Pakistan has long been said to have an image problem, a kind way to say that the world sees us one-dimensionally — as a country of terrorists and extremists, conservatives who enslave women and stone them to death, and tricky scoundrels who hate Americans and lie pathologically to our supposed allies. In Pakistan, we’ve long attributed the ubiquity of these images to what we believe is biased journalism, originating among mainstream American journalists who care little for depth and accuracy. By the time these tropes filter down into popular culture, and have morphed into the imaginings of showbiz writers, we’ve gone from an image problem to the realm of Jungian archetypes and haunting traumatized psyches.

Whenever a Western movie contains a connection to Pakistan, we watch it in a sadomasochistic way, eager and nervous to see how the West observes us. We look to see if we come across to you as monsters, and then to see what our new, monstrous face looks like. Again and again, we see a refracted, distorted image of our homeland staring back at us. We know we have monsters among us, but this isn’t what we look like to ourselves.

There have been previous international attempts to portray Pakistan on film: “A Mighty Heart,” about the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl; or “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The Pearl film was shot largely in India, with some scenes in Pakistan; the Bin Laden film was shot in Jordan and India; in these and other films, streets and shops in India were given nominal Pakistani makeovers, and Indian actors were hired to pass as Pakistanis. In them, I have seen India’s signature homemade Ambassador cars traveling down Pakistani streets; actors who play tribal Pashtuns but look Bihari; Western women wearing chadors where they don’t have to, or going around bareheaded when they should be covered.

In the season premiere of “Homeland,” Carrie Mathison orders an airstrike on a terrorist compound in a Pakistani tribal area bordering Afghanistan. It is utterly surreal for a Pakistani to watch a fictional imagining of the dreaded strike from the viewpoint of the person ordering it in an American control room: the disconnection, the studied casualness, the presenting of a birthday cake afterward. It’s not clear who the monsters are in this scene, even before it’s revealed that the strike hit a wedding party, killing women and children. It’s a moment of obvious reversal, but also of nuance, when I wasn’t expecting it.

Still, the season’s first hour, in which Carrie also goes to Islamabad, offers up a hundred little clues that tell me this isn’t the country where I grew up, or live. When a tribal boy examines the dead in his village, I hear everyone speaking Urdu, not the region’s Pashto. Protesters gather across from the American Embassy in Islamabad, when in reality the embassy is hidden inside a diplomatic enclave to which public access is extremely limited. I find out later that the season was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, with its Indian Muslim community standing in for Pakistanis.