It's probably too late for the John Adams class, but Salman Rushdie had a really interesting article on novel to film adaptation in The Guardian this morning.
It seems he was teaching a similar course to Adams at the same time! He mentions The Age of Innocence, No Country for Old Men amongst others, and he takes apart Danny Boyle's capitalist, colonialist, chauvanist, crowd-pleasing Slumdog Millionare.
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Man, I feel as a cultural theorist i SHOULD be criticising slum dog millionaire. But is it really a post-colonialist orientalist film? Ok, yes... (since that is according to Said inescapable) but still, isn't the west able to make films about the east anymore? And furthermore- comedic, kitschy ones in which the plot is a bit too perfect (i.e. the chronological order of events and questions that help tell his story and let him win). I mean maybe the film is guilty of all this but it makes me sad that directors can't really escape it...what is wrong with crowd pleasing, to be honest, especially if it teaches us even maybe 1 % of something about life in India more than the average western audience knew before (even if that 1% is only the knowldge of where India is, or that India was a british colony...:)
ReplyDeleteRANT #1)
ReplyDeleteThe film is colonialist because, as Said points out, the director Danny Boyle said "he had never been to India and knew nothing about it", which is alright from our western perspective, but an ignorant Indian director coming to the west would be laughed at. I don't have a problem with America making films about India, but there's something wrong when the only mainstream version of India we see is one through the gaze of Hollywood. The East is still a "career" for Hollywood. Especially when they use Indian actors for cheap labour.
RANT #2)
Crowd-pleasing is ok, I suppose, but somewhere you have to piss people off and make them work and think, otherwise you change nothing. In any case, Slumdog Millionaire pleases specific crowds with specific agendas: the Oscar committee for one, with its soppy ending, its Western perspective, its harmless, bloodless, non x-rated violence and sex scenes behind closed doors; it also pleases capitalists. In the middle of a financial crisis, when people should be at least slowly realising that capitalism is also shit, Slumdog Millionaire says, 'slums, poverty, corrupt governments, police brutality etc. is all ok because any one of us could become a millionaire.' That's what capitalism is all about. The American Dream of becoming rich. And this film wants us to keep dreaming that old dream, even though it will never come for most of us.
1: AGreed that if an Indian director made a film about America it would definitely be seen as weird and "he doesn't know what he's talking about". Also agreed r.e. Cheap labour= bad. But on the other hand I prefer them to make movies about India than to just make movies about USA...because that would be even more self centered, right? (i.e. the idea that at least they are trying). I think it's hard to make a film about India that people would watch on that scale that was brutally honest, unless it was a documentary (and we get them, at least, though also not often from the Indian POV).
ReplyDelete2. AGreed r.e capitalism = bad and the fact that the message of the film is a bit ambiguous (if the message is about anyone getting rich, then that's pretty sad, especially if that is our one "dream" that we share with India). On the other hand it has to be something that western audiences can associate with or they probably wouldn't watch it and in my opinon anything that makes the average westerner who doesn't know where India is learn that India exists, that is good. True, a very western perspective, a very capitalist perspective, but I always think there's something to be said for feel good movies if it teaches people something about humanity (that people in India are just as important as people in USA). And I think there are already plenty of films that piss people off and make them think...the only problem is they are almost always depressing and hard to watch, so no one does, and then the message doesn't really get across, except to people like us who are super smart and cultural, who don't need to watch films to know this stuff anyway:)))