azerbaijan to Germany these companies have amassed property portfolios embracing everything from housing

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and shopping complexes to ports and logistics hubs, converting nonrenewable current resources (oil and gas) into mobile capital that territorializes to allow wealth to renew and grow. One net e*ect, of course, is the in7uence these built environments have on the lives of those working and living in them. Just as tran- snational corporations headquartered in Dubai compel a tranche of legislative and economic insistences, so, too, an Emirati presence overseas can coerce local gov- ernments into submitting to its own whims. 6e political and )nancial structures that care better for owners and landlords than those who rent from them is accord- ingly also consolidated through the expectations extrapolated by their architec- tures and infrastructural logics. Although we may only occasionally “see” Dubai onscreen when foreign )lms are shot there, the capital they help generate 7ows outward in )nancialized and concrete forms that invigorate a certain macroecon- omy. As the )lm-focused examples investigated in this essay have only begun to illustrate, their armatures jeopardize the stability of countless people and, by implication, almost all of us.

Refusing to understand something like a )lm studio as merely a solid, single- sited entity and grappling with how it instrumentalizes the current vicissitudes of both the global supply chain and the international property market is to get closer to the impact of capital’s harmfully mercurial character. Marx’s M-C-M (money- commodity-money) general formula, which facilitates the primacy of exchange- value schemas, is perpetuated.G: 6e abstract quality of capital persists as it travels and mutates, while the exploitation of the workers inputting into its value can be obscured. It must be underscored that o*shored enterprises explicitly, and those compliant with the regimes of debt and pro)t in particular, hold precious little loyalty toward their localized workforce or its rights. As has been evinced, there is little that is “free” or “natural” about the movements into these formations by all concerned: renters, employers, or employees. At a profound political level their principles are buttressed by patent restrictions and abuses endured by those work- ers who keep commodities—studios and )lms included—in circulation and here under direct threat of losing their livelihoods, even their right to remain in the country.

6e point here has not been to demonize Dubai above and beyond an “any- where else” that is just as much a con7uence of global neoliberal currents, even though a good deal of the site-speci)c actions this essay has discussed clearly war- rant critique. Rather, Dubai’s “success” evidences precise motivations, strategies, and agendas that might just as easily work against it. 6e modular character of contemporary o*shore production leaves its workers enormously vulnerable as the industry ceaselessly exchanges and substitutes real locations and employees along its journey into and out of markets. One studio complex’s cost e9ciency will likely supplant another’s, the competitive pricing of labor an ultimate bargaining chip here. Dubai Studio City’s adeptness at riding these currents remains to be

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seen, and entering into speculation about its own potential mirrors too closely the mechanics of the futures market. For the moment, Studio City persists as a telling demonstration of how split-location supply-chain cinema colludes with broader economic, legislative and labor regimes, how its sites leverage the privatization, )nancialization, and globalization of the actual space in which most of us endeavor to survive through highly precarious means.

N O T E S

#. Curtin and Sanson, Precarious Creativity, #–!. !. Within the literature on studios Goldsmith and O’Regan’s !e Film Studio is one of the few to

think about these sites as globally networked and, most particularly, what it means to operate as a satel- lite studio servicing a more developed )lm industry.

D. 6e cost of building Studio City courtesy of Nick Vivarelli, “Dubai Studio City Chief Jamal Al- Sharif Talks New Strategy to Stimulate Local Production,” Variety, Dec. R, !$#", http://variety.com/!$#" /film/global/dubai-studio-city-chief-jamal-al-sharif-on-new-strategy-to-stimulate-local-content- industry-#!$#RD($%(.

'. Scott, On Hollywood, ($. %. Shiel, Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles, #!R–D$. ". Jacobson, Studios Before the System, #((. &. 6is is not to dismiss how crucial logistics, real estate, and )nance capital were to the develop-

ment of previous studio hubs but more to insist that these three sectors hold a more prominent and consciously recognized position in today’s economy.

(. Goldsmith and O’Regan understand this as a recurrent trend: “Perhaps the common character- istic of all of these [green)elds] developments is their risk-taking entrepreneurialism. Each share an extreme character that de)es common sense, accepted wisdom, and routine )lm industry risk assess- ments.” Goldsmith and O’Regan, !e Film Studio, &(.

R. Government of Dubai, “About DCCA,” https://dcca.gov.ae/en/about-dcca. #$. Dubai Film and TV Commission, Limitless Possibilities, !. ##. Government of Dubai, “Dubai Film and TV Commission: Services.” #!. LeCavalier, !e Rule of Logistics, ". #D. Government of Dubai, “Dubai Film and TV Commission: Local Production Companies.” #'. Unitas Consultancy, Dubai, #%. #%. Speed of processing data from Editor in Chief, “Dubai’s Prime for Film Production”; and O9-

cial Website for UAE Free Zones, “Dubai Studio City.” #". LeCavalier, !e Rule of Logistics, &. #&. LeCavalier, D'. #(. Sigler, “Relational Cities.” #R. LeCavalier, !e Rule of Logistics, #D. !$. O9cial Website for UAE Free Zones, “Dubai Studio City.” !#. Cidell, “Distribution Centers as Distributed Places,” !&–!(. !!. In Editor in Chief, “Dubai’s Prime for Film Production.” !D. I discuss the labor conditions of )lm workers in the Dubai free zones in greater detail in Dick-

inson, Arab Cinema Travels, #%D–%(. !'. Human Rights Watch, Building Towers, Cheating Workers, &; and Human Rights Watch, Island

of Happiness Revisited, %#. !%. Scott, On Hollywood, (%.

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!". Goldsmith, Ward, and O’Regan, Local Hollywood, (R; Goldsmith and O’Regan, !e Film Stu- dio, ".

!&. Quoted in Editor in Chief, “Dubai’s Prime for Film Production.” !(. O9cial Website for UAE Free Zones, “Dubai Studio City.” !R. Sassen, Expulsions, (#. D$. Tiwari and White, Real Estate Finance and the New Economy, ##%–#", %(. D#. Strauss-Kahn and Vives, “Why and Where Do Headquarters Move?” #. D!. Schwab, Global Competitiveness Report, "&'(–"&'#, ). DD. O9cial Website for UAE Free Zones, “Dubai Studio City.” D'. Buckley and Hanieh, “Diversi)cation by Urbanization,” #"(, #&#. D%. Goldsmith and O’Regan, !e Film Studio, &&. D". So claim the results of the World Economic Forum’s Executive Opinion Survey, as cited in

Schwab, Global Competitiveness Report, "&'(–"&'#, D%!. 6e UAE ranks twenty-eighth globally on )nancial market development, which, notes Schwab, is low in comparison to its standing for other economic determinants (D%D).

D&. Unitas Consultancy, Dubai, &. D(. Unitas Consultancy, ##. DR. Tiwari and White, Real Estate Finance and the New Economy, #%"–%&. '$. Buckley and Hanieh, “Diversi)cation by Urbanization,” #"R. It should be noted that most Emi-

rati banks provide only Islamic-compliant windows rather than running entirely according to Shariʻa principles. But overt pro)t from interest or risk imperils the good standing of the state more generally.

'#. John Richards, CEO of compareit'me, summarized some of the results of a poll his company undertook in !$#': “6ere are however !( percent of respondents who are )nding debt repayments di9cult and this is a concern. 6e cost of living in Dubai is rising and unfortunately at a faster rate than salaries. 6is is forcing some to use debt to cover basic costs like rent which is clearly not sustainable.” Quoted in “Rise in UAE Residents Using Credit Cards, Loans to Clear Existing Debts,” Arabian Busi- ness, Oct. !R, !$#', www.arabianbusiness.com/rise-in-uae-residents-using-credit-cards-loans-clear- existing-debts-%"R(#'.html.

'!. Marx, Capital, !'&–%&.